Scene Four - “Practicality of Duskfen”

The stars were fully out by the time Dandy finished.

Zook had not interrupted once. He had sat with the stone turning in his fingers and his eyes on the Duskfen lanterns below and listened the way very few people listen. Completely, without preparing his response while Dandy was talking, without the subtle lean forward that meant someone was waiting for their turn. He simply received it. All of it.

When Dandy finished Zook was quiet for a long moment.

“The paladin”, he said. “Serath. He stayed at the table".

“Yes".

“But he was uncomfortable".

“Visibly".

Zook turned the stone once. “That may matter later".

Dandy looked at him, “You think there's a crack in the council?"

“I think a man who is uncomfortable with a decision he made will not be comfortable with it forever”, Zook said. “Whether that becomes useful depends on how quickly things move”. He set the stone down. “Things are going to move quickly".

Dandy looked out at the lanterns. “How long have you known something was coming?”

“Known is a strong word”, Zook said. “Felt. For about two years. Something shifting in the deep currents, the kind of shift that doesn't announce itself, just changes the pressure of everything around it”. He paused, “like weather you can feel in your joints before the sky does anything about it".

“And you came up here".

“I came up here".

Dandy looked at him. “Why a ridge?”

Zook was quiet for a moment. Then, “How much do you know about gnomes?"

“Practical people”, Dandy said. “Very organized, strong opinions about process, cant forget the excellent pastries.”

“The pastries are good”, Zook agreed. “We are also a people who believe strongly that everything has its correct category. Its correct place. Its correct function”. He looked at the city below. “I have never fit correctly into any category Duskfen had available".

“What do you mean?"

Zook looked at him with the expression of someone deciding how much of a door to open.

“What do you know about magic”, he said.

“Enough to recognize it”, Dandy said. “Not enough to do it".

“In Duskfen magic is a civic function”, Zook said. “Mages work for the council. They manage infrastructure, maintain records, assist with repair. It is practical, organized, regulated”. He paused. “I was eleven when I first moved something with my mind. A stone. About the size of the one in my hand now. I was sitting in the back of a classroom being told what gnomes were permitted to study and I was extremely bored and the stone moved”. He looked at it. “I told no one".

“Smart”, Dandy said.

“Necessary”, Zook said. “Unregistered magic in Duskfen is not illegal exactly. It is more that it makes people very uncomfortable and uncomfortable people make very predictable decisions about things that make them uncomfortable".

“They regulate it away”, Dandy said.

“They find a category for it and then the category has rules and then the rules have administrators and then the administrators have forms”, Zook's mouth moved in that direction of a smile. “You have met the administrators".

"I have the form in my pocket," Dandy said.

“Keep it. You never know.”

Dandy looked at him. “Thats exactly what I, nevermind, so you hid your power?"

“For years, yes. Until I found the tome".

A pause settled between them. Not uncomfortable, the pause of a story arriving at its significant turn and taking a breath before it.

“What tome”, Dandy said.

--------------------------

Zook told it the way he told most things, in pieces, without performance, the facts placed down one at a time like stones being set in a path. Dandy filled the gaps with questions, which Zook answered with the patience.

He had been fifteen. Restless in the specific way that very intelligent people are restless when the world available to them is smaller than the world they can imagine. He had been wandering the oldest part of Duskfen, the deep roots, the original foundations, the tunnels that predated the city above them by centuries, because wandering underground was something he could do without anyone asking what category he was supposed to be in.

“You were already hiding”, Dandy said.

“I was already exploring”, Zook said. “The distinction matters to me".

“I understand my friend"

A pause. “Thank you".

The tome had been in a sealed alcove behind a root-wall so old the root had grown around the seal and made it look like just another feature of the tunnel.

“What was in it?” 

“Everything”, Zook said simply. Then, after a moment, “everything I didn't have a name for yet. Everything I'd felt moving in me since the stone and hadn't been able to reach”. He turned the stone in his fingers. “The arcane arts. Not civic magic, not infrastructure and record-keeping. The deep work. Teleportation. Concealment. What my ancestors called, the power of indigo, the manipulation of fundamental forces rather than surface applications".

“The lightning”, Dandy said.

“The lightning”, Zook agreed. “That came later. When I was learning the beam work I went to the ridge because I needed somewhere no one would see what I was practicing”. He looked out at the city. “The first time I lost control of it, the discharge lit up the northeastern sky for approximately four seconds".

Dandy stared at him. “You're the blue lightning.”

“Purple”, Zook said.

“The siblings said blue, or purple, or a general mix, my notes are a bit scattered, but I can confirm, mage of the ridge, real".

“The siblings are wrong”, Zook said, with the flat certainty of someone who has strong feelings about the color of their own lightning and will not be moved on the matter.

“How often did it happen?”

“Three times in the first year, then I learned control”. He paused, "by then the legend had already started. The mage of the ridge. Blue lightning." He said with a scoff. “I found that the legend was useful. People don't go looking for things they're already afraid of".

“Until me”, Dandy said.

“Until you”, the almost smile. “You are not afraid of very much".

“I'm afraid of quite a lot”, Dandy said. “I just don't find it useful to show it".

Zook looked at him. Something in the purple eyes that was warmer than his face was letting on.

“The tome”, Dandy said. “Whose was it?”

“A mage who passed through Duskfen two hundred years ago”, Zook said. “A traveler. No one recorded his name, he was here for a season, left without ceremony. The tome was all that remained”. He paused. “I spent ten years with it. Learning what I could. Practicing what I learned. And then two years ago something shifted in the deep currents and I came to the ridge and I have been here since".

“Waiting”, Dandy said.

“Practicing the spells I hadn't yet learned”, Zook said.

“What spells?"

Zook looked at him.

"The ones I thought I might need, the offensive arts of indigo" he said. “I wanted to be ready when whatever was shifting finished shifting".

The wind moved across the ridge. Below them Duskfen burned its patient amber. Above them the stars did what stars do when no one is watching closely enough to catch the moment they arrived.

“You had a dream”, Dandy said quietly.

Zook was still for a moment. “Yes".

“What was in it?"

“You”, Zook said. “Walking up through fog. Sitting on a rock. Eating half a pastry”. A pause. “The instrument on your back, and the sound it made”. He looked at The Weave. “I did not know what it was, only that it was coming and that when it arrived I would know what to do next".

Dandy looked at The Weave in his hands. He thought about his father carving it from a tree that had fallen the night he was born. He thought about a gnome fifteen years old in a tunnel beneath a city, finding a sealed alcove, and a book that contained everything he didn't yet have a name for.

"Right," Dandy said.

"Right," Zook agreed.

“So. Tomorrow.”

"Tomorrow," Zook said, “we find out whether Duskfen will move.”

Dandy looked at the lanterns below.

“And if they won't?”

Zook set the stone down with a small precise click.

"Then we find out what we do instead," he said.

------------------------

Recruitment of Duskfen

They came down from the ridge at dawn and went to work and the work was, comprehensively, a disaster.

Not an immediate disaster. Zook had contacts, people who had known him before the ridge, before the legend, in the years when he had been simply an unusual gnome with an unusual relationship to civic norms. He had favors owed. He had history. He had, in at least three cases, saved someone's life in ways that had never been publicly acknowledged and had been quietly understood between the parties involved to constitute a significant debt.

Duskfen was still practical about it.

The first was a warrior named Brek.

He was enormous by gnome standards, which meant he came to Dandy's chest, with forearms like small tree trunks and the kind of face that had been hit enough times to have stopped being surprised about it. He had known Zook for years. He owed him two favors, neither of which Dandy was told the specifics of, both of which had the quality of things that had happened in the dark and been resolved without paperwork.

He listened to everything. His face went through several things during the listening, surprise, anger, the specific grim recognition of someone hearing something they had half-suspected and hoped they were wrong about. When Zook finished Brek was quiet for a long moment.

“I believe you”, he said.

“Then you'll help us”, Dandy said.

Brek looked at him. Then at Zook.

“I want to fight”, he said. The specific painful weight of those three words, not I will, not I can, but I want to, which was a different sentence entirely. “Zook. You know what I want".

“I know”, Zook said quietly.

“But I have a company of forty-three soldiers who follow my orders because my orders follow the rules”, He leaned forward. “The moment I take them outside the rules I don't have forty-three soldiers anymore. I have forty-three individuals making individual decisions and half of them go home”, he shook his head. “I can't fight with half. And I can't order the other half to break what they've sworn to uphold".

“The pact is already breaking, Valdenmere..”, Dandy said. 

“The council hasn't confirmed that”, Brek said. “Until the council confirms it we're operating under the assumption that it stands”, He looked at Dandy. “I know how that sounds".

“It sounds like the world ending while everyone waits for the paperwork”, Dandy said.

Brek winced. "Yes," he said. “That is what it sounds like”, He stood, not proudly, but in a polite, practical way. “I'm sorry, ff the council moves, if they confirm what you're telling me, I'll be the first one through the gate. You have my word on that".

He shook Zook's hand. He looked at Dandy with something that wasn't quite an apology and wasn't quite encouragement, Dandy smiled, “I understand”.

They left.

“He means it”, Zook said, on the street outside. “About being first through the gate".

“I know”, Dandy said. “That makes it worse somehow".

------------------------------

The second was a woman named Ossa who ran a trading house in the eastern market and had, according to Zook in the brief walk between her door and Brek's, once hidden him in a grain shipment for three days during an incident he declined to specify beyond calling it an administrative misunderstanding that had required some patience to resolve.

She laughed when they told her.

Not cruelly, genuinely, the full bodied laugh of someone who has heard something so audacious that the body's first response is joy before the mind can organize an opinion. She laughed for long enough that Dandy started to feel cautiously optimistic about it.

Then she stopped laughing.

“Oh”, she said. “You're serious".

“Yes”, Zook said.

She looked between them. At Zook's expression, which had not changed during the laughing or after it. At Dandy, who was giving her his most earnest face, which was considerable.

“I'm sorry”, she said. "I thought..", she pressed her lips together. “I genuinely thought you were doing a bit".

“We are not doing a bit”. Dandy said in a serious tone he didnt equip unless necessary.

“No”, she said. “I can see that now”. She had the grace to look genuinely uncomfortable about the laughing. “Zook. I'm sorry. What you're describing is.."

“Real”, Zook said.

“Real”, she agreed. She looked at her hands on the table. "I run thirty-five trade routes. I have two hundred people employed across them. If I move against the pact, if I'm seen to be acting against a hundred years of established order without the council's backing..", she shook her head. “I lose the routes. I lose the people. Everything I've built”. A pause. “I'm sorry. I know that sounds..”

“Practical”, Zook said. Not unkindly.

“I was going to say small”, she said. “Against what you're describing”. She looked at him. “Does that make me a coward?”

“No”, Zook said. “It makes you a gnome".

She almost smiled at that. Then she stood and walked to a cabinet and came back with a small purse that she placed on the table between them.

“For supplies”, she said. “It's not nothing".

“It isn't”, Zook said. He took the purse. “Thank you Ossa".

She nodded. She didn't say goodbye, which Dandy suspected was because she knew what it would sound like.

------------------------------------

The third was an old man named Perris who had apparently owed Zook a favor significant enough that Zook had never called it in for ten years, which meant it was either enormous or he had forgotten about it.

He hadn't forgotten.

Perris opened his door, looked at Zook, looked at Dandy, looked at Zook again, and said, “I was wondering when you'd come".

He had grandchildren. He said so immediately, which Dandy had learned over the course of the day was how gnomes said no before they said no, by putting the thing they were protecting between themselves and the ask, so that the no arrived attached to a reason rather than just a refusal.

He listened to everything anyway. He had the courtesy of a man who understood that a debt required at minimum the dignity of a full hearing.

When Zook finished Perris looked at his hands for a long time.

“Ten years”, he said. “I've owed you ten years".

“You don't owe me this”, Zook said. “I'm asking, not collecting".

Perris looked up. “What's the difference?"

“You have a choice about this”, Zook said.

Perris was quiet for a long time. Long enough that Dandy stopped trying to read the outcome in his face and just waited with it.

“My grandchildren”, Perris said finally. “Three of them. The youngest turned four last month”. He looked at Zook. “If what you're saying is true, if this is real, then what happens to them if I do nothing?”

“I don't know for certain", Zook said. “But I think you do".

Perris closed his eyes. Opened them.

“I know”, he said. “And I still can't”. His voice was steady and the steadiness of it was the saddest part. “I am sixty-eight years old, I have three grandchildren, I have not held a weapon in fifteen years, and I am afraid”. He said it plainly, the way Zook said things plainly. “Not of the fight, of leaving them, of what happens to them if I go and don't come back”. He looked at Dandy. “You understand that".

"Yes, your duty is to your little ones", Dandy said.

“Then you understand my answer".

“Yes”, Dandy said again, and meant it.

Perris stood and shook Zook's hand and held it for a moment longer than a handshake required. Something passed between them that had years of weight in it and didn't need words.

They left.

The street outside was the same street it had been that morning. Duskfen moved around them with its practical unconcerned industry, stalls open, carts moving, the ordinary life of a city that had not yet been told what was coming down the eastern road.

Dandy and Zook stood in it and said nothing for a while.

“How many more”, Dandy said.

Zook looked down the root-road. “Two, after that I'm out of history with people.”

“What do you think.”

Zook was quiet for a moment. “I think Duskfen is going to say no”, he said. “And I think they are going to say it with genuine sorrow and genuine logic and it is going to amount to the same thing as saying it without either".

Dandy looked at the pastry stall across the market. He was not hungry. He looked at it anyway.

“Let's try the two”, he said.

They tried the two.

The two said no.

-------------------------------------------

Night Two

They came back up through the fog as the last of the light left the sky, Dandy through it first this time, without stopping, the cold and the damp three steps and then the ridge opening above Duskfen with all its patient lanterns and all its practical people going about their evening in complete and genuine ignorance of what was moving toward them.

They sat on the outcrop.

For a while neither of them said anything. The wind moved across the ridge. Below them the city breathed its amber light. Somewhere in the eastern quarter the string man was probably updating his wall.

“We have no one”, Zook said. Not with despair. Just with the flat honesty of someone naming a thing accurately.

“We have each other”, Dandy said.

“Against Tranodian's army".

“Against whatever comes before Tranodian's army”, Dandy said. “Which buys time for what comes after".

Zook looked at him. “That's not a plan. That's a sequence of events with optimism in the gaps".

“Most plans are”, Dandy said.

Dandy put his head back and looked at the stars. They were doing what they always did, existing at a distance that made everything below them look small and temporary.

“Valdenmere”, Dandy said.

The word sat between them.

“Yes”, Zook said.

“I left Valdenmere because going back felt inadvisable".

“It is inadvisable”, Zook said. “It is also the only door left".

“Cassin's council will have people watching the roads. If they know I overheard..”

“They know”, Zook said simply. “A bard who was at the dinner and disappeared the same night. They know".

“Right', Dandy looked at his hands. “So we walk back into a city where the people in charge want us specifically not to be in it”.

“Yes".

“Looking for allies".

“Yes".

“Among people who are being governed by the ones trying to sell them, they must be able to feel this".

“Yes".

Dandy was quiet for a moment.

“Serath”, he said. “The paladin, the one who is controlled by duty and faith".

“Yes”, Zook said. “I've been thinking about him since last night".

“A man who made a decision that cost him something”, Dandy said. “Who is still sitting with what it cost".

“A crack”, Zook said. “Small. But cracks are where we can slip through".

They sat with that. The wind moved. The lanterns below held steady. Somewhere in the distance, too far to hear yet, too close to ignore, the shape of what was coming continued its patient approach.

“Tomorrow”, Dandy said.

“Tomorrow”, Zook agreed.

“If this goes badly I want it on the record that I tried the reasonable option first".

“The emergency petition”, Zook said.

“The emergency petition”, Dandy said. “Very reasonable, very practical of me, an excellent use of the form”.

Zook made a sound. It was brief and quiet and it was without a question, a laugh. Small, controlled, arriving and departing quickly as though it had suprised him.

Dandy smirked, “I wasnt even trying to be funny there, of course now you laugh”.

Zook smirked, “go get some sleep”, he said.

“The rock was quite uncomfortable last night, do you have a bedroll?”

Zook stood from the outcrop and picked up his satchel. He turned toward the far end of the ridge, the dark end, the end that looked like nothing but rock and shadow. He raised one hand and spoke two words quietly in a language Dandy could not understand. 

The air at the far end of the ridge folded.

That was the only word for it, folded, like a page turning. The dark, the rock, and the shadow peeling back to reveal what had been sitting behind it the entire time. A cabin. Small, low-roofed, built from the same grey stone as the ridge. It blended so well, Dandy's eyes kept trying to file it as background. A window with warm light behind it somehow already lit. A door of dark wood worn smooth at the handle. 

Dandy stared in disbelief. 

“You have had a cabin this whole time”, he said.

“Yes”

“Concealed”

“Well, obviously”, Zook smirked.

“I have walked past this cabin more times than I can count, I could have walked right into it, and I slept on a rock last night”.

“Six times, you have walked by the cabin, six times”, Zook said. “I slept on the rock my first month, I thought it was quite comfortable, and I still had to keep an eye on you”. 

Dandy looked at the cabin. Looked at Zook. Then back at the cabin. 

“How long has that been there”, Dandy asked.

“I built it after the first month, Zook said. He moved toward the door with the unhurried ease of someone arriving home. ”The rock is comfortable for awhile, but this needed to feel like home while I got prepared". He pushed the door open. Warm light spilled out across the grey stone of the ridge. “There is a second room, it has a bed, the bed is narrow, but a bed nonetheless”.

Dandy looked at the open door. At the warm light inside. At the ridge around him that had seemed so exposed and so empty and had been apparently hiding an entire domestic situation. 

“Zook”, Dandy said.

“Yes".

“For what it's worth”. He paused. “I'm glad it was your ridge the string man sent me to”.

Zook stood in the doorway with the warm light behind him and his starfield cloak catching the night around him and said nothing for a moment. 

“Come inside, Dandy”, he said. “We have an inadvisable city to walk into tomorrow”.

He went in.