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Caleb has a mind that counts things.
He counts coin. The passing hours. His remaining stocks of spell components. And, right now, the number of seconds since Essek Thelyss met his eyes and died.
Nine seconds ago, Essek went still on the laboratory floor, sprawled in the centre of the casting circle as if his corpse were the product of some sadistic summoning ritual. Twenty-four seconds ago – twenty-four seconds – Caleb stood outside Essek’s gate in beautiful ignorance of what was going on inside the house, angling a copper wire towards the tower. ‘If you are at home, we should talk, maybe. I’m outside now. You can reply to this message.’
A pause. Then the response: a lightning-hiss of magic, and Essek’s voice, a pain-strained snarl. ‘If the Assembly thinks they can get away with having me murdered in my own laboratory –’
Then the sound of an impact, and an awful, choked noise.
(Because it would be impossible for Essek Thelyss to stop being a genius, even with a Scourger in his home and a knife wound in his gut. Of course he would find a way to tell Caleb what was happening, and where to go, while making it all sound like a desperate taunt to his attacker. Without alerting the Scourger that reinforcements were on the way.)
Twelve seconds ago, Caleb crashed through the window of Essek’s laboratory, carried on his cat’s paw.
Eleven seconds ago, he watched the Scourger withdraw a curved dagger from Essek’s back.
Ten seconds ago, Essek’s eyes flickered up to meet Caleb’s. And Caleb learned that there is a kind of hopeless relief in the eyes of a man who knows he is about to die, and is glad that he will die in the company of a friend.
Nine seconds ago, without looking away from Caleb’s face, Essek convulsed a single time and died.
Now, Caleb slashes the Scourger’s half-drawn Teleport glyph in half with a Counterspell, and sends them reeling with a blast of flame. He is not concerned for his own safety. He is alone, yes; he is also fresh and unharmed. And Essek, before he took the lethal blow, quite clearly gave this bastard hell. What little Caleb can see of the Scourger's masked face is more bruise than skin; they move jerkily, sluggishly, one leg twisted from the crush of graviturgy. So, no – Caleb has no fears about dying here. He is only concerned about not letting the Scourger get away to cover up what they have done. To get away with fucking murdering Essek.
The Scourger hurls a blade. It wobbles even as it shoots in Caleb’s direction, and it’s a simple matter for him to bat it aside with a Shield. The knife that killed Essek skids over his desk, slices a line through his research notes, and topples over the far end. Sloppy. Caleb sends silent thanks to Essek for fucking the Scourger up so completely that they can’t even aim straight, then sends a silent snarl in the vague direction of the Empire and Trent: train your people better.
He wrenches his lodestone from his component pouch and points his finger at the assassin’s heart. And he takes a single moment to grieve for them, for the lies they've been force-fed, for the child they must once have been.
Then a green beam of light lances from his fingertip and punches the Scourger in the centre of the chest. They have a single half-second to look down in mild surprise at the hole blasted through their ribcage; then they shatter into dust.
The moment their body dissipates, Caleb is running. His hands find Essek, pull the bloodied form into his lap. No movement. No breath. Essek’s eyes are still open, dull and glazed in a way that’s sickening, un-Essek, wrong. And too much like another purple-skinned body, falling on the road with eyes never shutting.
A scream is welling in Caleb’s head, and he hurries to block it out behind his usual wall of numbness. His fingers lower Essek’s eyelids, brush blood-soaked hair away from his face, and rest on the still-warm cheek. Then he snarls at himself: fix this.
There is no point in casting Message, but he does it anyway. ‘Jester. Come to Essek’s laboratory now,’ he says, knowing that the words are harsh and clipped, and not caring. ‘Bring Caduceus. Bring diamonds.’
Pointless. His friends are far out of range of the spell. Even if they are not, they will never arrive within the thirty-five seconds left before it is too late for a Revivify.
Caleb could, perhaps, teleport to the Xhorhaus. But Jester and Caduceus will not be there. They were going into town to shop, and he has no idea where they are - and would Essek even come with him? As far as the rules of magic are concerned, Essek is no longer a creature, someone who can be brought along with the spell willingly. He is an object.
Essek is an object. The scream tries to push its way up Caleb’s throat again, and he chokes it back.
He snaps his fingers, and Frumpkin materialises before him. ‘Go and find Jester or Caduceus. Bring them here. Drag them by their coat-tails if you must.’
Frumpkin swishes his tail and races from the room. Caleb watches him go, and tugs Essek a little closer. He is not a man usually daunted by the word impossible, but there is no chance, not chance at all, that Frumpkin could find the clerics and bring them here within the remaining twenty-one seconds.
There is no point counting down anymore. There will be no Revivify cast on Essek. But Caleb counts the seconds because he does not know how to stop, and when the last one slips away he pulls Essek against his chest and lets out something that’s halfway between a sob and a scream.
He does not let go. He lets Essek’s blood soak into his clothes, and he remembers sitting in an inn room a lifetime ago, telling Beauregard and Nott-who-is-now-Veth, I want to bend reality to my will. He has seldom wanted it so furiously as he does now, because he has lived for seventy-eight seconds in a reality where Essek Thelyss is dead, and it is an awful, cold reality that Caleb cannot remain in.
It will be over soon, he thinks. Jester or Caduceus can end it. And then, with a realisation that makes him catch his breath and pull his face from Essek’s cloak – no. I can end it.
Still clasping Essek to him with one hand, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his transmuter’s stone.
Blood smears over the surface as he pulls it free, hiding the ring around its circumference. Caleb's hands move, mechanically, and wipe the blood away. Then they return his component pouch, withdrawing his pearl and a healing potion, setting the latter down so that it’s within arm’s reach when Essek wakes up. There. This is everything he needs for what he is about to attempt. Except -
He gathers up the end of his scarf, pours a little of the contents of his waterskin over it, and dabs the blood from Essek's face. The stains don't matter. Essek can Prestidigitate them out once he is alive again.
There. Now everything is ready.
He presses the pearl to his own forehead and weaves the glyphs of Fortune’s Favour into the air, trying very hard not to think about how he first saw these runes in Essek’s spellbook, and first wrote them down with Essek watching. The glyph shimmers as he completes it, and there's a half-second of vertigo, an echo of the magnetic, trance-like feel of being drawn into the Beacon - and he senses with some gut-deep instinct that possibility has become malleable. Just for a little while. Just for him.
Use it wisely, Widogast.
Caleb sets the pearl aside, and places the transmuter’s stone in the centre of Essek’s chest, over his heart. He does not take a moment to ready himself, because that would only lead to his head filling up with I’m not a cleric and I don’t know how to do this. He simply takes in a breath and casts.
Under his blood-slick fingers, the stone heats, and Caleb closes his eyes and focuses on the fading warmth of the body in his arms. He tries to channel his awareness into every cell and sinew, every inch of matter that makes up Essek. He senses the spell catch, lock onto Essek, reaching for whatever traces of him are left in the universe – and he feels those traces slip through the spell’s grasp and shrink away.
Panic screams through him. Caleb reaches for his defensive numbness – then stops, reconsiders, and allows himself to be afraid. He allows himself to acknowledge that his limbs are shaking, that his throat aches, that his eyes are wet. Then he reaches for that little fragment of possibility, and asks the universe: another chance to save him, please.
He reaches for Essek again. The spell searches, grasps – and holds.
The stone is beginning to shake. Caleb holds it firm, and remembers something that Caduceus once mentioned about resurrection rituals, about gifts and words beckoning the dead back home. Three usually does the trick, he’d said. Caleb is only one person, and speech seems so far beyond him - but he is all Essek has, so he will have to be enough.
He opens his eyes and stares into Essek’s still face. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘my father used to say that stones with rings like this were lucky.’
His voice sounds grating and alien, too loud for a room in which Essek is lying dead. Caleb ignores this, and forces more words out of his numb lips. ‘I suppose that sounds foolish to a man like you, who can hold up a pearl and create his own luck. And honestly, I thought it was silly when I was younger too. I told myself that a student of the arcane like myself, a student of reality, had no need for superstition. But I carried around the lucky pebble that my father gave me, all the same. It was – it was in my pocket when I burned my parents alive.’
This is a very poor way for Essek to find out about that. But the words have been said, and Caleb thinks they needed to be said, and he doesn't have time to regret them.
‘I took this stone from a swamp, back when my friends and I were even bigger assholes than we are now. Veth asked me what I would do with it, and I told her I wasn’t sure. Because I am like you, friend: a good liar.’
He gives Essek a rueful smile, like he would if Essek were alive and listening. ‘I knew exactly what I hoped to do with it. I was thinking of the master transmuters I’d read about, who could use enchanted stones to mould matter and twist the energy of reality. Stones that could reverse the touch of time and restore a creature’s youth. Stones that could raise the dead. And… I was thinking of my father. I was thinking of Leofric Ermendrud, who believed that ringed stones were lucky and who I killed.’
He pauses. Lifts one hand from the stone so that he can trace its pale ring.
‘I made this stone to turn back time and make it so that my mother and father were never dead. I have wanted it above everything, I have given so much to it, because if I ever stopped trying to put it right -’ His throat almost closes, because even considering this is near-impossible. ‘It would be like saying that I could move on and let them be dead while I kept living. So I told myself I could change time, change what I did. Because it seemed unthinkable to change myself and just... live as someone different and better. Live as some happier lie of a man. So if you are hearing me, Essek, and you want to come back but you are afraid, because you think you have done too much harm and it is impossible to move forward - I get that fear. I get it very much.’
Is he imagining it, or does his grasp on the spell feel firmer? It is like he has reached into the astral sea and caught some free-floating body in his gravity, pulled it into his orbit.
Something, somewhere, is listening.
He licks his lips and carries on. ‘But you know, in my more hopeless moments, I told myself, you can’t change reality and save people with a pebble. And then I met you, and you showed me that reality could be changed with a single pearl. And then you showed me that the Mighty Nein had already changed reality with far less than a pearl, because you became our friend and learned regret. There are so many possible timelines in which I did not pull out that Beacon and you were never anything more to me than a jailor. Instead we have worked on spells together and laughed with our friends together, and we could try to do better together.’
The spell wraps itself around Essek’s body in a haze of faint orange light. The stone is vibrating so hard now that it is all Caleb can do hold onto it.
‘It’s like this stone, really. Layers of sediment all adding up to make it, and somehow, something different got folded into it and became a ring. What are the odds of that? A chance in a million, but it happened. And against all the odds, you got swept up into the muck of the Mighty Nein and pressed into the mix of us, and we would not be the same without you. We would still exist. But we would be less special, I think.’
Caleb reaches for that little trace of something that’s caught in his spell’s gravity, and gives it a pull.
‘So now I am going to make a reality in which I do save someone with this stone. And it will not happen because I want to go back to being the boy I was, or because I am a guilt-stricken wreck trying to fix the things I burned. It will happen because I think you can grow, and I want to be there to see it. And because I am already sick of this reality in which you are not here. You are wanted here, Essek. You are loved here. And if this stone returns you to me, then… it will have been a lucky stone indeed.’
The stone splits cleanly along its ring, and shatters into a thousand shards.
For a second, they hang in the air around Caleb’s hands, each surrounded by a flickering, candle-like glow. Caleb closes his eyes again and directs them down, sending the shimmering fragments into Essek’s body, driving them into every cell and doing what he does best: transmuting. Turning every last shred of matter from dead to living. Changing the lungs from empty to breathing, and the heart from still to beating. Bending the reality around him from one without Essek to with Essek, with Essek, please, please, with –
Essek jolts, and shudders to life in Caleb’s arms.
And continues to bleed profusely, of course. He chokes for air and stares at Caleb with huge, terrified eyes – so Caleb snatches up the healing potion and tips it down Essek's throat, holding his head to make sure the stuff goes down. A little forcefully, perhaps. But gentleness can be saved for a moment when Essek’s body is not already trying to die again. There's another moment of spluttering; then the gash lines torn across Essek’s body glow faintly, knit together, and fade.
Caleb holds tight as Essek’s chest heaves. He counts every retching battle of a breath that proves that Essek is alive, and listens as they grow steadier and quieter. After eleven breaths, Essek manages to stir his body into moving, just enough to grasp Caleb’s arm with one hand and lift his head to scan the room.
‘I killed them,’ Caleb says, putting his hand over Essek’s. ‘You’re safe. The clerics are on their way, and – and I am here now.’
Essek’s gaze flickers back onto Caleb. He nods, and lets his head fall back down onto Caleb’s arm. Fifty-one seconds pass, in which Essek holds onto Caleb and Caleb holds onto him. Then Essek sucks in a deeper breath and says, ‘Thank you.’
‘Of course,’ Caleb says, because he cannot imagine a single timeline in which he would not have done this. ‘I am, um, just glad that it worked. I’ve not used that type of magic before.’
The tiniest of smiles tugs at Essek’s lips. ‘I did say once that you were prepared for more than you gave yourself credit for.’
‘Well. Take this as proof of –’ Caleb has to stop for a moment to put his own breathing back in order – ‘of the school of transmutation’s capabilities.’
‘No. I take it as proof of yours.’
Twelve seconds slip by in an exhausted but comfortable silence. Then it occurs to Caleb that Essek is still lying in his lap, and that he should, perhaps, either lower him onto the floor or help him sit up. But Essek has not asked for either, nor has he tried to move. In fact, he’s lying here quite snugly, his hand still enclosed in Caleb's. Close enough that Caleb can feel every rise and fall of his chest. His skin is pale from blood loss, but he is warm and so beautifully alive - and perhaps Caleb can savour that a little longer.
‘You really are quite the speechmaker,’ Essek says, after six more seconds.
‘Oh. You heard?’
‘I did. It was hazy, but I heard. And I will not ask further about… certain details, unless you are ever willing to tell.’
Not trusting himself to speak, Caleb nods his thanks. And then, because he isn’t ready to tell yet, says, ‘Jester and Caduceus should be here soon.’
Essek nods and closes his eyes, as if he hasn’t the energy to keep them open. Which is understandable, considering. ‘Don’t go?’
Caleb squeezes his hand a little tighter. ‘Of course not.’
‘Thank you.’ There’s a faint return pressure around Caleb’s fingers, and Caleb wants to beg him to stop being so grateful for basic kindnesses. And yes, a resurrection is basic kindness, if it is returning a life that should never have been taken away.
And then Caleb looks at him, alive and awake, letting Caleb cradle his body with absolute trust. He thinks about those unbearable few minutes in which Essek was dead, the relief of those minutes ending – and a thought occurs to him. He would call it an epiphany, except that the word implies some kind of blinding revelation, and this thought comes quietly, almost absent-mindedly.
What he thinks is: I have done it at last. I have reshaped reality. I have saved someone whom I love.
Love. The word should be a surprise to him. Or at the very least, it should be terrifying, shoved away by a snarl of I do not deserve and it cannot work.
It is not a surprise. It is not terrifying. He does not push it away.
Because it is, really, a recognition of something already known. It is like listening to a new language for months, drinking it in but thinking that he has not learned it - only to find the first few words waiting on his tongue.
Caleb closes his eyes, and takes a moment to acknowledge the passing of the first few seconds in which he's certain that he loves Essek Thelyss.
‘I am sorry that your stone was destroyed,’ Essek says suddenly, startling Caleb into opening his eyes again. ‘You had – things you wished to accomplish with it.’
Yes, he did. To save those dear to him. To undo deaths that should never have happened. Caleb shakes his head and smiles.
‘I did,’ he says. ‘And it did exactly what it was made for.’