Chapter Text
x.
The seconds pass. Then the minutes. Then the hour. The sun drags across the sky and the rest of the castle rouses from their beds and goes about their day, blissfully ignorant of the mess in Callum’s room but Ez doesn’t leave.
How can he, at a time like this? The last of his family, trapped in the same dream, one even Lujanne, an expert in Moon magic, can’t help them escape from. Callum hasn’t moved at all since he got here, and if it wasn’t for the gentle rise and fall of his chest, Ez might have thought—
He shakes his head. Callum’s breathing, and that’s what matters. Rayla and Soren have both gone after him, and they’ll bring him back. All that’s left for Ez is to do is…
“Be patient, Ezran,” says Lujanne. She hasn’t left the room either, and she’d spent most of the morning muttering thoughtfully to herself about illusions and spells and dark magic. Ez suspects that she’s just thinking out loud for alternatives, but it hasn’t helped. It doesn’t sound like she’s made any breakthroughs, and Callum and Rayla and Soren are still trapped and have to find their own way out. The thought makes him bristle.
“ Patient,” he snorts. “What good am I if all I can do is be patient? ”
“Well, you’re no good to them being impatient ,” says Lujanne shortly.
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
“You can and you will. ” Lujanne frowns at him, eyes hard with disapproval. It’s a rare look for her. Ordinarily, she’s kooky and sarcastic and… maybe fun isn’t the word, but something like it. She’s been irritated with them in the past, and tired and grumpy, but it’s never been quite like this, and it strikes Ez too late that perhaps she’s just as frustrated as he is.
She snorts when she realizes he understands. “Imagine the Guardian of the Moon Nexus, a Moon Mage to top all other Moon Mages, unable to help more in a situation like this,” she scoffs. “You humans and your dark magic. Look at the misery it brings you.”
Ez scowls at her. “We don’t use dark magic here,” he grumbles. “Katolis has been opposed to it since the end of the war.”
“And yet here we are.”
“This isn’t us, ” snaps Ez. “Claudia’s not acting on our behalf. She’s—whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it for her dad. You don’t get to blame all of humanity for that.”
There’s a pause. Then Lujanne lets out a sigh and flops tiredly into Callum’s desk chair. “No,” she mutters. “I suppose I can’t. My apologies, Your Majesty,” she adds, with a little incline of her head. “I forgot myself.”
Ez huffs. “Don’t worry about it,” he murmurs. “I get it. I’m pretty disappointed in Claudia too.”
“I can’t say ‘disappointed’ is the word I would use,” snorts Lujanne. She purses her lips and glances at Callum and Rayla and Soren’s sleeping forms. Ez thinks he catches her counting their breaths. It’s strangely comforting to know that he’s not the only one doing it. Then she sits back and sighs. “What will you do with Claudia, assuming Rayla and Soren find their way back with her and Callum?”
Ez hums. “I’m not sure,” he admits after a moment. “I hadn’t thought that far. I’ve been so worried about these three I forgot to even consider it.”
Lujanne hums too. “A word of advice, Your Majesty,” she begins carefully, “when this all blows over— if it all blows over—I would not recommend taking any chances with her.”
Ez blinks. “What do you mean?”
“I think you know,” says Lujanne. “This is powerful, dangerous magic that even I can’t undo. If this is demonstrative of the power Viren has now… you may find that you’ll have to do... what is necessary .”
Ez blanches. Things he hadn’t thought about, indeed. “I can’t do that,” he murmurs, looking away. “Claudia’s my friend. I couldn’t—I wouldn’t —”
“Even after all of this?” Lujanne nods at Callum, all but lifeless on the bed.
Ez shifts uneasily in his seat and stares at his hands. Objectively, it’s true: this is beyond forgiveness, and Claudia is demonstrably dangerous—but Ez had sworn when he took the crown that he would be different. No more revenge. No more bloodshed. No more executions for people who’d only been involved by proxy, and when Soren and Claudia had been brought to him as prisoners years ago, he’d decided then that they wouldn’t pay for their father’s crimes.
But this? This is a crime on its own, isn’t it? Can he really still argue that this is only Viren’s crime?
When he doesn’t answer, Lujanne clucks her tongue. “Perhaps it’s not my place to say,” she says, “but naivete will not be rewarded in times like these. You were always going to have to make hard decisions, Ezran. I only hope you make the right ones.”
Ez says nothing to that. On the other side of the room, Soren shifts in his sleep.
No one wakes.
“So? What’s the plan?”
Rayla blinks. All of this is still so disconcerting that she almost forgets where they are and why they’re here in the first place. She squints against the sunlight, her limbs like lead as she and Soren stumble across the sand towards the beach house. His parents’ laughter echoes over the shore, and Rayla swallows and pauses in mid-step.
“I—uh—” She grimaces. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Rayla scowls. “It’s not like you have a plan either,” she snaps. “ You wanted to be here just as badly, didn’t you? What’s your plan?”
“Whoa, back off.” Soren glares at her. “I’m trying to help. You’ve done all this before, haven’t you?”
Rayla bristles and keeps her eyes on the sand. “Not like this,” she mutters. “When I—when Claudia did this to me, she did it to get information. It was torture, Soren, but I—” She winces as she says it. She’s never admitted it to herself in so many words. In her mind, admitting to it made her weak, and it made it her fault that it happened because she wasn’t strong enough to stop it.
Her breathing quickens and catches in her throat. Her body tenses like she’s ready to run. The waves sound too loud in her ears, and then—
“Hey.”
Rayla gasps. The air rushes in. Soren sets a hand on her shoulder and reality crashes back into her at once.
“Sorry,” says Soren quietly after a minute. “I can’t… even imagine what Claudia must have done to your head. You don’t have to say anything else about it. But we need to start somewhere and you’ll know how to do that better than me.”
“Right.” Rayla draws a breath to steady herself and looks up at the beach house. Its shadow looms over the sand, beckoning to them and threatening them at the same time. “We need to get in there,” she says at last. “If Callum’s trapped here somewhere, he’s gotta be in there.”
“You’re sure?”
Rayla nods at his parents, and at Callum’s laughing with each other on the deck. “It’s well guarded, isn’t it?” she says. “They’re… puppets, I think. Illusions she’s been using to get close to Callum. Weird that she’d put your parents in here but… I guess if she’s trying to fool Callum into thinking everything’s different, it’d make sense.”
Soren’s brow furrows a little. “Does that mean there’s a version of me in here too?”
“Maybe,” mutters Rayla. She swears under her breath. “That complicates things.”
“No it doesn’t,” says Soren. “If she’s made one of me, I can just take its place. It’s you we need to worry about. You’re the odd one out here—unless there’s any reason to think she might have made up a version of you.”
She shakes her head. “Callum said she didn’t want any hint of me here. That’s how he figured it out the first time. He provoked her by asking about me and it turned into a nightmare.”
“If anything, that complicates things.” Soren huffs and glances back up at his parents, his lips twitching into a rueful grimace as he touches the dagger in his pocket once more. “Fine,” he says at last. “I’ll go in. Replace myself. Find some way to get you to Callum. See if I can’t get to Claudia too. Maybe I can get her to stop this. You just… stay out of sight, I guess.”
“You want me to sit back and do nothing?”
“There’s not a lot you can do, is there?” says Soren sharply. “Not without Claudia figuring it out and making this a whole lot harder. You have to stay out of sight until I can get you to Callum. Okay?”
Rayla scowls but he’s right and she knows it—and it’s a testament to how dire the situation is that Soren’s reeling her back. “Fine,” she grumbles at last. “Do what you need to do. Just… don’t do anything stupid.”
Soren snorts. “You should consider taking your own advice.
Callum starts awake with a gasp. For a second, everything’s a mess. He doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here, and there’s terror in his throat, and he doesn’t know why. His fingers curl into the sheets, and he glances around the room, wide-eyed and panicked, until—
“Hey! Hey, it’s okay! You’re okay!”
Callum draws a ragged breath. It doesn’t quite make it to his lungs, but it’s better than nothing. He forces himself to settle. To focus. The room is bright. The air is warm. The cotton of his sheets is cool around his legs, and beside him, Claudia smiles, albeit a little tearily, and sits back in her chair.
“Claudia?”
Claudia’s smile widens, just a bit. “You’re okay,” she breathes, sounding relieved. Then she wrinkles her nose and swats his arm. “Don’t do that. You scared me.”
“ Scared you? I—What’d I do?”
Claudia's irritation falters. “You don’t remember?”
“No?” Callum grimaces and shifts in the bed. Come to think of it, he doesn’t remember much of anything. He’s not even sure where…
Claudia frowns at him. “Maybe we should get you a doctor,” she mutters, leaning over to touch his forehead. “Hold still. You got pretty battered out there. Maybe you’ve got some sort of concussion.” She brings her face so close to his that Callum can count the freckles across her nose and his insides squirm at the sudden proximity. She’s studying his eyes, he realizes, and suddenly he’s glad because it means she won’t be looking at the way his cheeks are glowing pink
“You seem okay,” she says after a minute. She pulls away and drags her finger back and forth in front of his face, watching the way his pupils follow. “I still think we should see a doctor.”
Callum takes his turn to frown. “What happened?”
Claudia’s lips twitch. Something unreadable glints in her eyes. “You fell out of the yacht,” she says after a moment. “Remember? You and me and Soren and Ez were gonna tour around the bay. The yacht lurched and I guess you weren’t holding on tight enough because the next second…” She shudders. “Soren had to go in after you. Gave us the scare of our lives.”
Callum stares at her because no, he doesn’t remember that at all . “We went sailing?” he asks stupidly.
“Oof, you must’ve hit your head really hard.” Claudia tsks. She touches his forehead again and a dull ache blossoms beneath her fingers, like a day-old bruise he’s sure wasn’t there before. Callum swats her hand away, but in the same moment, the image of a yacht flashes in his mind and he… remembers? The wind in his hair, the lurch in his gut, his lungs screaming for oxygen—
“Oh,” he says at last. “I—I think I do remember now.”
Claudia raises a sceptical eyebrow at him. “Are you just saying that to get out of seeing a doctor?”
“I—no. No.” Callum laughs in spite of himself and waves her off. “No, I think I’m okay. Just… needed a minute, I guess.” He grins at her. It comes off a little awkward and a little bashful, but she smiles back, after a second, and leans across the bed to press a kiss into his cheek.
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad. Everything’s going to be okay now.”
Claudia only leaves the room once she’s certain the spell has taken hold.
Everything feels so much sharper now, and it’s so much easier to keep this world fluid. The sea rolls behind the beach house, each wave upon the shore like a heartbeat she doesn’t have to think about to maintain. The versions of her mother and father are performing beautifully and it’s such a relief not to have to animate them herself. The bruise on Callum’s forehead had formed because she’d willed it to, and planting fake memories in his head had been as easy as touching his skin.
“That’s more like it,” she mumbles to herself, examining her hands and enjoying the power at her fingertips. All of this and only for a single phial of blood. If she’d known from the beginning how potent it would be, she would have bled the elf dry. “‘ Far more potent than I’ve prepared yourself for,’ huh, Dad?” Claudia lets out a hollow laugh and stalks down the hall. “Not to worry. I’ll have that cube for you soon enough.”