Chapter 30- In Which Very Little Happens, and All of It Matters

Breakfast was quieter than usual.

Not silent — Tessa was talking, which meant there was always noise — but there was an undertone to the conversation that screamed of avoidance. I ate. I listened. I watched Alara across the table move through her food with focused attention, as though that were the only thing on her mind.

She looked fine. That was the thing about Alara — she always looked fine. It was only if you knew what to look for that you could see the difference between her usual composure and this version of it, which was costing her something.

I looked for it anyway.

I watched her take every bite of her cheesy pastry with almost mechanical consistency. Bite, four chews, swallow. Every time. Every once in a while her eyes would dart over to us and look away.

I had been trying to be nonchalant about observing her, but her eyes met mine eventually. She didn't sneer, but the look on her face told me to look away.

I did. For a second. Against my better judgement, I kept looking.

Her braid was extra fastidious today. It was always very well kept, but you could often find strays or fly-aways here and there. Today it was perfect; she had clearly used some sort of product or spell to make sure it was immaculately smooth.

Her civilian clothes were also cleanly pressed and tidy. This was normal for her, but today I could see the seams in her tunic sleeves.

Control through rigidity. I could respect that, but it made me concerned.

Even after finishing my first plate of sausage and eggs, I was still hungry. I knew that if I mentioned this, Tessa would tell me to wait twenty minutes and see if I still wanted more, but instead of announcing myself, I got up and headed back to the food line.

Ojola was there as always, smiling. Sometimes she felt like the only normal thing in my life. "Back for more, honey?"

"Just can't stay away from your food."

"Did you wait twenty minutes?"

"Not you too."

"I'm only teasing. Have all the stomach aches you want."

"Thank you."

I truly enjoyed our banter in the mornings. But the orc woman could clearly see something was off.

She nodded over to my companions. "Everything alright?"

I shrugged. "Hard to say."

"Alara?"

"Yeah."

"Poor girl is a wall. I got her to smile the other day and I felt like I won. Today, she's so sad."

I sighed. "She laughed yesterday."

"Actual laughter?"

"Yep."

"She's warming up to you."

"To the group, you mean."

"Sure."

She scooped some more food onto my waiting plate. "Good talk, honey."

"Thanks, Ojola."

I took my tray, filled my cup with coffee and headed back to the table. Kael was still fully engrossed in tinkering with what appeared to be his prototype. It looked much more complete than the last time I saw it.

Tessa was focused intently on her food.

Alara had vanished.

I jerked my head at her empty space. "Where'd she go?"

Tessa glanced up at me. "She said she had to go restock her healing supplies."

"We haven't worked recently."

Kael spoke without looking up. "Definitely an excuse."

I observed him more closely for a moment. His brow was furrowed with more than concentration. He seemed to almost be looking past his work at something in his own head. "You okay, Kael?"

"Fine, thanks."

"Cool. Did you want to take a look at those elginarium samples today?"

"Absolutely. Right after breakfast."

Tessa and I exchanged a worried look. Whatever had been in Alara's letter was affecting all of us.

I looked around the mess hall, noting in passing that the large elephant-man janitor was throwing away his trash and heading off to work.

The guild's communal workshops were the kind of rooms that existed in every institution — large enough to be useful, impersonal enough that nobody felt territorial about it. Long tables, shared equipment, the accumulated clutter of people who were between jobs and needed somewhere to put their hands. We had claimed a corner of one by default, the way we claimed most things.

Kael had the elginarium samples arranged in front of him in a careful row, his magnifying lens out, SCRUB positioned nearby at an angle that suggested he was also examining them and finding the results professionally interesting. Tessa was cross-referencing something in two notebooks simultaneously, which I had learned meant she was excited. I was doing approximately nothing useful, which felt appropriate for the day.

Hask appeared in the doorway.

He looked at the elginarium samples on the table.

He looked at us.

He said nothing about the elginarium samples. "Audited dungeon run. Next week. Standard procedure for license reinstatement. Be ready."

He looked at me. "You were real helpful the other day, Callister."

He left.

The three of us let that sink in for a moment.

Finally, Tessa spoke. "Next week."

Kael nodded in agreement. "We can finally get this over with."

Neither of them sounded entirely sure whether that was good news.

I wasn't sure either. An auditor meant someone watching. Someone watching meant performing competence under scrutiny on a job that was never entirely predictable. But it also meant the end of the suspension. It meant work. It meant the thing we'd been waiting for since Varkas filed that challenge.

I thought about what Hask had said to me specifically.

Then I stopped thinking about it, because the communal workspace had other people in it and I had learned to be careful about where I let my face go.

For a moment, nobody moved. The three of us just sat there with "next week" and "you were real helpful" and the elginarium samples all occupying the same table.

Then Kael picked up his lens.

That was enough. Tessa went back to her notebooks. I focused on the samples in front of us.

Kael had turned his attention back to his work, carefully prodding at the ore with a pair of tweezers, measuring with calipers and scraping here and there along the rock's surface.

I watched him quietly for several long minutes.

Kael set down his lens and sat back. "This has been processed."

Tessa looked up from her notebooks. "What do you mean processed?"

"I mean someone worked on it after it came out of the wall. The crystalline structure — elginarium in its raw state has a specific pattern, you can see it in the Ebon Maw walls. This doesn't have that pattern anymore. Someone refined it. Partially, but deliberately."

Tessa stared at the samples. "That would require specialized equipment. And knowledge of elginarium's properties that isn't exactly common."

"Right."

"And the Ebon Maw hasn't officially reopened."

"Also right."

I rolled the thought over in my mind. "So someone got into a closed dungeon," I said slowly. "Extracted elginarium. Refined it somewhere. And then lost a cartload of it on a back road at night."

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Kael nodded. "Whatever they're doing with it, they're not being careful about it."

I thought about Dan. About the coin. About one conversation left before terms.

I thought about what someone sloppy enough to lose a cart full of refined elginarium from a dungeon that wasn't supposed to be open might mean to an organization whose entire business model depended on knowing everything that moved through Moorhaven.

I kept my face neutral. "We should probably find someone who knows more about elginarium refinement than we do."

Nobody disagreed.

That evening, I headed into the city, toward the library. I didn't need any particular books or information, but it was a good place to find some peace and quiet.

The Moorhaven Grand Library was familiar to me now, to the point where stepping in off the street felt like a relieved exhale. I looked around at everything that had become so second nature: the particular quality of light from the setting sun through the high windows, the smell of old paper and Alben's tea, the hush of the quiet stacks that felt less like silence and more like the absence of everything that was currently wrong with my life.

It helped. It always helped.

Head Librarian Alben was already pouring when I arrived, which meant he had heard my footsteps in the foyer and had either been expecting me or had simply decided that anyone who came to the library at this hour needed tea regardless of who they were.

He smiled warmly as I reached his desk. "Mister Callister. What a pleasant surprise. Are you here to peruse tonight, or have you simply come to keep an old man company?"

I pulled up a chair. "Most definitely the latter."

He slid a steaming cup across the desk. "Been delving extra dungeons today?"

I sipped at my tea as I chose my words.

Alben always brewed the same tea: nettle and hibiscus, which made for an earthy, yet fruity taste. There was also a slightly bitter aftertaste that Alben said came from mountain thistle, and he was very vocal about having to steep the tea for long enough for that aftertaste to come through. I could have done without it, but was acquiring a taste for it.

"Quite the opposite. Our license is on suspension."

The old man quirked a brow over his cup. "Suspended? For what, exactly?"

I knew I couldn't tell him too much. He certainly didn't need to know about Varkas, or any of what I had overheard in Hask's office. "Someone is messing with us. They filed a challenge to our provisional B-rank license, saying that our work was 'careless'."

"Wait…the provisional license you were to be given after completing your Ebon Maw job, six months ago?"

"Yeah."

He shook his head. "Why would anyone bother?"

Why indeed? I took another careful sip. "I don't really know. They filed a petition, citing 'carelessness'."

"Interesting…I assume that means you've been bored to tears."

I shrugged, pretending that was the case. "Mostly. We attended the Swiftfoot festival."

Alben smiled. "Oh, I was there as well. Such fun! These old bones don't get around like they used to, but I couldn't forgive myself if I missed a halfling festival. Such a beautiful lantern ceremony, as well."

"It really was."

He leaned forward, almost conspiratorially, his voice dropping even more quietly, as if he didn't feel the books should hear his next words. "And did you tell her how you feel?"

I nearly choked on my tea. "What now?!"

The smile came again. "Tessa. A halfling lantern ceremony would be a perfect time to confess your feelings to the halfling girl who has won your heart."

"Alben, what are you talking about?"

"Mister Callister, you visit me here quite often, and you've told me all about your team. I've heard how you speak of her."

"Yeah, so? She's my friend!"

He sat back, eyes twinkling. "Of course she is."

My face was burning and I frantically searched for a change of subject. "Have you gotten any new books?"

Alben's eyes lit up like the lanterns at the festival had. "Actually…"

He turned in his chair and reached under his desk. With a groan, he hefted a shockingly large, leather bound volume between us. "I was recently able to acquire a truly fascinating book: it is an exhaustive index of municipal water drainage records in pre-imperial settlements! I've been lost in it for days."

I stared. "Days?"

He nodded fervently, the way a child might when showing you their new favorite toy. "It's incredibly absorbing. Would you like to hear about it?"

It didn't sound absorbing in the slightest, but I saw the hopeful look on his face and grinned. "Absolutely I do!"

It would also keep him from talking about Tessa.

He opened the volume near the midpoint and began pointing at pages. "Well the way a settlement drains its communal water is distinctly telling of its people. If you look here, this village - Gedbroun - has records of its drainage systems in the southern reaches of what is now the Delvenmoor Empire. Imperial records cite Gedbroun being located further north."

He was pointing emphatically at two points on a very old map on the page to drive his point home. "But the proof is in the pudding: people build infrastructure where they need it, not where historians say they did."

I leaned forward in my chair, despite myself. "I'll be damned, that actually is interesting."

Alben huffed, as if offended. "Of course it's interesting! It's accidental history! A puzzle that we can solve."

I nodded. "Tell me more."

I was surprised at my own earnestness, but Alben did not hesitate.

I actually enjoyed the lecture; apparently, before the empire was founded, settlements had no standardized tools or building practices. There were records of dozens of different methods of drainage and different materials used to build the systems needed. Many different ways to solve the same problem.

Apparently, there was a social implication too. Who got good drainage and who didn't could tell you everything about the social hierarchy of a settlement. It's inequality made literal in stone and pipe.

Alben also pointed out what settlements ceased to be recorded further on in the book. He explained that bad drainage brought disease and death, among many other problems, and would crumble entire towns. The index was essentially a record of which early communities survived and which didn't, and why.

The thing that amused me was that Alben had some seriously strong opinions on the index itself. "The annotation alone is worth the price of acquisition, Mister Callister. A woman named Derra Holt — municipal archivist, mid-empire period, apparently quite meticulous — cross-referenced every drainage record against the settlement's census data and building permits. Every one. Do you know how many settlements that is?"

I shook my head.

"Four hundred and twelve," Alben said, as if unveiling knowledge of the meaning of life.

Up to this point, he had been calmly sitting and explaining. This particular subject had him gesticulating and speaking more verbosely than usual. "And she did it alphabetically by settlement name, which I have some opinions about, frankly, because chronological would have been considerably more useful for anyone trying to trace the development of technique over time, but her actual cross-referencing is impeccable, so I've chosen to forgive her."

He was so busy being animated that I refilled my own teacup. "How very gracious of you, Alben."

He glanced at me. "Oh, I'm exceedingly forgiving in the face of excellent work, shortcomings notwithstanding. But look here!"

He pointed to another page. "There's a footnote on page two hundred and forty-seven — "

He said this the way someone else might say that there was a remarkable view from the top of a high mountain peak. "—where she catches herself in an error she made sixty pages prior and corrects it retroactively with a marginal note. In red ink. The only red ink in the entire volume. She clearly felt strongly about it."

He paused, seeming to consider this. "I respect that enormously."

I nodded in agreement and he continued his impromptu lesson.

He was so invested that he did not seem to notice the door of the library open.

I did.

I was shocked to see that it was Alara.

She walked through the room quickly, beelining for a table a ways away from where I sat. If she noticed my presence, she didn't show it. She pulled a book from a shelf and sat, burying her nose in it.

Alben must have caught my lapse in attention. "Mister Callister, are you listening?"

I looked back at him. "Sorry, Alben. I just –"

He craned his neck to look over at the table Alara had just occupied. "Ooooh, I understand. It's the elf girl who also has you completely smitten. Alara, was it?"

I hissed at him. "Alben! What are you on about?"

He smirked. "Go talk to her. I think she might need you."

"There's no way –"

"Trust me. Just go. Come visit me again soon. I also have a new tome on the migration patterns of the pale-spotted dung beetle."

I looked between him and Alara once. Twice. "Sure. See you later."

"Indeed. For now, you really should talk about your feelings."

"Go read your beetle book, Alben."

"Good night, Mister Callister."

As Alben stood and collected his things, I walked quietly over to where Alara was seated, apparently engrossed in her book.

I hesitated about ten feet away, unsure of what to say to her. I noticed that she was holding the book upside down.

I took a deep breath and moved forward, quietly pulling out a chair on the other side of the table, but not directly across from her.

I slid the hot tea I was still holding across the table to her. She reached out and took it, not looking at me. "Thanks."

That one word was almost enough to knock me out of my seat. I couldn't remember a time she had ever thanked me for anything.

I decided to not mention it. I had spent most of today worrying about her, thinking about how she had rushed away from us. And thinking of how she had laughed back at the river.

I had to try and help. "...you okay?"

Stupid. That was the wrong thing to say.

She didn't answer immediately. She closed her upside-down book and sipped her tea, still not meeting my eyes. "No."

I nodded slowly. "Can I help?"

"Unlikely."

The silence that followed that statement was so heavy I could feel it. In the past, I would've let the conversation end there, left her to her thoughts. But I remembered something that Hask said, while recovering in the hospital after the Ebon Maw.

"If you wanna help people, sometimes all you can do is be there for them. Let them feel safe. Learn how to reach out."

I'd been earnestly trying to apply that lesson to Alara. Let her feel safe. And I could definitely see changes in her. Maybe it was impatience, but I decided to speak plainly.

I chose my words carefully. "Alara…"

She looked at me directly for the first time. Her gaze was not sharp and angry. Her eyes were red and puffy; she'd clearly been crying a lot. "I know you've got a lot of stuff going on that I don't know about. I also know that it isn't my business."

I saw her hand clench around her cup, but I pressed on. "But we've been doing dungeons together for months now. Fought monsters, almost died."

"What's your point?"

I steeled myself and continued. "My point is this…I'm your friend. You don't have to be my friend. You don't have to tell me anything, or do anything that you don't want to. I won't push you. But –"

Now it was my turn to look away. "–I'm here. I don't know if or how I could help. But I'm here if you want me to try."

I looked down at my hand. It was shaking.

She was silent for a painfully long time, and I was wondering if she was going to yell at me, or make some snide comment.

Instead, she sipped her tea and took a breath. "The letter was from my sister."

I was stunned. I hadn't expected that to actually work. "Your sister?"

She nodded.

Another long pause. I didn't think I would get even that much and was unsure if I should press further. "Do you want to talk about it?"

I watched her consider it. "Not right now. It's a lot."

I nodded but made no reply. I pushed my chair back to stand.

She stopped me. "Can I find you later?"

I swallowed hard. "Yeah. Of course."

I stood awkwardly and turned to go.

"Goodnight, Lorne."

With my back to her, I felt my face flush again. I squared my shoulders. "Goodnight, Alara."