#copperhawk writes

[copperhawkthoughts]

I’m having post-Thing crash and I’m grumpy about it, but I found this snippet I wrote in the comments on TNOL and I don’t think(??) I ever posted it here, so, here it is.

Caleb was chewing on his cloak. Caleb was chewing on his cloak.


“Caleb, please, I - Caleb, no, don’t - Caleb! This is highly unbecoming - no don’t look at me like that - help!?”


This last, with an exasperated sigh, was directed at Jester, doubled over with laughter nearby, rather than down at the ovine creature that was at present attempting to digest his clothing.


Jester managed to stifle her giggles, though her lilting voice was still thick with mirth.

“Esseeeeek, he liiikes you! You should totally give him pets, I bet he’s sooo soft.”


“Jester. I cannot give Caleb pets.”


“Sure you can! Just pat him on the head, you know? He won’t mind, Cayleb is very schnuggly as an animal.”


Jester’s eyes were bright with mischief and her grin was sharp, and Essek knew he’d never hear the end of it - but if it would at least distract Caleb long enough to extract his cloak…


The dense wool was spongy beneath his hand, and his fingers sunk surprisingly deep. The texture was odd, not as coarse as it first appeared - rather silky, in fact.


Essek sighed. Jester was right. It was very soft.

[copperhawkthoughts]

Happy Wednesday!! Today is the day - the last chapter and the epilogue of The Nature of Light are up. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!

…Over the following days Beauregard holes herself up with Caleb and the Volstrucker by turns, spending hours sequestered. Caleb leaves these sessions ashen and distant, scratching at his arms. Astrid is ever aloof, appearing outside of mealtimes only infrequently, but she is never more stone-faced than when Beauregard has released her. The man – Essek learns his name is Wulf – turns out to have a knack for thatching, and spends the hours between interviews atop the roof of the Clay home with Cornelius and Calliope, pitching down charred bundles and lashing in new.

He also joins Essek in the garden, seeming comfortable in his skin bare-headed in the sun and bare-handed in the damp soil, tucking seedlings from the Clays’ greenhouse into freshly-dug beds.

“We were farmer’s children, you know. B- Caleb and Asa and me,” he says congenially one morning, as they work toward each other from opposite ends of a row, pulling weeds.

“Indeed,” says Essek, cloaked and rose-gloved beneath a ludicrously beribboned sunhat. “I was not.” Wulf barks a laugh, loud and genuine.

Wulf also flirts, in a bluff and genial way very different from Kingsley’s swaggering charm, with Fjord, with Jester, with Fjord, with Kingsley himself, with Veth and Yeza, with Fjord, and even once with Caduceus, who only laughs and tells him to find another tree.

He never flirts with Caleb, nor with Essek. With Caleb it is clear there is some history there which Wulf has no desire to stir up, but Essek is unsure why he has been spared, save that the afternoon after their return, when Essek had sought refuge from the brightest sun within the cool walls of the Clays’ temple-home, Wulf had ducked his head in while Caleb had been expounding on the principles of his Vault of Amber. Wulf had watched from the door for a moment, eyes on Caleb’s gesturing hands, and then caught Essek’s eye, winked, and disappeared.

The Volstrucker have been with them for three days when Beauregard pronounces herself satisfied with her gathered testimony, and the holiday atmosphere shifts. After dinner that night, over mugs of fragrant tea Essek now understands the nomenclature of and tumblers of Clay homebrew he swiftly learned to decline, the Nein begin to strategize…

Read the rest here

[copperhawkthoughts]

Deeply enjoyed Ashton and Laudna RP-ing their way through getting that ring back.

POV: you own and run a pawnshop in dieselpunk hell

At first you think it’s just the wind rattling the shutters but the knocking is too regular, and then you hear, above the clatter of the storm, a woman’s voice, begging shelter.

This isn’t a temple or an inn or a bar but your fathers raised you proper and this storm’s settling in to be a bone-stripper, no doubt, so you crack open the door just enough and two people slip in, swaddled in cheap yellow cloaks that are instantly recognizable even under the red-brown dust caked into the rough weave.

They’re polite enough in thanking you and seem genuinely pleased to be out of the wind, and you’ve never had particular trouble with the Call yourself but you haven’t gotten where you are by being careless so you watch them as they relax, looking around the shop curiously.

They spend fifteen minutes inspecting your wares and antagonizing each other, idly pawing through your selection of rings before surprising you by actually buying something, bickering all the while.

You pride yourself on having a good salesman’s eye for folk but you can’t get a read on this pair at all - are they flirting? Are they siblings? Do they despise each other?

You can’t pin it down, and before you can even really try they breeze out the door like there isn’t a fucking sandstorm doing its level best to scour the rust off this scrap heap.

The wind howls for hours after they leave, deep into the evening without pause, and your thoughts swirl almost as violently.

That ring was nothing special, platinum or no. They paid with good gold and barely tried to bargain. They didn’t even try to lift anything, and yet you cannot shake the deep, unwavering certainty that some way, some how, you’ve been had.

You hate this fucking city.

[copperhawkthoughts]

Ch 30 of The Nature of Light is out today, and Essek is letting his “I have several advanced degrees” flag fly

…Above the din, Fjord’s voice rises.

“If you teleport into a busy place, like a bar, and you pick a location where someone’s standing, what happens to them?”

Essek nearly laughs. Verin had asked him that once, when they were children and he had only recently begun his studies. He bites back the reflexive urge to answer now, as he had then, with a lecture on Mirsuur-Por’co tunnels and the manipulation of the Weave, but he nearly chokes on the half-swallowed words when –

“They disintegrate!” Veth crows.

Fjord blinks at her. Veth has a gift of lying exactly brazenly enough to give anyone pause, even in the face of their own good sense, and Essek can see reflexive mistrust and tentative belief warring on Fjord’s face.

“Is that true?!” He demands of Veth, who nods up at him, looking for all the world as though the Light wouldn’t blind her. Fjord narrows his eyes at her, wisely suspicious.

“Cal – oh, Essek! Is that true?”

Essek shakes his head, fondly exasperated. “Such an outcome simply cannot occur. The innate magical energy produced by all living creatures bolsters the localized density of the Weave, rebuffing the crystallization of the distal Xayr anchor, which is preferentially attracted to points of negative magical density…”

Fjord is nodding along politely, but those golden eyes are glazing over. Veth is shaking her head at Essek, expression wryly amused. He stops. “Ah, no. The teleport will either connect to an unoccupied space, or the spell fails.”

Fjord nods again, more firmly. “Is that ‘fails’ like ‘ugh, waah, aiee’, or ‘fails’ like… ‘pfft’?” He makes a series of accompanying hand gestures to illustrate.

Essek smothers a grin. “Ah, more along the lines of ‘pfft’, typically…”

Read the rest here

[copperhawkthoughts]

Ok maybe it’s a hot take but I don’t believe that Essek and Caleb label their food because I 100% do not believe that Essek cooks.

Their spell components, however…

The cabinet in their study is a beautiful piece of furniture.

Nearly as tall as Caleb, with dozens of small drawers, each with its own creamy-white card in a buffed silver frame gleaming against the polished vermaloc. Verin, disguised, had commissioned it from a master craftsman in Uthodurn as a wedding present. It is the sort of piece that would make any wizard jealous, rivalling anything in the towers of the Assembly. It stands against the back wall, between the two desks which face each other across the cozy room, each with their own piles of papers, books, and assorted magical bric-a-brac.

The cabinet is a marvel of craftsmanship, with carefully book-matched panels and finely carved legs, but the precise elegance of its design is marred, if only slightly, by the labels themselves.

Down the left half of the cabinet the labels are done in a flowing script, thin and spidery, and in Undercommon as often as not. The labels on the right are written in a bolder hand, scrupulous block capitals. One or two are Zemnian. A keen observer with a grasp of all three languages might note that there are duplicates; ‘pearls’ appears twice, once on each side, as do ‘feathers’, ‘gold dust’, ‘obsidian’. Others are unique. The presence of the duplicates of course means the cabinet holds less variety than it might otherwise, but the owners of the cabinet, the occupants of this study, learned an important lesson long ago.

They can share many things, large and small: a house, a bed. Laughter. Friends. Passions. Histories, traumas. Books, spellbooks. Even, on occasion, their wardrobes, but they could not - flatly could not - share spell components.

…

“Essek, liebchen, I love you, but if you use up my cocoons again I will tell Jester you don’t care for her cupcakes.”

…

“Light scorch it, where are those marbles? Caleb? I need my marbles, what have you done with them?”

“Ah,” with a badly suppressed grin, “have you lost them again? Your marbles?”

This sparkling wit is met with a stern glare, the merest, barest hint of amusement in the twitch of an ornamented ear.

A conversation is had. Another. Several.

An argument over paper and ink that is really about years spent scraping by and the thoughtless way the truly wealthy consider - or don’t consider - scarcity, privation, ends in a full day of mutual sulking before either side is willing to admit their mistake. After that, changes are made. Compromises.

And with time, and practice, and a carefully divided cabinet, two wizards build another thing to share: a life.

[copperhawkthoughts]

It’s Wednesday again, Trent Ikithon is up close and personal with Beauregard’s best rear naked choke, and Essek discovers something he and Beau have in common in today’s 32nd instalment of The Nature of Light:

Trent Ikithon is sprawled in the dirt, half on top of Beauregard. She has him grappled like a pit fighter, arms twined around his neck and legs locked over his hips, and though he struggles, her strength is more than a match for one ancient wizard. She barely even seems to strain, but Essek’s skin crawls with referred disgust; Ikithon’s slick hair is in her mouth.

Essek places himself at Caleb’s elbow with barely a thought, and thrusts a commanding hand down toward the felled Archmage. “Stay down,” he snarls, and Ikithon goes stiff.

Beauregard shoves Ikithon half-over onto his face, scrambling out from underneath him. She kicks him back onto his back, and plants herself at Caleb’s other elbow.

Physically ungifted Ikithon might be; his is nevertheless a powerful mind, and Essek hisses as he feels the arcane shackles binding him dissolve. Before Ikithon can do more than twitch his fingers, however, the tip of Yasha’s greatsword comes to rest below his heart, angled to slip easily between a pair of ribs. The skirts of Ikithon’s robes are bunched around his splayed knees, and Yasha plants a heavy boot, still filthy with the grime and dried fluids of Aeor and Cognouza both, on the rumpled silk brocade over his groin.

“I’m not going to do anything, Caleb,” she says, her soft voice with its light Xhorhassian accent gentle. Cold, implacable threat laces her tone as she looks down at Ikithon, “But if you try anything, I will kill you.”

Behind Caleb’s back, Essek catches Beauregard’s slight shiver. Ah. Something they have in common, then.

Read the rest here

[copperhawkthoughts]

Happy Wednesday! This is my last WIP Wednesday, because next week the final chapters of TNoL go up and it will be a WIP no longer…but in the meantime, we have Ch 33:

…Fjord leans around Caduceus to catch Essek’s eye.

“It’s occurred to me that…I’m not saying that no one’s looking for us, but that was rather opportune. You could go home; it was Trent and the Volstruckers that were on our tail before.”

Jester pauses her painting and looks up, frowning. “I think it was the entire Assembly, though, because Vess is still missing, and she was with us. I think they think we killed her?”

DeRogna. He had forgotten about DeRogna. How could he have forgotten about DeRogna?! It was barely a week ago that the Nein had shown up on his doorstep and informed him, while he burnt his tongue on hot whiskey with cocoa, that one of the three Dwendalian Archmages with knowledge of his involvement with the Beacons had been assassinated on their watch, and he had forgotten.

He is beginning to sweat when Caleb speaks up, brow furrowed. “There could also be Volstrucker in play who are already working under orders.”

Essek has changed past all self-recognition over the course of this adventure, because ordinarily, mention of the possibility of assassins hunting him would be cause for alarm. Instead, a small bead of warm feeling begins to thrum in his chest, resonating to the subtle undercurrent in Caleb’s words, to the sound of Caleb offering reasons why he should not go, yet - as though he might actually have meant, if Essek but dared hope, please stay.

He clears his throat, doing everything he can to keep his voice level, to keep the tremor of anxiety and hope and fear and relief out of it. “Then maybe it's best you clear your names.”

“Ja, we’ll help the Clays clean up their home,” Caleb begins ticking tasks off on his fingers. “Bring our friend over there in,” with a flapped hand at Ikithon, tied to his tree, unconscious. “And then the hard work begins,” he finishes, looking at Beauregard.

She nods across the circle at him. “When you’re ready.”

“Very well,” Essek says, inclining his head, but in his heart, he means yes, I’ll stay…

Read the rest here

[copperhawkthoughts]

Here, have a snippet of Chapter 26 of The Nature of Light, that fic where Essek goes to Aeor and canonically Goes Thru It

…Yasha scoops him up carefully, mindful of the wicked wing-spines and heedless of the blood. She doesn’t go far, merely steps around Caleb and Jester to the first clear patch of ground, laying Lucien gently down where Caleb had lain not long before.

He is a gruesome sight. There at the end, as Jester’s final spell was eating its way through his back, he had - Molly had? - ripped his own chest open, exposing his heart. His throat is torn open all the way up to the hinge of his jaw. His legs are mangled, his left foot crushed. His right, a mere handspan from Essek’s knee, has a high, delicate arch.

Caleb moves slowly, painfully, to kneel at Lucien’s head. From the pocket of his tattered coat, he produces a large stone, a river-smooth cobble banded in white, and nestles it into the crevasse of Lucien’s chest, next to his heart.

“Why did we come this far, if not for this? We would do this for any one of us.”

Veth nods, subdued. “I think he’s still in there.”

“I know he is.” Jester’s voice is choked with tears, but firm. Full of conviction.

Caleb is still so pale, his every movement pained. He seems to exist just slightly out of phase with his own skin, so recently bartered back from the Matron. Essek opens his mouth to speak, but no sound emerges. He clears his throat and tries again.

“Are you sure this is even wise to attempt?”

Essek had once thought he hadn’t had a heart to break; he’d lately thought it had done breaking, but it crumbles into diamond dust, evaporates into pearl smoke when Caleb looks down the length of Lucien’s ruined corpse at him and says, quiet and firm, “Once you’re a member of the Mighty Nein, you’re in. You should know that by now.”

Essek has no idea what his face is doing, stripped entirely of the ability to demur or dissemble as something soft and delicate and growing begins to sprout in his chest from seeds carefully sown and haphazardly scattered.

A scarred and calloused hand squeezing his forearm.

A glittering voice in his mind at all hours, cheerful and bright.

Awkward dinner invitations and hot chocolate and acceptance. Trust.

Veth steps close to Essek’s side and squeezes his shoulder, her small hand the faintest pressure through his cloak.

“He’s right, and right now there are only eight of us.”