Chapter 49 Breakfast

Chapter 49 Breakfast
Elias's POV

"You're telling me," Cara said, "that the curse is broken, forty seven people came back from wherever the curse sent them, the dungeon is open, there's a passage between here and somewhere that doesn't have a name, something three thousand years old is moving toward us, and your response is breakfast."

"Yes," Elias replied.

Cara looked at him across the kitchen table. "You're serious."

"We haven't eaten since yesterday," Elias replied. "Whatever is coming has been travelling for three thousand years. It can wait twenty minutes."

Cara looked at Lyra.

Lyra looked back at her with both pairs of eyes and said nothing.

Cara looked at their father.

Aldric was standing at the stove making something with the focused unhurried movement of a man who had been Ren for three hundred years and Aldric Stone for seventeen and had decided Aldric Stone made breakfast and that was that.

"Dad," Cara said.

"Eat first," Aldric replied without turning around.

Cara looked at Brennan.

Brennan shrugged. "I've been gone for eight years. I'll eat anywhere."

Soli was already eating. She had found bread and honey approximately thirty seconds after entering the house and had been completely focused on it ever since and had no opinions about ancient passages or three thousand year old signals because she was seven and the honey was excellent.

Cael appeared in the doorway.

He looked at the room full of people and the bread and the honey and Aldric at the stove and Elias at the table and Lyra sitting against the wall with her eyes slightly unfocused in the way that said the restoration was still completing in the background.

"My father wants to know if there's enough for two more," Cael said.

"There's enough," Aldric replied.

Cael disappeared.

Elias looked at the kitchen. His mother's three cups on the shelf. The cracked tile by the window. The dim corner that never quite got enough light. Everything exactly the same as it had always been and completely different simultaneously because the people around the table had never all been in the same room before and now they were and the weight of that was the specific kind of weight that didn't feel like weight at all.

Mira appeared in the doorway where Cael had been.

She had her notebook open already.

"There's a three thousand year old passage beneath your kitchen," she said to Elias.

"There's a three thousand year old passage beneath the oldest building in Stormborn," Elias corrected. "Which is not my kitchen."

"Close enough," Mira replied, already writing.

"Are you going to eat or document?" Elias asked.

"Both," she replied, sitting down and not looking up from the notebook.

Cassel appeared behind her, older than the version Elias had met in the corridor outside his father's room, older than the version in the threshold memories, just a man in a doorway looking at a kitchen full of people with the expression of someone who had made a long series of terrible decisions and was trying to locate the specific moment they had stopped being terrible.

He looked at Cael sitting at the table.

Cael looked back at him.

Neither of them said anything.

Then Cael moved one chair over and Cassel sat down and Aldric put food in front of both of them without comment and that was apparently enough for now.

Aldric sat at the head of the table.

Elias looked at his father sitting at the head of the table that had held one untouched cup of tea for seventeen mornings and thought about the first night and the forty three steps and the twelve percent survival probability and thought about how far the table had come from that.

"The passage," Aldric said. "We need to discuss it."

"After breakfast," Elias replied.

"Elias," Aldric said.

"You said eat first," Elias replied. "We're eating."

Aldric looked at him for a moment.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

Not quite a smile but close enough that Cara noticed and looked at Brennan and Brennan looked at Soli and Soli was still eating her honey and had no opinion about anything.

"Fine," Aldric said. "After breakfast."

They ate.

It was the specific kind of meal that happens after impossible things, where nobody talks about the impossible things because they are too present to need mentioning and too enormous to fit into breakfast conversation, and everyone eats and passes bread and pours water and exists in the same space and lets that be enough for twenty minutes.

Soli finished her honey and looked at Elias.

"The mark is different," she said.

"Yes," Elias replied.

"It used to be scary," she said. "Not to me. But it felt scary. Like it was carrying something too heavy." She looked at his wrist. "Now it just feels like you."

Elias looked at the small gold tinged mark on his wrist.

"Yes," he said quietly. "That's about right."

Soli nodded like that confirmed something and went back to her bread.

Lyra's eyes focused.

She looked at the table and at the people around it and at the bread and the honey and the three cups on the shelf and the cracked tile by the window and her expression did something that had no performance in it at all.

"Are you alright?" Elias asked quietly.

"Maren never had this," Lyra said. "A table full of people. Morning. Bread." She paused. "She had it before the trials. She remembers it. But she gave it up when she went into the dungeon and she never came back to it." She looked at the table. "I've been in a dungeon for sixty two years. I don't have a memory of a table like this that's mine." She paused. "Until now."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Cara pushed the honey toward her.

"It's good honey," Cara said simply.

Lyra looked at the honey.

Then at Cara.

Then she took the honey and Cara went back to her bread and that was apparently all that needed to happen.

The door opened.

Vane stood in the frame. Plain clothes, no insignia, the kind of deliberately unremarkable appearance that said a man who had been kingdom military for thirty years was trying very hard to look like he wasn't.

He looked at the table full of people.

"Drell is in custody," he said. "Kingdom military took him this morning. I have enough documentation to keep him there permanently." He looked at Elias. "The exposure you and your arcanist friend put together combined with what I've been holding for thirty years." He paused. "It's done."

"Thank you," Elias said.

Vane looked at him for a moment. "Don't thank me. I'm doing this for my own reasons."

"I know," Elias replied. "Thank you anyway."

Vane looked at the table one more time with the expression of a man who had spent thirty years making terrible decisions and was standing at the edge of making different ones and wasn't sure yet what that felt like.

Then he left.

Aldric put his cup down.

"The passage," he said.

"Yes," Elias replied. "The passage."

"Something three thousand years old is moving toward us through it," Aldric said. "Weeks away. Maybe less." He looked at his son. "We have time to prepare but not much of it and we don't know what we're preparing for."

"We know what it isn't," Elias said. "The system said it's not hostile. It's a consequence. It's answering a signal."

"The system also withheld information about the absorption for six trials," Lyra said from across the table.

"Fair point," Elias replied.

"We need more information," Mira said without looking up from her notebook. "The ancient chamber. The first architect's records. Whatever the passage between has left in the dungeon foundation over three thousand years of proximity." She looked up. "I need access to all of it."

"You have it," Elias said.

"I need your mark," she said. "The woman's presence in the foundation. She knows things about the first architect that nothing else does."

"You can't have my mark," Elias replied. "But you can ask questions and I'll relay the answers."

Mira looked at him. "That's inefficient."

"That's the offer," Elias replied.

She went back to her notebook. "Fine."

Cassel cleared his throat.

Everyone looked at him.

He looked at the table. "I have twenty years of documentation on the dungeon system. Every trial. Every ability. Every threshold the architect built." He paused. "Some of it the architect didn't know I had. Things I documented from sources he didn't know I had access to." He held Elias's gaze. "It might be useful."

"It might," Elias agreed.

"I'd like to help," Cassel said. "If that's something that's possible."

Cael looked at his father without expression.

Cassel looked back at his son.

"It's possible," Elias said. "We'll discuss what it looks like."

Cassel nodded once and went back to his food.

Aldric looked at his son across the table.

"Weeks," he said quietly.

"Yes," Elias replied.

"To prepare for a three thousand year old answer to a question we didn't ask," Aldric said.

"Yes," Elias said.

"Where do we start?" Aldric asked.

Elias looked at the mark on his wrist and felt the woman's presence in the foundation layer and thought about the first architect building an entire system to send a warning back through the passage between and thought about the something still coming moving toward a signal sent by people who had been dead for three millennia.

He looked at the table full of people who had survived impossible things and were eating bread and honey in a kitchen in Stormborn on a gold morning in June.

"We start here," he said. "With what we have. With who we have." He looked around the table. "The first architect built dungeons alone. We don't have to."

The table was quiet for a moment.

Then Soli looked up from her bread.

"Can I help?" she asked.

"Yes," Elias replied.

"Good," she said, and went back to eating.