It was fascinating to watch.
Before my transformation, I had been only peripherally aware of magic — able to feel it in certain moments, never able to see it. Now I could see it, smell it, hear the particular quality it produced in the air when someone was actively working it. The full range of senses, opened all at once, and still not entirely familiar.
Zaren's magic gathered in his palm with a slowness that suggested deliberate control despite his current state — threads of it forming and organising themselves with a precision that seemed almost to operate independently of his compromised focus. The threads found the engraved lines in the door and moved through them, tracing each channel to its end, filling the circuit like water finding its level. When the last line was complete, a soft, clean click sounded from somewhere inside the door's frame.
He turned to look at me.
His face was flushed a deep red, his eyes heavy-lidded and slow. And his expression said, with a clarity that required no words whatsoever: 'did you see that? Am I not impressive?'
I looked at him for a moment, then let out a small sigh alongside my smile.
"Very well done," I said, with as much warmth as I could honestly offer.
He smiled — and it was slightly shy, the smile of someone who doesn't entirely know what to do with a compliment delivered sincerely. It was so different from every version of him I had encountered during the day that I found myself genuinely disarmed by it.
The sober Reichert was cold, exacting, and deliberate. The evening Zaren was looser, more present, more human. And the drunk version of him was something else again.
'Cute,'I thought, reluctantly.
'Adorable' was perhaps the more accurate word, but I was not going to think it twice.
---
He pushed the door open slowly, the hinges producing a long, unhurried creak, and the room beyond came into view.
My senses registered it before my eyes did.
Salt air — ocean salt, clean and immediate, as though the sea itself had been invited inside. And light: the quality of morning light, sharp and new, coming through the windows at an angle that bore no relation to the evening we had left behind in the corridor.
I stopped in the doorway.
The room was considerably larger than the exterior of the inn had any right to account for — three or four times what a standard room would have been, with ceilings high enough that the chandelier hanging at their centre looked proportionate rather than grand. The bed occupied the entire left wall, large enough to be absurd, dressed in silk with gold embroidery on the covers and a dark oak canopy above. On the right side, bookshelves ran from floor to mid-ceiling, completely full and — I noticed after a moment — meticulously organised. Every shelf was labelled. Every volume was placed with the alignment of someone for whom disorder is a physical irritant.
A large oak desk occupied the far right corner, its surface hosting ink bottles, feather pens, and a stack of parchments arranged with the same fastidious precision as the shelves. Nothing out of place anywhere in the room. Not one surface carelessly occupied.
And directly opposite the door, beyond the enormous bed, a row of wide windows stood fully open to the outside.
The salt smell was coming from there.
I crossed the room without fully deciding to, drawn by the light and the air, and looked out.
The view stopped me completely.
It was not Arpa outside those windows. It was not Selon, or any landscape I recognised. A steep hillside fell away below the sill to a jagged line of rocks far beneath, where dark water crashed in heavy, rhythmic waves that broke against the stone and pulled back and broke again. The light outside was morning light — early, angled, the particular gold of a sun still finding its height. The sky was a clean pale blue without a cloud in it.
Wherever this was, it was thousands of miles from the inn we had entered.
"Impressive, isn't it?" His voice came from behind me, closer than I expected.
I turned slightly. He had moved to the bedside table, poured water from a jug there, and was sipping it with the care of someone trying to assist their own recovery. His eyes were still heavy, but there was more awareness in them than before.
I couldn't quite find words, so I made a sound of agreement instead.
"The western Kingdom of Furha," he said, coming to stand beside me at the window, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him. "Its eastern shores. The place is called Old Bay. It's where my home is." He looked out at the water for a moment. "It's morning there now — the next day has already begun for them, while we're still finishing the previous one. They'll be starting their work while we're about to sleep." He paused, something soft and tired moving through his voice. "Strange, isn't it?"
The melancholy was quiet but present — the particular ache of someone who has been away from home long enough that the distance has become physical.
He had built a window to his home inside a locked room in a foreign city. Just so he could look at it every day.
Something in my chest shifted at the thought. Not pity — something closer to recognition.
I looked at the waves breaking on the rocks below, and the morning light lying flat across the water, and felt the homesickness arrive in me without warning — sudden and disproportionate, the way it always was when something else triggered it.
Draga. The cold, the pale skies, the particular quality of the light there, the sound of wind through stone corridors. The people who wanted me dead. The home I could return to in a single moment and didn't, because I couldn't trust what I would find.
The longing that had been a small, manageable ember in my chest all these weeks flared up without warning, briefly enormous.
"I miss home too," I said. Not to him, exactly. More to the window, to the water, to whatever part of myself had decided now was the time to say it out loud.
He didn't respond. Whether he hadn't heard it or had chosen not to engage with it, I couldn't tell.
After a moment I heard the quiet sound of him setting the cup down, and then the soft displacement of the bed as he lay back. I turned from the window.
He was already horizontal, murmuring something too low to catch — and then the magic began, a warm flush of rose-pink spreading across him in the manner of something well-practised and automatic. His clothes shifted to something softer, looser, better suited to sleep. The cleaning spell followed, equally swift. He appeared to have entirely checked out of the evening.
I walked to the door and let myself back into the ordinary hallway of the Silver Coin Inn, taking one last look back at him before I pulled the door closed.
"Good night, Mister Zaren."
Silence. He didn't stir. I began to ease the door shut.
Then his voice came — barely above a whisper, arriving just as the gap between the door and its frame narrowed to nothing.
"Good night to you too, Ai—"
The door closed.
I stood in the corridor and looked at the wood in front of me.
The word had been cut off. I had caught everything before it and nothing of what came after. Just the beginning of something — a name, or a word, or something else entirely — that had slipped out in the unguarded space between waking and sleep.
I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to.
'I missed something important,' I thought, and couldn't explain why I was so certain of it.