Chapter Text
It was probably fair to say that he was not thinking clearly when he came up with this spell, Essek reflected as the casting took hold and an unfamiliar form began to resolve itself into the summoning circle. He hadn't successfully completed a trance the entire month, he hadn't heard anything from the Mighty Nein in roughly the same amount of time, the Assembly had been sending him absolute garbage and calling it results, and he was almost certain he'd been followed the last time he'd gone out to try to purchase components. This was definitely not the time to be trying a new and risky spell.
Of course, by the time he'd had such a clear thought it was already too late to call the whole thing off, and he was just going to have to power through now.
The figure resolved itself into that of a drow, which he'd been expecting. Unlike what he'd expected, she was very clearly not a version of himself from the future. Unless he'd decided to be consecuted for some reason …?
The drow wobbled as she came fully into this time and place. “Nai, what the fuck are you-” she cut herself off as she realized that he wasn't her father. Her jaw went slack.
He allowed himself the luxury of a deep breath, and reminded himself that it was very much too late to back out now. “I am Shadowhand Essek Thelyss of Den They-”
“Yes, I know who you are,” she scoffed.
“Uh-”
“Shh!”
Unused to being hushed, Essek blinked forcefully in response. He should be having to swallow the urge to retaliate, if not actively retaliating. Unfortunately for him, that instinct was buried under a new surge of exhaustion, part and parcel of casting a spell of this magnitude but by the Light he'd underestimated just how tired he already was when he cast.
The woman paid him no heed, first peering around him to look at the window, and then turning to get a look at the runes encircling her.
“Well, good news first, Mr. Shadowhand,” she said finally. “You've got your whole life ahead of you and you have, just now, done the dumbest shit you'll ever do.” Then she laughed at him.
After nearly a full minute of watching her attempt to get herself under control, he tried to speak again “I-”
She wasn't having it. “Bad news is, you've shot yourself in the foot for dignity forever, because I am never going to let this go,” she wheezed around continued chuckles. “I am- fucking six hundred years from now on the second of Brussendar, four-oh-three in the morning Rosohna time, I am showing up to the Blooming Grove or wherever it is you end up spending your dotage, and I am bringing any and every Brenatto that will still answer my Sendings and we're going to fucking serenade you about it. Holy shit, this is so dumb!” And then she broke down into laughter again.
“Brenatto?” Essek repeated, mainly to himself. That was the name of Nott's husband, correct? Yeza Brenatto? And he was sure he'd heard the Nein discussing the Blooming Grove before.
“What were you- what were you even trying to do?” she demanded between bouts of giggles. “This is- this fucking sloppy. You’re risking a hole in whole fucking time-space continuum and you're- this is sloppy! Why is it sloppy? You're never this sloppy.”
“I, that-”
“What even is this rune supposed to be?” She squinted down at the rune he'd etched into the floor closest to the desk. A frown crossed her face as she studied it. “Were you trying to contact… Verin?” Her frown deepened. “This is very nonspecific.”
“I was hoping to speak with myself, actually,” he told her. “I… find myself in need of advice.” Frankly, he found himself in need of proof that he had a future.
“Well, the you of my time would also find this real fucking dumb, I can tell you that much for free,” the woman replied. Then, with all the appearance of an involuntary reaction, she started laughing again.
“Sorry, sorry, I'm not- I know you're having a rough time right now, I just-” She made a motion vaguely reminiscent of waving up and down at him. “Look at you, you're like a baby.”
“What.”
“A really sad baby, but like- you've got repressed punk hair, you’re floating in your own damn home, you've never been to the moon-”
“The moon?”
“You've never even been to Aeor!”
“Why would I go to the moon or Aeor?” Essek demanded.
“Date nights, mainly.”
“...what.”
“Was this circle supposed to have some kind of binding enchantment baked in?” Without waiting for a response, she hopped lightly outside of the circle. “Yeah, that- that's not going to hold shit.”
“Ah,” Essek said. “Unfortunate.”
They regarded one another for a moment. Essek, for his part, keenly felt his own lack of preparedness to fight, if it came down to that: this ritual was the result of too many nights without rest and a frankly absurd amount of energy, and he was barely keeping himself upright. The woman remained an enigma who was probably going to laugh at him again, and he would be fortunate if that was all she chose to do.
“Right, so, two more pieces of good news for you,” she said finally. “First of all, I'm actually pretty good at chronurgy, so, you know, I can probably help fix this circle, which we should probably do before I'm supposed to bamf back to my home time. Twenty-four hours, yeah?”
Essek nodded.
“Great! Well, you seem to have that part right, which leaves us time for the second bit of good news: you're- you've helped me a lot, in my time. You've told me a lot, you- we're both protected from scrying here, right?”
“Yes,” Essek replied.
“Great, then I'll be blunt: I know about the Beacons, your family, what happened in Nicodranas…” Essek felt the blood run out of his face, but the other drow didn't give him a chance to actually react before continuing on. “You're, uh- you're admirably upfront about it all, in my time. And I'm pretty sure I know what sort of advice you'd give yourself, if the older you was here, so…let's move this into the kitchen, fix ourselves a pot of tea, and talk a bit?”
“Who are you?” Essek asked.
“My name is Ariadne.”
“Who are you to me?” Essek clarified.
“I'm Ariadne of Den Nein.”
Well. He wasn't quite sure what to say about that.
“Come on: kitchen, tea, sit, we'll- we'll figure this out, okay?” And with that, she walked away.
“...okay,” Essek called after her. “Sure. Let's do that, then.” And then he glided after her.
He'd run out of tea two days ago, a fact which he recalled roughly halfway downstairs and then managed to forget again before entering the kitchen.
“...you have literally nothing in your kitchen,” Ariadne of Den Nein informed him as he hovered useless in the doorway. “Like, even your trash is empty. When was the last time you ate?”
“I-” Essek wracked his mind and dregged up a memory of Uraya pressing a Goodberry into his hand when they'd run into one another in the Lucid Bastion yesterday. Or, well, if it was actually four in the morning, the day before yesterday then. “Recently enough to not be a concern.”
“Genuinely, that might be the most concerning answer you could have given me,” she told him. “Hang on, let me see if getting bamfed back in time dismissed my familiar…”
It had not, evidently, as not a moment later an exceedingly large bat appeared on the chandelier over the table.
“Good girl, Cara!” she cooed. “Now, we're about three decades and a bit back from when we normally are, so just give me a moment to write you a little letter of introduction…”
She had a bag with her, that she deposited on the table alongside a scarf woven out of a variety of purples. Essek hadn't noticed either item before, and abruptly realized that he'd parsed absolutely none of her appearance. He attempted to kick his brain back into gear.
She was well-dressed, though perhaps braced for colder weather than they were currently experiencing: a red half- cloak made of crushed velvet encircled her shoulders and fell to her waist, mostly concealing what seemed to be a variant on Caleb's spellbook holster, and not concealing at all the rapier she wore on her hip: a pretty thing with a ruby spellcasting focus built into the hilt. She had on a rather sturdy-looking black leather corset over a silver-white shirt that gathered in ruffles around her wrists and throat and disappeared beneath the waistline of her skirts, themselves made of layers of black velvet and tulle, held in place by a silver belt studded with garnets and amethysts. Fingerless gloves completed the look well enough, though it was a downright risqué choice against the rest of the ensemble. It was the sort of outfit a merchant might wear to the opera around the Winter Solstice. Well, that sort of outfit, save for her boots: they’d very obviously been recently cleaned but they were still in contrast to the rest of her outfit, clearly made more for the harsh practicalities of travel on the open road than for a night out at the opera.
Her ears held the usual sort of piercings, conveying the usual sort of information: she was a returned soul, apparently, with an immediate family in her current life consisting of two sworn fathers, a blood mother, and a younger brother. Her Den insignia dangled from her right ear, marking her as a member in good standing but not as a leader or leader-in-waiting of any kind. The design of it was unfamiliar in that he'd never seen it before; and it was very familiar, in that it clearly portrayed the Xhorhaus tree.
Physically, her skin was a pale sort of indigo, very nearly lavender, the sort of shade most common in the Brokenveil Marsh where most drow were descended from escapees from the once isolated and now destroyed Underdark city of Chiss Ussaint, rather than descended from participants in the Luxon Rebellion. She was solidly built: plump and at just over five foot three in height on the taller end of average for a drow. Her eyes he really should have noticed before: the irises were a common purple shade, but they had three pupils apiece, an uncommon mutation that superstitious minds considered to be a sign of Lolth's favor- or susceptibility to the Spider Queen's control. It was the sort of thing most people would notice about her first, and as Shadowhand to the Bright Queen he really should have noted it sooner.
She fixed a small pouch containing a handful of gold and her letter of introduction to her familiar's leg, and then opened the window. The bat swooped out into the perpetual night.
“You haven't discovered that you enjoy gardening yet, I see,” she said as she turned around.
He blinked. “Beg pardon?”
“The window boxes are full of old rainwater and hireling illusion magic,” she explained. “Back in my time, you'd have them full of torenias and mints. Well, forward in my time, I guess.”
Essek wasn't quite sure what to do with the information that his future self apparently had a hobby. Gardening, his mind supplied, involved dirt, and also utilized manure as a source of nutrients. Coming up with some kind of reaction to that was a bit beyond him at the moment.
“Tea should be the next step here, I think,” Ariadne remarked.
“I'm out of tea,” he remembered.
“That's okay, I have some in my bag and it looks like you own a kettle and mugs so… sit down. Before you fall down, preferably.”
Essek opened his mouth, found himself lacking a counterargument, and closed his mouth again. He sat down.
“Good,” she said, giving his shoulder a squeeze. It was an unexpected touch and he flinched away from it. “Good,” she repeated, withdrawing her hand. “Tea will help.”
To his very great shock, tea did indeed help. He hadn't even realized how cold his fingers were until they were wrapped around the steaming mug, and the minty-herbal flavor soothed his throat. Ariadne said nothing as he drank, her eyes flicking lazily between him and the open window, her expression carefully blank.
“You said that you are a member of Den Nein,” Essek said after he'd sipped his way through half the mug.
“Yes,” Ariadne replied. “That's how we refer to the whole family on this side of the border, and we’re officially registered as one as of about five years from now. We tend to call ourselves a Guild in the Empire: big sprawling multiracial families like ours sadly aren't all that common over there.”
“Right,” Essek said. “Yes, that- and that's as in the Mighty Nein?”
“Yeah, of course,” Ariadne replied. “I'm one of several kids the Mighty Nein will adopt in the coming years.”
“Are there a lot of drow in Den Nein?” Essek asked, trying very hard to sound casual.
“Fully drow? It's just you and I, but there are- whoa.”
Essek had put his head down on the table and buried it under his arms as he tried not to hyperventilate, and so didn't respond.
“Uh, okay! So, some more good news, which I guess I should have started with: you're happy in the future. Not, like, all the time, but pretty often, I'd say? Like, as a baseline, you're pretty okay with yourself and your life. And you're loved, yeah? The whole family has your back, and everyone knows it.” Essek could feel her hovering, but clearly she remembered his earlier reaction to physical contact and didn't wish to repeat it. “Uh, could you… could you maybe say something if you heard any of that?”
“...sure,” Essek replied after a moment.
“Great! Uh, yeah, good, that's great,” she said with poorly disguised relief.
Distantly, he was aware that he was going to be utterly mortified by this moment later, having lost all composure in front of what was essentially a stranger. At the moment, all he could think was: there's a chance. His spell had more than half worked, he had someone from at least one potential future who could vouch that there was a way out of this that didn't end with him either dead or completely alone with his sins.
“Okay, so I guess we'll just sit like this for a minute…”
“My apologies,” Essek said, pulling himself back into a seated upright position. “It has been a trying month.”
“No kidding!” Ariadne replied brightly. “But, hey: you can get through this, I promise. Living, breathing proof right here.” She pointed to her own face.
She reminded him of Beauregard in her bluntness. And Cadeceus in her patience. And Jester in her persistence. He supposed that she might be trying to channel the adults in her life; certainly, if she'd grown up around them as she'd implied, she might reach for that same bravado under the circumstances.
It occurred to him then, somewhat belatedly, that the circumstances were probably, from her perspective, astoundingly bad and also entirely his fault. He felt a twinge of regret, once utterly foreign to him and now stomach-churningly common.
“Please, tell me: what is it I have to do to get to-” To you? To the version of me you know? To them? To Den Nein? He wasn't sure how to finish his question.
He wasn't sure it was necessary, from the way the other drow froze.
“Here's the thing,” she said after a long moment. “When I say that you've helped me, I mean with, well. This sort of thing, exactly. You're really good, in my time, at finding people who have stuck themselves on a ledge and are just kind of metaphorically muttering ‘well, if I'm going to be a monster forever I might as well do it’ and then… talking them down. And I don't want to- I really don't want to accidentally stop you from developing those skills because, seriously, you've talked a lot of people out of compounding bad decisions and into making better ones.”
Well, that didn't sound like him at all. “I… have?”
“You have,” she confirmed. “You've put a lot of good into the world, by the time it gets to me. You don't seem likely to stop any time soon.”
Essek turned the idea over in his mind. It was hardly the first time he'd considered the concept of becoming someone who did good things- roughly half the time he'd normally spend trancing had, in this past month, been spent contemplating the notion. It was the first time anyone had given him an indication of what the end result would look like. He wasn't really sure what to make of the result, but at least he had one now.
“How old are you?” he asked on impulse.
Ariadne snorted. “Oh, that's not the question you meant to ask at all.”
Essek felt himself sneer, just a little, in spite of himself. “Isn't it?”
“No, you want to know what the temporal displacement here is- that's about thirty-three years, by the way,” she said. “As for the question you asked: the body is twenty years old, the soul is old enough to know better.”
“Well, that's hardly an answer now, is it?”
“Older than the Bright Queen,” she clarified, which did explain her reluctance to place a number on it. Leylas Kryn had been quite young when she founded the Dynasty, but it wasn't particularly couth to mention it. “Actually, I think right now I might be the oldest entity you've ever spoken to.”
“Your use of the word ‘entity’ there is concerning.”
She laughed at him again. “Sorry, sorry, I'm just having to repeat ‘he's a baby who has never been to the moon’ to myself,” she explained.
There were a hundred questions he could have asked in response to that, the most obvious having to do with whichever of the moons he'd evidently find himself on later, so he asked another one instead. “Shouldn't you be an umavi, if you're that old?”
“They've got to get me to agree to the concept of there being ‘perfected souls’ first,” she grumbled. “I don't. Frankly, if I could ensure that I was never reborn with my memories intact again I probably would do that.”
Essek blinked, hard. “You… would unconsecute yourself?”
“Have you ever dealt with what's your first crush, hormonally, while also mnemonically reliving your acrimonious divorce of ages past?” she asked.
“I can't say I've had the pleasure,” Essek managed, though truthfully, that was what the current situation with Caleb felt like: the sudden realization that yes, he could very much fall in love with him and also that they were probably never going to be able to so much sit comfortably in the same room alone again.
“I've done that more than a few times now, and I assure you, it's no pleasure,” she told him. “You were smart, opting out of it.”
Essek hadn't told anyone of his decision to forego consecution in twenty years, and that had only been because the argument with his mother had been an unavoidable consequence of that decision. He wasn't even sure Verin knew. Generally, when pressed, he prevaracated, if not lied outright about it.
Or. Well. That had been his way, up until now.
“So, am I no longer a liar, in your time?”
She snorted. “Well, that's sure not a loaded question at all.”
“You're under no obligation to answer, I suppose.”
She snorted again. “You lie professionally, still, and you’ll lie for survival’s sake. You don't lie to the family, mostly. We have kind of a rule about it. Not because of you- or not just because of you. Before I came along there was an unpleasant pattern of people trying to hide their problems only for their problems to explode over everyone, and as more and more kids started coming into the picture everyone came to the mutual decision to stop so kids would stop being caught in the problemsplosions.”
“And do people follow that rule?” he asked.
“Mostly, yes. It's actually us at the kids’ table who are struggling with it right now, though in our defense we did grow up in a state of persistent Götterscheiße, which does complicate all the good behaviors we had so painstakingly modeled for us.”
Essek's ears perked at the Zemnian, very nearly literally. “Götterscheiße?”
“It's the technical term for the most basic threat level of people being insane about divinity,” she explained. “This past year has been more like verdammt Götterscheiße. I was psyching myself out to walk into what promises to be a prime example of Arschficken verdammt Götterscheiße when you bamfed me here.”
Essek felt himself smile. “Is there a level beyond that?” Dredging up a memory of scrying on Caleb and Nott as they exchanged friendly insults, he took a stab at it. “Dummkopf Arschficken verdammt Götterscheiße, perhaps?”
“Ah, no. The next level is actually Götterdämmerung, which, fun fact, is actually the Zemnian term for the Calamity,” she informed him. “We're trying to steer clear of that one. Hence marching to meet the Arschficken.”
It occurred to him then that what she'd actually told him had nothing to do with Caleb, so much as it had to do with some kind of rapidly worsening religious conflict that he'd taken her from at a crucial moment. “Ah.”
“Yes. Quite.”
Essek looked down into his half empty teacup and contemplated the mechanics of drowning himself in it.
After a moment, Ariadne cleared her throat. “You'll get me back, on time. And then I'm going to hold this over you forever,” she promised. “In the meantime, let's work on building that skillset, yeah?”
“How?”
“Well, I mean, as a sort of kitchen table activity we could start with what you expect out of this?”
Essek frowned. “That seems a counterintuitive place to start.”
“You're an entity with needs,” Ariadne replied primly. “Ignoring those needs can lead to some pretty dumb decisions, hence my presence here.”
Essek looked back into his teacup, and experienced a vague urge to fling the remaining liquid at her face. But, alas, she had a point.
Still, he kept his face turned down as he said “I'd like to- I want to not be alone any more. I need- I can't go on as I have been.”
“Good! That's good, that's really, genuinely a great place to start and frankly better than I expected,” Ariadne said. When he looked over at her, she was beaming.
He managed some weak attempt at a smile of his own in response before dropping his gaze again. “Specifically, I'd like to be friends with the Mighty Nein again.”
“And you will be,” she promised. “And, hey, that's a good direction to want to go in. So… what's the problem here, exactly?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Why are you starving yourself in your tower inventing horribly dangerous and terrifyingly dumb spells instead of doing literally anything else? Especially something that might actually put you in proximity to the Nein?”
“I doubt very much they want to see me,” Essek replied.
“Tch yeah, well… that doesn't mean they won't need your help with something. It also doesn't mean that you can't offer it.”
Essek grimaced. “I would rather not regress our relationship to a transactional one. I have plenty of those already, I truly do not wish for more.”
“I mean, was it ever transactional, really?” Ariadne asked. “I wasn't around for this, obviously, but family lore kind of makes it sound like you sort of tried to accrue favors and then immediately got distracted discussing magical theory with Caleb and having Jester inadvertently teach you to hug and Caduceus feeding you up with soup.”
“...that's not wholly inaccurate,” Essek confirmed reluctantly. “If vastly oversimplified.”
“So… it sounds to me like that's an approach that has worked before,” Ariadne said.
“It wouldn't work again.”
“Why not?”
“Because they know now! They're aware that I- I can't fool them into thinking I'm somehow like them or capable of being like them or whatever it was that I did the first time.”
Ariadne looked at him askance. “Okay, well… unless I've somehow skipped timelines that is definitely not what happened. You weren't fooling anyone.”
“Then perhaps we should consider that you are from a different timeline entirely because I have definitely fooled people. I would be dead, otherwise.”
“We will not be doing that, partially because I haven't budgeted emotionally for multiverses but mainly because I know for a fact that they kept trying to befriend you because they thought you were lonely.”
Essek grimaced. “I would not describe myself as lonely.”
“You literally just did. You just said you didn't want to be alone any more. Literally! Just now! You did that!” Ariadne spluttered.
“That- that's not. I didn't feel lonely, before,” Essek explained. “I didn't really feel much of anything.”
“That's not the whole truth though, is it?” Ariadne asked.
Essek regarded her for a moment. “I don't know what you expect me to say to that,” he said as evenly as he could.
“That's fine. We'll leave that there for now, we'll come back to that,” she said. “So I guess the next stop here should be: what do you think they think the problem here is, exactly?”
“That I lied to them,” Essek replied instantly.
“Definitely didn't help!” Ariadne chirruped. “How would things have gone differently if you'd been honest with them?”
Essek stared at her. She looked back, unperturbed.
Honesty had never been the plan. As things had… progressed, as the peace treaty suddenly became a real possibility and he became more and more fond of the Mighty Nein, he had become deeply invested in extricating himself as much as he could. He had been hoping to obscure his involvement in the Beacon theft indefinitely. He hadn't ever considered doing otherwise. He had never even imagined that they would find out and not kill him immediately, at best.
“Can you imagine when you might have been honest, at least?” Ariadne asked.
That, at least, was a question with a clear answer. “No.”
“Well… we're at a good news/bad news situation again,” she told him. “Good news: if you'd gone to them at any point after you started staying for dinner and said ‘I've made a terrible mistake and I need your help fixing it’ they'd have probably helped you. Bad news, though: they would still be mad at you about it.”
“About..?”
“You've got two really big problems that you're ignoring,” Ariadne told him.
He could guess at one of them, after a moment to think. “I started the war, and thousands of people died as a result.”
“Yes, and I know you're having trouble with that one,” she said. “It's not a you thing, if that helps. Pretty much every person who has ever lived has had trouble feeling an emotional connection when presented with a number, and honestly? I’m not really worried about making you feel that.”
Essek turned that little declaration over in his mind for a moment. “Why?”
“Because I can promise you, you're going to be putting faces on that particular statistic for years and years to come. And every time, say, that you realize that the woman who makes your favorite sticky buns watched her children be crushed to death in a Dynasty raid, or the man you play chess with has a wooden leg because Empire soldiers staked him out in the sun and he lost it to gangrene, it will kick you right in the chest.”
It kicked him in the chest right now, a pain beneath his ribs that he recognized mainly from contemplating just how horribly he had fucked up his friends’ lives before he'd even had the opportunity to meet them. His life had been much easier, he thought more than a little resentfully, before he had learned to regret.
Ariadne was still speaking. “Which does leave the question: can you tell me what problem number two is?”
Essek stared at her. “Is it… in any way comparable to problem number one?"
“I'd say so, and I think they would too.”
“Is it- inevitably, some souls would be reborn in the Empire,” he began. “Have been reborn in the Empire.”
“That is a factually correct statement,” Ariadne told him. “But it's absolutely not the problem I'm looking for you to articulate.”
“Hmm.” Well, that certainly left some questions. “Well, they value loyalty… is the fact that I betrayed my nation-”
Ariadne laughed. “Sorry, sorry- I mean, they value loyalty, yes, but they sure as hell don't value nationalism. If you'd done a good thing, or had better reasons, the fact that you subverted the government you work for might have won you some extra respect from them.”
“Ah.” Yes, that did fit, though that also left the question “Then what is it?”
“Well, you picked the three worst people alive on the planet to be study buddies with,” Ariadne replied. “Just… fully handed them not one but two artifacts of incredible power. That was not great of you.”
“Surely that's an exaggeration,” Essek replied.
“That's an understatement, I promise you,” Ariadne said. “Actually, no, alive might be overstating a bit, I think Vess DeRonga might actually be dead now? She might be being murdered right now, actually I'm not 100% on when that happened.” She shrugged. “I'd say that it couldn't have happened to a nicer mage but, unfortunately, the other two.”
Essek regarded her. She looked back, a challenge writ large on her face.
“You'll have to elaborate on what was so objectionable about her,” he said. “I never spent much time in her company, myself.”
“If you had, you might have noticed her tattoos: nine red eyes, a symbol of her commitment to becoming the Nonagon, an entity that will harness the power of Aeor’s quote-unquote ‘surviving’ ward in an effort to become a demigod and presumably conquer the world.”
“Ah, yes. That does sound… problematic.”
“She's the craziest of the bunch. Luckily for you, you'll be able to clean up her mess in a bit- that'll be your first mission as a member of the Mighty Nein,” Ariadne raised her mug towards him in a mock toast. “You'll all have nightmares about it for the rest of your lives, but you'll succeed! Prost!”
Feeling a bit conflicted, Essek raised his own mug in return.
“Of course, after her mess, then you'll have to deal with Trent Ikithon,” she added. “And he's just the worst.”
“That I have little difficulty believing,” Essek remarked. He had needed to interact with the man one-on-one at a handful of meetings, and each and every one had left with a deep need to draw a very hot bath and scrub himself raw in it.
“But you don't know the half of it yet, do you?” she asked. “He never explained how he makes his Volstruckeren, right?”
“He showed them off, enough for me to figure out that the implantation of some variant of residuum in loyal soldiers is involved,” Essek told her.
“Oh you've got that backwards,” Ariadne told him. “He implants them into schoolchildren, who he then molds into loyal soldiers.”
“He what.”
“Hmm.” Ariadne gave him a tight-lipped smile over the rim of her mug. “He teaches at Soltryce, occasionally, and through that position he is able to select suitably talented students- specifically those from poorer, unconnected families. Scholarship students from rural areas, mainly. He whisks them away to his estate, spends several months teaching them in isolation: lessons in magic as promised, yes, but also how to torture “dissidents”, to seduce people for information, to kill in the name of the Empire. Then he modifies their memories to make them think their own families are planning revolution. Then he waits: to see if his students will report their families for treason, and then to see if they'll take the ‘necessary’ steps to suppress the brewing revolt. After killing their own parents, they pretty much have to become his loyal soldiers. What else is there for them after that but Trent Ikithon and his vision for the Empire?”
Essek felt his fingers clutch convulsively around his mug. “And no one stops this?” he asked.
“Most of the Cerberus Assembly is aware of it, if not actively engaged with the details. They consider it a matter of allowing Ikithon to build a cadre of supersoldiers which feel no small personal loyalty to himself in exchange for his eating the cost of the residuum.” She shrugged. “The Volstruckeren do very much partake in many above-board missions for the Empire, and it’s not like their own annexes never run personal missions for them.”
“And that doesn't- and it works. There aren't runners? Defectors?” There should be defectors. Essek should have been dealing with defectors from this kind of abomination for years. He should have been under public orders to weaponize their testimony to drum up support for the war. He should have been under private orders to figure out how it was children survived having residuum crystals implanted in them in the first place.
…surely this was something that Ikithon had been doing for far longer than just the five years he'd had access to the Beacons.
“A very few,” was Ariadne's answer. “Ikithon's invested a lot in making sure that the Empire's various authority figures have incentive to just let him do his thing, so there's not really anywhere for them to run. Most of their bodies turned up as evidence during his trial. Only one actually succeeded in breaking away well enough to be able to come back and press charges and he had to undergo some… extreme difficulties, for that to happen. You've met Caleb, obviously. One day he'll tell you all the details.”
The mug slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers.
“Oh, so that was all- that was all news to you!” Ariadne was saying. Her voice seemed very distant. “Really thought you guys had- but okay, let's deal with this then.”
The mug had cracked when he'd dropped it, and tea was spreading across the table. He was distantly aware of this, as well as the fact that Ariadne was continuing to speak as she bustled around doing… something. Things, even.
Caleb being a Scourger had always been one of the very worst- if also one of the most obvious- options he'd considered when the Mighty Nein had first shown up. Some creature of the Assembly, implanted into the company of fools, bartering back one of the Beacons they'd paid so dearly for in exchange for having one of their agents embedded in close in a way Essek would be hard pressed to shake.
He'd watched carefully. Left verbal traps. Baited him into his debt with favors. Taught Caleb a mostly harmless spell, and then a significantly less harmless spell, and waited to see if it showed up on the wrong side of the border. Asked him outright, at least once, and gotten an evasive response for his trouble.
Caleb had been a little evasive, always. And a little too flirtatious. That seemed, from his admittedly self-curated experience, to be typical of Empire citizens. Ludinus certainly had tried flirtation, but he hadn't been able to swallow his distaste for drow long enough to make his interest convincing, much less provoke a reaction in kind from Essek. Not that anything had managed to provoke such a reaction until recently.
Truly, the Mighty Nein had managed to break him in a multitude of bizarre and disastrous ways. He was pretty sure Caleb hadn't even been trying to seduce him any more when he finally succeeded. He'd just- swung him around in jubilation and Essek had quietly had the realization that he did not mind being touched by this man.
He may have screamed into his pillow a little bit about that later. He may have purchased a pillow for the express purpose of having something to scream into. Beauregard had been quite correct when she’d recommended that course of action, even if she hadn't actually been speaking to him at the time.
She wasn't likely to speak to him again. None of them would. Why would they? He kept discovering ways in which he had completely and utterly betrayed them. Every revelation was worse than the one preceding it. He had done a horrible thing, and that horror only compounded with time, and he hadn't even gotten what he’d wanted out of it.
His fingers sank into something warm and furry. A voice sounded in his head. Okay Essek. Now try to match your breathing to Carambola. Breathe in. Breath out. Breathe in…
Eventually his surroundings resolved themselves. He was laying on his back on something cold and smooth. Above him, quite, close, were several wooden boards. They'd been defaced with an etching of a penis, so presumably Jester had been here at some point, or perhaps Nott. Oh, wait, there was a second, more crudely carved penis. A collaboration, then.
His arms were crossed over his chest, and something small and furry that lay on top of his chest. He looked down. The overly-large, uncannily silver eyes of Ariadne's bat familiar looked up at him. Ariadne herself was next to him, copper wire held between her fingers.
“Where are we?” Essek croaked.
“Under your kitchen table,” Ariadne replied. “You kind of, uh, fell? You were having a really bad panic attack until about a minute ago.”
“Ah.”
“Just lay there and pet Cara for a minute. Settle back into yourself.”
Bereft of a better idea, Essek lay there and pet the familiar. If nothing else, the contrasting sensations of his sweat cooling against what he now knew to be the cold stone floor of his kitchen and small knot of heat that was the oversized bat on his chest was a new one.
“This doesn't seem fair,” he said after a long moment.
“Like, as in it's not fair that you're getting overwhelmed now that you're trying to be a better person? Or it's not fair that you didn't feel half this bad when you were stealing the Beacons? Or it's not fair for you to feel this bad now that some of the force of your bad decisions is beginning to hit you?”
Essek turned his head to better glower at her.
“Look, I'm not going to lie to you, this part sucks, and it's going to suck for a while,” she said, unapologetic. “But it's worth it, to push through.”
“Is it?” he asked.
“As a matter of both my personal opinion as someone who likes my family and my professional opinion as someone who doesn't want the timeline fucked, yes, it's very worth it,” she replied.
“...fair point,” he conceded.
“But leaving aside all that,” she added with a sigh. “You know you could decide differently, right?”
“Could I?”
“Of course you could. You've spent decades learning to manipulate the politics of court to your advantage, for survival's sake as much as ambition's. You're the man who heisted two Beacons out of their temples, and who planted convincing-enough-for-now evidence that someone else committed the crime. When viewed as a loose end to tidy up the Mighty Nein aren't so formidable. Caleb was meant to be a Volstruker, and he still bears the scars. Beau is sworn to an organization that is dedicated to anti-corruption, yes, but with the way things are now it wouldn't be stretching the truth too much to name her an enemy agent. Jester is effectively the high priestess of a cult that stands in direct contravention to the Luxon. Fjord-”
“Stop,” Essek said.
She stopped.
It wasn't news, really, what she was saying. He would be lying if he said that the idea hadn't ever crossed his mind. He was still very naturally inclined to lie.
“Does it ever go away?” he asked instead.
“Yes and no,” she replied.
“That's a very unhelpful answer.”
“It’s a true one. Eventually you can develop better habits and instincts. The longer you refuse to act on the urge to hurt them, the weaker that urge grows. But the capability remains, always.”
Essek stared ahead at the dicks carved beneath his kitchen table, unseeing.
“You said- you alluded to me having talked you down from-”
“Past life shit, mainly” Ariadne interrupted gently. “And like I said, this body's only twenty years old, the temporal displacement is thirty-three… there's a contemporary version of me operating under a different name and a very different ethos right now. And I can't, for the sake of the fabric of time, do anything about that. So, you understand, I'd rather not talk about it.”
“Ah.”
“Anamnesis: it's not fun!” Ariadne said with a shake of her hands.
“It certainly didn't look like it to me.”
“Yeah, well, you're smart,” Ariadne said. “You ready to get off the floor? Food came while you were out of it, and your tea should still be hot enough. Don't worry, the delivery boy didn't see anything”
“Right. Yes,” said Essek, who could not muster up any sort of enthusiasm for food.
Or, at least, he couldn't until it was in front of him and he'd bit into the corner of a manti for politeness’ sake. Then he found he was starving.
“We should probably discuss your third co-conspirator, for completion's sake,” Ariadne said, after a few moments of watching him trying to eat quickly without losing all sense of decorum. “And because Ludinus Da'leth is the most dangerous of them.”
Essek swallowed hurriedly before the food could turn to ash in his mouth. “That is- oh, just tell me what you can.”
“In roughly seven years’ time he'll come within a hairsbreath of causing a second Calamity,” Ariadne said.
The words hit as hard as she likely intended them to hit.
“I could tell you everything I know about it and I doubt it would make a difference,” she continued. “He's been planning this since roughly the last Calamity. His plans have contingencies upon contingencies. You- all of Exandria- are going to throw everything you have at him and still it'll barely end in a draw. You prevent the worst of the collateral damage in terms of people killed and the Weave being permanently altered beyond all use, but he ends up getting what he set out to get: the end to the divine gate, and thus the dominion of gods over the material plane.”
“Ah.” Essek gave himself a moment to try to take that all in. He failed. “How does that- does divine magic no longer work, in your time?”
“It works, mostly. There are differences, a bit. The gods themselves still exist, but they're in mortal form now, and largely without any divine powers themselves. For that, there are sort of cisterns, as we call them: places where divine power pools, generally well-established places of worship. It makes for some weird geography. Vasselheim is a trip and a half to visit now.”
“Does that mean that the Luxon is up and walking around?” Essek asked.
Ariadne was already shaking her head. “The Luxon isn't a god in the same sense as the others. Neither is Tharizdun. Naturally, this has led the Kryn government to declare that the Luxon is the only true god.”
“Of course,” Essek said with a sigh. “I presume we've launched a crusade or two?”
“Surprisingly, no. The peace the Nein just negotiated continues to last. Missionaries are sent out to preach the truth of the Luxon. Considering the state of things, they've found this softer method has been met with no small success.” She smirked. “Still, it's become something of a stock joke in the Empire, dinner being interrupted by a well-dressed drow couple wanting to discuss being saved by the Light.”
Essek tried to wrap his mind around that and failed. “I don't know what I expected from the future.”
“Yeah, sorry, your life is just going to get weirder on an exponential curve from here on out,” Ariadne told him, not sounding sorry at all. “I am skipping over so, so much. But, you know, that's the other main reason why they're mad at you.”
“Because I picked the three worst people possible and handed them two Beacons,” Essek realized.
“In fairness, they picked you, definitely. I'll go through Ludinus’ papers in the future, he's been working on you as a potential Assembly asset since you met sixty years earlier. And I understand why you didn't exactly do your due diligence in checking them out, but… man, that was a bad decision.”
Essek looked at her. I know about your family she'd said before, when they were still upstairs. He hadn't thought much of it before. He wasn't sure he could think of it now.
And then, in an odd twist of fortune, he found he no longer had to.
ESSEK! WE'RE BACK IN THE XHORHAUS! WE HAVE NEWS! DO YOU HAVE PASTRIES? CAN WE COME OVER? ARE YOU POOPING?
Fighting to keep a hopelessly fond smile from his face, Essek held up his hand to forestall any commentary from Ariadne and replied. Jester! It's a pleasure to hear from you. Now is not an ideal time, as I have company. Come here for pastries in the morning?
“Jester?” Ariadne asked.
“Yes. The Mighty Nein have returned to Rosohna, it seems.”
“That- wait. Did you tell them I was here?”
“I said that I had company, and to come by in the morning. We can find some place to hide you, there are-”
“Yeah we should probably just come up with a cover story now,” Ariadne interrupted. “They'll spend twenty minutes arguing over whether it's more likely that you're selling them out, being held hostage, or actually with someone, they'll try to scry on you, and then they'll just come over here themselves.”
Essek opened his mouth, realized that she had a point, and then closed it again. “Yes. Yes, we should probably just do that now.”