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‘Is it impolite, and forgive me if it is,’ the half-orc says, ‘to ask how many years you’ve been through the beacon?’
And Essek – unthinkably, impossibly – tells the truth.
‘Interestingly enough,’ he begins, and means to say while I am consecuted, I am on my first life. That is what the Umavi has instructed him to say; it is what he has told everyone who has asked for the last few decades. Until now, when his tongue reaches for the words, and freezes.
Essek frowns. Blinks. Tries again. His lips shape silent syllables, and his mind backlashes as if it has plunged into a psychic wall. For the first time since Essek was old enough to grasp the concept of deception, he cannot lie.
So he says, ‘I am not, in fact, consecuted.’
And instantly despises himself. If he had just held himself together long enough to think, he could have come up with some a way to maintain the ruse. He should have said while I have been through the consecution ritual, and left out the part where it failed. But coming up with that delicate dance around the truth would have taken another second, and he’d already been silent for too long, and his companions were starting to stare.
Besides. He was rather preoccupied with reeling from the realisation: one of these people is his soulmate.
There is no lying to your soulmate. There is no lying to anyone, when your soulmate can hear the words.
‘Oh.’ The half-orc looks the slightest bit abashed. Apologetic, even, waiting to be reprimanded for a faux-pas. ‘I’m sorry if that was intrusive. We’re not all that familiar with the, uh, customs here.’
You have no idea, Essek thinks, but he dips his head and smiles in what he hopes reads as a gracious acceptance of the apology. He could happily throw the half-orc into a gravity fissure, but the man does not know what he has just revealed. It is not his fault. It is not his fault that Essek has been forced into the truth. It is not his fault that the Umavi must never know.
Essek’s breathing is quickening. He forces it back into a rhythm, feigning composure he doesn't feel. His mother cannot know. If the Mighty Nein spoke of this to anyone, and it made its way to the other Dens, then – well. Essek does not particularly care about the shame it would bring to Den Thelyss. But he cares a little more about the mockery and scorn that would follow; he’s soaked up more than his share already, thanks to his youth and his soul’s newness. He's used to the Dens' taunts, of course. But even a tolerance to poison will not make poison taste any sweeter in your mouth.
And then there would be his mother's rage, about which Essek cares a great deal. He should not care about it. She does not deserve for him to care about it. He cares anyway.
‘I am comparably young within my Den,’ he says at last. ‘Only partway into my second century. Those as young as myself are rarely given a gift as –’ He has to stop, again because he was going to say generous, and the Dens do not act from generosity, and Essek cannot lie – ‘as significant as consecution to one so young. And to answer your question, I take no offence myself, but I should warn you that discussion of another’s soul-status is considered very personal by most here in the Dynasty.’
There. That will do. It makes it sound as if his lack of consecution is the natural result of his youth; they will not think him inept, or a pariah. They will not suspect the truth about his ritual's failure. Most importantly, it will check them from blabbing about the truth he has blurted out.
(The Umavi cannot know.)
The human man, the one who held up the beacon, is watching him narrowly. ‘That is understandable. It must be a great honour.’
To say yes would be a lie. Essek tries to nod, and his neck refuses to bend. His own flesh is beyond his control – and there’s little he’d like more, right now, than to teleport home, find a quiet corner, and scream.
Instead, Essek clenches his fists beneath his cloak until they shake and says, ‘It is certainly not entrusted to many.’
To his relief, he is not forced into any further truths as they continue through the streets. Despite his float, he feels off-balance; despite his cloak, he feels naked, and seeing them off at the tavern is like having his lungs unblocked. He hovers outside once the door has closed, murmuring random, pointless untruths under his breath just to check that he can.
So much for the romantic Dynasty fairytales about the blessings of finding a soulmate. This is agonising.
More than that: it is dangerous. Essek should never go near these people again. He should forget every plan to keep them close. And he most certainly should not give a single thought to which one of them might be responsible for his current panic. He should not wonder which of them is his soulmate.
He already knows that he will do all these things.
Of course, Essek thinks later, back in his home, upending a bottle of wine into a glass and huffing out a bitter laugh. Of course the consecution ritual would fail in every respect but this.
He has never bought into the romanticising of soulmates. They are such shameless hypocrites, his Denmates, echoing the Luxon's priests with too-sweet smiles. Jabbering platitudes about how Luxon blesses the consecuted with a chosen partner or partners, intertwining their fates so irrevocably that they cannot lie to each other. In a world of endless potential timelines, the Luxon grants us the greatest gift of all: a point of certainty.
In the light, the Dens praise the Luxon’s gift of truth. Behind closed doors, they lie, and make liars of their children. Essek should know.
He takes a too-fast sip, taking a savage pleasure in how it burns his throat. It would be a lie (oh, how ironic), to say that he had never considered what it would be like, finding a soulmate. Someone whose love would never be conditional. Whose love would not be be withheld, like the Umavi’s, or lost, like his father’s, or beaten away by stress and distance and the weight of expectations, like Verin’s.
It would also be a lie to say that the idea had sat easy with him. When he traded away the beacons, a voice in his head whispered, perhaps there will be no more soulmates, perhaps you will never find yours - and it spoke with relief, not regret. Deception is a hundred-year-old instinct, a well-worn piece of armour, a defence Essek never wanted to have stripped away.
His lips curl. He should have expected this. When have his wants ever mattered to anyone but himself?
Essek regards his wine, then downs the entire glass in a single swig. It's an irony so cruel that it feels inevitable, that even a failed ritual should leave him with this. He has a soulmate in one of the Mighty Nein – and they have already laid him barer than he can stomach. He has a soulmate, and he must manipulate them and use them. He has someone whom he cannot lie to, and he must deceive them.
He has someone he might be happy with, and he tore that chance asunder three years ago, when he slipped two Beacons into his wristpocket and teleported away to the Empire.
Essek stares into his empty glass, both his throat and his eyes stinging. He’d always thought that if the miracle happened, if he found his soulmate, it would mean an end to feeling alone.
One of the Mighty Nein is Essek’s soulmate, and he feels lonelier than ever.
It doesn’t stay a mystery. Essek knows who it is, really, from the moment a translucent cat paw flexes before him in the middle of the street.
He’s been keeping an eye on all three of the men. Not that he could entirely rule out the others; soulmates are often platonic, and Essek is a stranger to attraction. He’s never quite understood the unspoken codes and invisible magnetisms taking place around him. But he has always felt that he could feel that way, and that if he did, it would be about a man. If it was the right time. If Essek had the time and space to get close, and let the feelings grow.
Which he doesn’t. It’s academic, pointless, looking between Fjord and Caleb and Caduceus and wondering which of you -? But he does it anyway, just like he bothers to mentally cross Caduceus off the list when he stands outside the Nein’s new home without Caduceus in earshot, and finds himself unable to say I’m not too familiar with this neighbourhood.
A few minutes later, Essek discovers that Caleb Widogast’s idea of ‘the height of your power’ is Bigby’s Hand, cast in the shape of a cat’s paw.
And it’s wonderful. It’s charming, it’s quirky, it’s pointlessly creative in all the ways Essek’s peers in the Dynasty have never been. It’s magic invented for the joy of it, and Essek’s lips peel back into a grin.
Still, he's ready for time spent with this man - time in which he cannot lie - to be a constant torture. And it isn’t. It’s easy. It’s the easiest time he has passed in a hundred and twenty years. Because Caleb loves the magic that Essek loves. Caleb speaks of things that Essek cares about, and listens when Essek speaks about them too. Caleb considers him someone worth learning from, and he does not look at Essek’s spellwork with scathing disinterest because Essek is young and on his first life. ‘An even weaker wizard than I am,’ he calls the Resonant Echo, and Essek smiles and leans in and says ‘Don’t tell it that.’ And suddenly he has an in-joke with someone, and Caleb is grinning, and it’s –
It’s what a soulmate really is, of course. It's not a stranger, picked out by some arbitrary whim of fate. It's someone around whom you can live your own truth, day after day.
He can't be certain that it's Caleb. But if it isn’t, then to be honest (hah), he’s tempted to live out the plot of every awful novel he read as a teenager and say that he chooses Caleb anyway, and damn what the Luxon says. But he can't chose Caleb, because Essek is guilty of high treason, and he is deceiving the Mighty Nein every day without telling a single lie, and because this will not last.
This will end. Quite possibly in violence.
So Essek never tries to make sure. He never tries to get Caleb alone and tell him a harmless lie, just to see if his tongue freezes. It’s better not to know. It’s better not to fool himself that these delicious, honest hours could be his future.
Until, that is, the desire to fool himself becomes overwhelming.
He’s sitting with Frumpkin on his lap and his friends on every side, listening to Jester conjecture about consecution, and the logistics of loved ones returning from the dead. ‘Does it not transfer,’ she asks, ‘that sort of emotional feeling? Like, you're star-crossed lovers for all time, or do you, like –’
‘Reset,’ Fjord supplies.
‘It –’ Essek begins, then says, ‘Ah,’ and stops. This is dangerous territory. Talking about loved ones and consecution means talking about soulmates, and that will create the inevitable do you have a soulmate question from Jester, which will necessitate all kinds of awkward truth-dodging. ‘These are not matters I've conjectured too often, but there are individuals that have relationships that span multiple lifetimes. And of course, there is the matter of soulmates.’
Jester’s eyes stretch wide. ‘Soulmates?’
‘It is something that only occurs among the consecuted. According the the priesthood, it's -' Essek scratches quotation marks in the air - 'a bond, or several, that transcends all other emotional connections that the individual will form in their lifetime. Supposedly, when such people meet, the Luxon makes the certainty of this bond manifest itself physically. A consecuted soul cannot lie to their soulmate.’
‘Not at all? Like, not even a little bit? What about white lies, or just, you know, leaving out the truth?’
‘Well, I’m not bound to a beacon myself, so…’ Essek smiles and waves a hand, letting the (untrue) implication of I have no first-hand experience hang in the air. ‘I believe soulmates can omit the truth when speaking to each other, yes. It is only the speaking of deliberate untruths that is impossible.’
‘So basically it's like my Zone of Truth spell. Basically.'
‘Indeed. You may congratulate yourself, Jester: you can create with a simple incantation a state that many in the Dynasty go centuries longing to achieve.’
Jester grins, and Essek smiles back. ‘To return to your original question – yes, such soulmate bonds often continue across multiple lifetimes. I’ve heard of these relationships failing due to circumstance, and in those cases, the consecuted individual sometimes finds another soulmate, but –’
Beau cuts across him. ‘So if you got yourself consecuted, you might just run into someone one day and be like, fuck, I can't lie to them?'
'And you wouldn't get a say in it?' Yasha adds. 'They would be chosen for you. You would just sort of meet them and know that they were going to be your life partner.'
‘Romantically or platonically, yes.’
‘Well, fuck,’ Beau says, and Yasha frowns, and Jester breathes, ‘whoah.’
Essek should do absolutely anything, in this moment, except glance at Caleb. But of course he does, and of course Caleb is watching him with the usual silent intensity – and there’s a jolt through Essek's skin. It's pleasurable, if mildly terrifying.
‘That must be weird, though, right?’ Fjord says. ‘I mean, I know you haven’t been through it yourself yet –’ Essek wills his face to remain neutral – ‘But feeling like you have to love someone –’
‘It never did sit quite right with me. The idea of something so important being predestined always felt like... coercion.’
(So why does he not feel coerced now? While he studies how Caleb's hair is outlined in gold by the lanternlight, and thinks that he could love this man, given time?
Maybe because the soulmate bond is irrelevant, in the end. There’s no future for Essek to be forced into. Caleb is not consecuted. Caleb is Essek’s soulmate, but there is no timeline in which Essek is his. Which means that getting close to Caleb isn’t lying down and letting fate choose for him: it’s obstinacy, defiance, looking the inevitable heartbreak in the eye and saying I want this closeness anyway.)
‘Do you want it?’ Caleb says quietly. ‘To be consecuted? To have a chance of finding this partner?’
‘I don’t know, honestly. I never gave it much thought for much of my life. It always seemed so unlikely.’
Jester screws up her face. ‘Why, though? Do you think there’s not going to be anyone out there who’d love you?’
I hardly have a history of being loved, Essek thinks. Out loud, he says, ‘Perhaps. As I said, I haven’t let anyone get all that close in… ever, really.’
Jester slams her cup of milk down on the table. ‘Essek. You will definitely have a soulmate. You help us all the time, and you know all the magic –’ Is he imagining her eyes flicking over towards Caleb? – ‘And you’re super handsome, and we think you’re the shit.’
Essek swallows, struggles for a response, and settles on, ‘Thank you, Jester.’
She beams at him and sips her milk. So utterly certain in her words, so certain that he could be loved.
Essek almost believes her.
He tries to lie to Jester at the party in Nicodranas, while Caleb cannot hear. And promptly learns that it is near-impossible to lie to someone you love, even when you don’t have fate forcing your tongue.
(He imagines what it would have been like if he’d ever told Jester about his soulmate. Before this. She would have gasped, ‘Oh. My. Gods,’ and called it the most romantic thing ever. She’d have asked who it was, and maybe he’d have told her, and they’d have whispered about it like siblings.
Essek's limbs lock in place, Jester tugs him outside, and he takes a moment to mourn that never-to-be future.)
So he goes to the ship with them, and the next few minutes are numb, except for the warmth of Jester’s hand and Caleb’s lips. ‘We're going to need a certain amount of honesty going forward,’ Caduceus says, and Essek feels an awful urge to laugh.
But they do not kill him. They do not turn him into the Bright Queen. They call him one of their own. And so, after, Essek sits alone and remembers all the times he has told himself, I could love Caleb Widogast.
Now he thinks, there is no could about it anymore.
The months pass. Things change. Essek grows.
He is alone with Caleb many times. He tries to tell a few innocuous lies and can’t, and it’s not a revelation. It’s not a decree. It’s only a gentle confirmation of something that was already there. Something that was in their candlelit study sessions where magic is shared freely, not exchanged for favours. In the castings of Fortune’s Favour, given to each other though they could easily give it to themselves. In the moments when one of them stops to adjust the other’s coat or scarf. In the moments when Caleb, leaning in to kiss Essek’s forehead again and again, is all it takes to make Essek believe that he can be better, and that it is worth trying.
Essek does not tell Caleb. He tells Jester, in the end, and she squeals and hugs him, and it’s wonderful – but he does not tell Caleb. Until, at last, he does.
They are in Essek's Magnificent Mansion – a conjured replica of the Xhorhaus - and they are gearing for their final strike against the Assembly. They have eaten and rested. They have made a plan that’s certain to fall apart within the first minute. They have gathered their spell components and made a list of the magics they need to bring to the fray. Now, as Essek emerges from his trance, he has nothing to do but wait for his friends to wake.
His head is full: battle strategies, emergency plans, worst-case scenarios. Essek grits his teeth and heads to the roof.
He’s made a copy of Caduceus’s tree there, because the roof wouldn’t be anywhere near so calming without it – just shorter, and covered with a roof of dark glass, because they cannot be open to the skies of the Astral Plane. The ceiling is engraved with starcharts, diagrams of magical leylines, all shimmering faintly to fill the room with a yellow-white glow.
Beneath that light, Caleb is sitting cross-legged on the floor, his spell components laid out before him in a phalanx of neat rows.
Pausing on the top step, Essek watches. Caleb’s hands dip into one of his satchels, bringing out iron dust, molasses, a lodestone, slotting them into gaps in the lines. He completes the row, draws out the pearl for Fortune's Favour, and rolls it between thumb and forefinger. Then he sets it down with the precision of a man performing delicate surgery. Without looking up, he says, ‘I like to have order.’
Essek nods, and picks his way around the lines to stand at Caleb’s side. ‘Have you slept?’
‘Enough. Not well, but enough.’ Caleb gestures to the rows before him. ‘I woke early to do this. I needed to make sure everything was ready, that everything is where it should be.’
‘Of course.’ Caleb does not seem to resent his presence, so Essek sits down next to him. ‘And it is. You have everything you need.' Including the things he can't lay out in rows to make sure are there. Like his friends’ support, or the fact that he is ten times the wizard and a hundred times the man that Ikithon will ever be.
Caleb swallows and looks away. ‘When I see that man again, I – I go a bit to pieces, sometimes, when I have too many memories in my head in a fight, and I–’ His hands stray to the platinum cord he uses to cast Tether Essence, scooping it up, twirling it around his fingers. ‘I won't be the wizard you know. I will just be throwing fire at them, and you need more than that from me. You need me to be able to think. I am the one who pushed us all towards fighting the Assembly, and I'm an asshole, asking you all to die for me –’
'You really think we need to be asked? Please, Caleb. We are the Mighty Nein. Respect us enough to know that we'd die for each other of our own free will.’
The bond lets him say it. The bond lets him call himself one of the Mighty Nein. Essek presses his lips together to hide the smile.
‘You should be consecuted, my friend.’ Caleb lets the thread slip through his fingers and unravel into a spool on the floor. ‘You should have more than the one life you’re risking for my sake. Your achievements should have earned you that honour from your Den, not shame and loneliness.'
‘I can think of nothing better to do with that one life than risk it for my friends,’ Essek says. And then, because he’s tired of trying to hide from Caleb, ‘Besides, they – they did give me that honour. Or they tried to.’
‘You refused?’
‘The ritual failed. Why, I don’t know.’ Essek’s lungs are tight. He grips the hem of his cloak and holds fast. ‘My mother could not acknowledge such a shame, so… I was commanded to lie. I didn’t argue: I was respected a little more as a consecuted soul, and I enjoyed that. No one knows that when I die, it will stick. Except for you and our friends.’
Caleb is still for a moment. Processing, Essek thinks. Then he frowns, the way he frowns when presented with the equation for a new spell. ‘Perhaps it failed because of your reluctance to be involved with an entity whose intentions you weren't sure of. A lot of magical effects don't work if they're not cast on a willing creature.’
‘A good point.’ Essek smiles, and it isn’t forced. Sitting alone with Caleb and discussing the mechanics of the arcane is familiar. Soothing. He releases his death-grip on his cloak.
‘But you told us the truth,’ Caleb says, ‘that day you met us.’
Essek nods, slowly. He could leave it at that, he thinks, and Caleb would not press him. But Caleb has been lied to enough, by too many people, and Essek stopped wanting to be one of them a long time ago.
‘I did. I had no other choice.’
The room is quiet. There’s no breeze to stir the tree. Essek swallows, stares at the floor, and waits for Caleb to piece it together. Which he will, because he is Caleb.
‘I thought,’ Caleb says at last, ‘you had to be consecuted for that.’
‘Well, I was put through the ritual. My soul will not be brought back upon my death, but apparently I was still affected enough for… certain other effects.’
‘So – one of us –’
‘I’ve never lied to you.’ Essek clasps his hands tight together, because he cannot let them shake. ‘I’ve misled and dissembled and concealed, but I was never able to lie. Not to you, Caleb.’
Caleb is still for a few moments. Essek does not look up, because he does not think he could stomach whatever might be on Caleb’s face – and when Caleb speaks again, it’s with something in his voice that Essek can’t name. A tremor. A brittleness. It might be sorrow, and it might be fear. Either, at least, is better than disgust. ‘I’m sorry.’
Of course. He is sorry that Essek must live with a bond that cannot be returned. Only Caleb would apologise for such a thing, and Essek smiles despite the ache that’s thick in his throat and his heart. ‘You have nothing to apologise for.’
‘No, I –’ Caleb’s voice cracks, and Essek looks up at him, alarmed. ‘You said – ages ago – that you weren’t comfortable with this. This bond from the Luxon. That it felt like coercion. I’m sorry to have –’
‘You have done nothing. This is mine to carry, Caleb. You aren’t consecuted; you’re not part of this… contract with the Luxon. I have never felt coerced. I have never had any feeling that I was locked into some ordained future, because I betrayed you even before I met you. I was so sure our friendship would end before long. I never fooled myself into thinking that there could be a future in which –’
You love me, he thinks, but his lips won’t make the words. It’s not the bond stopping him, only his own cowardice.
‘And if there were?’
Essek stares at him. Looks away. Then stares again.
‘If there were a possibility,’ Caleb says, very quietly. ‘If that future could exist – would you want it, Essek? Or would you feel that it had happened against your will?’
Essek feels very numb, and very aware of everything, at once. He licks his lips, breathes in, and says, ‘Do you remember – this isn’t a digression, I promise – when Beauregard asked me if I had ever scryed on you while you were changing?’
Caleb’s lips flicker into a smile. ‘You said you had no interest in such things.’
‘I didn't lie. I couldn't have. I don’t have interest in such things, really, not without time to – to get close, to learn a person, to build something.’ His voice is more or less steady; good. ‘When I realised I couldn’t lie to you, I could have backed away. I could have ignored the bond, and never spent enough time in your company to allow anything to grow. But I did.' He meets Caleb’s eyes at last. ‘I have drifted through most of my life with my eyes wilfully shut to my own actions and to their consequences. But this, I walked towards with eyes open.’
Seconds pass. Caleb fiddles with his scarf, then says, ‘And has it been time enough?’
‘For what?’
‘You need time to care about someone in that way. Has it been time enough?’
And at last Essek realises what that brittle tone in Caleb’s voice is. It’s hope.
So he says, ‘Yes.’
Silence, again. Essek waits.
Caleb lets out a breath. Then he leans in and clasps Essek’s face in both hands, and Essek ducks his head, waiting for the forehead kiss that’s so familiar to him now.
Instead, there’s a warm pressure against his lips.
And Caleb is tucking one finger under Essek’s chin and tilting his head up, and he is running another finger over Essek's nape. His lips are warm, and his body is close, and it’s soft and unfamiliar and terrifying, and Essek isn’t certain that he recognises himself in this man who’s smiling into a kiss with his soulmate –
And yet it feels so obvious. Like this was the only place they could ever have been going. Like unmoored objects pulled to earth by gravity. Not because of a divine command, but because Essek chose this, and he will choose Caleb again and again, and the idea of a universe where he does not choose Caleb is unthinkable.
So he draws Caleb in again, and again. Then he rests their foreheads together and lets the quiet last.
Caleb doesn’t say anything when, after a few moments, he moves back. He only smiles, and he still doesn’t speak as he and Essek gather up the array of spell components and return them to Caleb’s bag. But there’s no more fear in Caleb's eyes as they head downstairs. He stands a little taller, lifts his chin a little higher, smiles at odd moments.
He does not say, it’s been time enough for me to love you too. But if he did, Essek knows, it would be the truth.