Fic: Happy Holidays From The Forces of Darkness
Summary: As the solstice approaches, an employee at the Fortress of Evil gets into the holiday spirit.
Notes: This is a snippet of holiday-themed quirky miniboss squad domestic fluff. Thanks to pukingtoreador and Levi for their feedback.
Warnings: work safe, brief references to human sacrifice and substance abuse, incomplete and ends rather abruptly.
“I can’t believe it!” Lalitsya ranted, “It’s a month until the Solstice, and we haven’t started any preparations for Longest Dark! Doesn’t anyone in this blasted fortress have any holiday spirit?”
“I would be most happy to oblige you,” replied Madhumakhi, who was seated in the corner of the room preparing a vat of meat scraps for her scorpions, “but I have no idea how you northerners do this sort of thing. Where I come from the big seasonal holidays are all around the start of the rainy season. Which makes things rather awkward when the first storm comes late and all the flowers people bought in advance start wilting. Not that this is an issue right here, since I haven’t seen anything green outside the glasshouses that wasn’t from a conifer or bread gone off in weeks.” Madhumakhi gave a little wistful sigh.
Lalitsya’s education had been thorough, but not universally broad, and she knew more about the inscrutable realms her pets came from than she did of mundane geography. She had worked with Madhumakhi since Lalitsya herself started plying her trade at the Obsidian Fortress, and she still didn’t know much about the culture of the other woman’s homeland. She knew quite a few of Maddie’s personal quirks, but that wasn’t necessarily a representation of what was normal over there. After all, Madhumakhi had to have left for a reason, and if there was any country within the known world where raising giant hornets was a popular pastime, Lalitsya was sure she would have heard of it by now. Geography wasn’t her best subject, but she had a good memory for offbeat information.
Lalitsya’s train of thought was interrupted by a soft scuttling noise coming from the ceiling. She looked up. “Honestly, Skitters, don’t you realize it’s not smart to sneak up on people in a place like this? What if you’d surprised one of the guards, or something like that?” There was no reply, but the shuffling on the ceiling progressed to Madhumakhi’s end of the room.
“Why, hello there,” Madhumakhi said, with rather more warmth than Lalitsya had used. “What brings you down here? No, sorry, you don’t want to eat that, it already has the pheromones and nutrient supplements mixed in, and you know they don’t agree with you. But how about this?” Madhumakhi picked up a mutton bone from her basin of leftovers that had not yet been converted into scorpion chow and chucked it at the ceiling above her head. It didn’t come down. Madhumakhi returned to her work with all appearance of contentment, and no visible apprehension regarding the unseen carnivore lurking over her head. A few minutes passed, and the patch of shadow over Madhumakhi’s work table gave a few soft, reproachful chitters, which ceased when the woman tossed up a couple of ribs.
For someone who apparently devoured the bones as well as the flesh, Lalitsya thought, Skitters ate awfully quietly. She would have suspected a few crunching noises at least. But then, she wasn’t entirely certain that Skitters had teeth. He tended to stick to the less well-lit corners of the fortress, and despite being friendly in his way, wasn’t one to get close to people. And that was assuming that there was only one of him - and that he was male, for that matter. It was a bit of a blow to one’s professional pride as an expert in exotic life forms to live with a creature for over a year and still have no positive identification of his sex, species, or even phylum. All she knew for sure, apart from his love of meaty bones, was that he wasn’t something their boss had summoned within the past few decades - people in Lalitsya’s profession had a sense for these sorts of things, and Skitters’s energy signatures had nothing otherworldly about them.
Contemplating the weird biology of one’s house mates was all well and good, but the practical problems at hand still hadn’t been addressed. “Hey, Maddie. Do you think Skitters would let us dress him up for Longest Dark? I don’t know if any of the festive hats would fit, but I could at least put some ribbons around his neck. Wouldn’t that be adorable?” At this suggestion there was a burst of indignant chirps and hisses from the ceiling over Madhumakhi.
Madhumakhi rolled her eyes and looked up at her companion. “It was just a suggestion, Skits. Nobody’s going to force you to do anything, hiding out in the barn to preserve your dignity will not be necessary. And why are you so upset anyway? It’s only a few ribbons.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Lalitsya said to herself, but added, “Would he be willing to help put the decorations up? He knows the ceilings better than any of us, and it would save a lot of messing about with ladders.” A resounding silence from above greeted this suggestion. Lalitsya had no idea whether this signified a less vehement degree of indignation, or a refusal to dignify the idea with a response.
“Do you think you could get the rest of the girls to help you?” Madhumakhi asked. “I am, of course, very willing, but someone who actually grew up with the holiday might have more useful ideas. I don’t even know what the traditional menu is, except that there are parsnips involved, and those little round cabbage things, and too much roast meat so everyone lives on hash and sandwiches for a week afterwards.”
“You forgot the sweets, but that’s the basic principle. See, you’ve picked up more than you think you have.”
“I still think you should ask everyone else. If this holiday is that important, they might have ideas of their own, and you don’t want any irate assassins trying to hunt you down and murder you for ruining their Longest Dark.”
“Point taken.” All the women who worked at the fortress were such good friends that Lalitsya sometimes forgot the sort of people they were in their professional capacities. But then, most of them, besides Maddie and her ubiquitous arthropod entourage, didn’t flaunt it. You’d never know Lalitsya was a Class Alpha-Three demon summoner if you met her in her time off. She reserved the red leather and chainmail evening dress with the brass corset and the thigh high boots for major summonings, when making the right impression was worth a little chafing. Demons respected a woman who dressed like a militarily inclined courtesan, but Lalitsya didn’t believe in torturing herself in order to impress every imp she talked to with her fashion sense. Bribery worked better with the little guys, anyway.
“Maddie, is there anything you want? It doesn’t need to be strictly traditional. We’re not exactly a normal household here, in any case.”
“If I think of something, I’ll be sure to tell you. Now, Skitters,” she said, turned towards the ceiling again, “I’m down to the last few ribs. Speak now or forever hold your peace.” Lalitsya couldn’t hear any reply, but Madhumakhi tossed up a bone anyway, and then resumed dismantling one of the few remaining ones. “You might as well start asking the others now - Chernobiya takes her lunch at about this time, so she should be free to talk at least. As soon as I finish up with this I’m going to be feeding my scorpions. The little ones don’t eat much, but Typhon and Echidna more than make up for it. I swear, sometimes I worry about their digestions, they bolt it down so fast…”
“Tell them bon appétit for me. Goodbye!” Lalitsya sensed that she was being urged to go and let Maddie get on with her work, so she left to look for any of her coworkers who might be in a position to make conversation. First - Chernobiya. Now where was that big girl?
Lunch. Right. Now, that didn’t solve the entire problem, since she could have taken something with her or had the kitchen send her something, but if the latter possibility was true, then Mrs. Aconite would know where she was, at least. The woman kept better track of her dishes and silver than some ministers of state kept track of their country’s secrets. And if she was eating in, she’d probably be using the informal dining room, unless she was eating with the guards in their mess. But that was a quarter mile away - longer but warmer and dryer if you took the tunnels - so Lalitsya decided to exhaust the nearest options first. Her current work shoes, while far more comfortable than the boots that went with her formal summoning outfit, weren’t made for tramping through the residue of an early blizzard.
Making her way to the kitchen from Madhumakhi’s workroom had two possible routes - three if you counted the experimental teleporter, but those always made Lalitsya sick to her stomach, which was the last thing you wanted before plunging into a warm steamy room that smelled like onion gravy. She could take a boat across the branch of artificial underground lake that extended around the back, or she could take the tunnels.
Both had their advantages and hazards. The lake was a shorter trip, and the lapping of the water was rather soothing, and one didn’t have to worry about some employee or escaped experiment with a malign sense of humor jumping out at one from around a corner, given the difficulty of performing such acts in open water. Unfortunately, the little boats, while picturesque, were not that easy to steer in Lalitsya’s experience, she knew nothing about their safety record, and being pounced on from under the water is just as bad as having it done from around a dark corner on dry land - and potentially much worse, if one adheres to the quaint custom of air breathing.
The primary attraction of the tunnels was a much lower risk of accidental drowning - there had been once incident with a guard and a very large puddle, but she’d been out of her skull on wine of wormwood at the time, and Mistress Daciana had been able to revive her eventually in any case. The primary disadvantages were the abundant unnecessarily convoluted branching paths that led to things like supply closets, and their popularity as a place for guards on a spree to sleep it off out of sight of their commanding officers. Not that Lalitsya was one of your mad-eyed temperance advocates or anything like that, but some of the guards could get a bit weird under the influence. Particularly the trolls. There was one otherwise promising young recruit who’d had a bad habit of licking Madhumakhi’s discarded lab glassware and cauldrons until her sergeant assigned her a patrol route that didn’t take her past the trash heaps. Hearing about the details from Maddie had left Lalitsya simultaneously impressed with the girl’s foolishness and her fortitude. She hadn’t known a person could survive ingesting some of those substances for long enough to get anything interesting out of the experience. (Which was probably true for humans, but in this day and age acting as if “human” and “person” were completely synonymous can get you into all manner of trouble, and not just from the wrath of people you’ve offended. Lalitsya remembered reading about the last Dark Lord but one before her boss, who remembered the existence of female soldiers and had the prophecy changed to “no human of woman born shall overthrow me.” The guy wound up getting stabbed by a goblin - and a male goblin at that. Is there any plague more painfully lethal than irony?)
Lalitsya chose the tunnels. She could use the extra time to think, and didn’t feel like wrestling with one of those strange little gondolas again. And talking to Chernobiya about holidays might require a little diplomacy.
“Sensitivity” was not a word one often used in connection with the big gray soldier. During Lalitsya’s acquaintance with her, she’d seen Chernobiya in four basic moods: exuberant cheerfulness, outspoken mild annoyance, boredom, and advanced inebriation. She’d seen Chernobiya doing sword practice in her underwear - the big girl had just arrived, and there had been no practice armor that fit her, since all the human equipment was too small and she wasn’t shaped like a troll - and shrug off the heaviest blows Captain Tiberia could hit her with as if the Captain had been wielding a feather duster instead of a well-constructed wooden sword. The woman’s idea of a “bracing winter punch” was undiluted pepper vodka heated with some spices and orange peel - and she drank it in pint mugs. But despite all this, Lalitsya decided it was better not to push superficial jollity too far, especially when you might be messing with feelings of someone who could throw you with one arm. She didn’t trust the cushioning power of the castle tapestries that much.
The heart of the problem was that Chernobiya was a Harbinger, and Lalitsya was, quite possibly, the only person in the fortress besides their boss who knew the full implications of this. And they were hardly cheerful. Judging by her appearance and energy signature, Chernobiya was a Nightbringer, and they tended to be created by people who were trying to bring about the end of the world, but didn’t have the raw magical power available to just blow it into the aether. Lalitsya didn’t believe in judging people by their religion - there were plenty of members of the Order of Eternal Light who were loving parents and good citizens, even if they could be awfully prejudiced against demons - but there was a part of her that couldn’t believe that doomsday cultists would make very good parents. Whether or not her parents had done their best, they clearly hadn’t been good enough for her, because the only reference Lalitsya had ever heard Chernobiya make to her childhood had been a story about running away at the age of nine to join the circus and performing in a strongman act. She hadn’t sounded overtly bitter at the time, but Lalitsya was wary of dredging up ancient issues with someone twice her size.
The air was growing warmer and even more humid, and the mosses and fungi were growing more thickly on the walls. Lalitsya knew she was approaching the kitchen. She heard a faint noise above her head that sounded like metal hitting the floor. Well, at least it wasn’t crockery. Tin plates were reasonably resilient, at least when put to their intended usage and not used as makeshift armor for practice dummies (Mrs. Aconite still twitched a little whenever anyone talked to her about new guard recruits.) As Lalitsya continued on her path, the air grew slightly cooler and drier, and she eventually found herself in the cheese cellar. She stopped to take a look at the progress of this summer’s experimental Double Cream Mammoth’s Milk (coming along nicely, from what she knew of cheese, although one of them was developing blue veins. Was this supposed to happen?) Lalitsya had hoped to be able to take the big dumbwaiter up to the kitchen and save herself the walk, but it was in use elsewhere and she had to take the steps up like an ordinary person.
Mrs. Aconite was elsewhere, leaving the kitchen to be supervised by Mandragora, the head kitchen maid. Lalitsya was a little relieved by this. Mrs. Aconite’s clairvoyance where her dishes were concerned could be useful, but the woman was rather intimidating to talk to even by a summoner’s standards. “Mandy! Just the woman I wanted to see!”
“Whatever it is, make it quick,” Mandragora replied. “We’re making strudel dough, and in about a minute and … oh, ten seconds, Olga is going to need to stand right where you are to stretch it.”
“Could you tell me where Chernobiya is?”
“Informal dining room. She settled down there with an oyster pie and a half-bottle of claret about five minutes ago.”
“Many thanks. And by the way, that sorrel-noodle thing you did last night was delicious.” And with that, Lalitsya hurried out. She’d seen what Mandy could do with a pastry roller.
Chernobiya was as Mandy had described her, and has obviously made serious inroads on both pie and bottle. She was also reading a novel with the title in curly writing on the cover and a picture of a woman in a low-cut dress holding an impractically large crossbow. Lalitsya was a little surprised by this, as she’d never thought of the other woman as much of a reader. She hoped that Chernobiya wasn’t at such an unbearably exciting part of the story that she wouldn’t tolerate an interruption.
“Hey, Chery.”
“Yes, darlin’?” Chernobiya put the book down with the handle of her fork stuck in the place where she’d left off.
“You know Longest Dark’s coming up, and I was wondering if you wanted to do anything special.”
“Hmmm… well, when I was little they always observed the solstice with human sacrifice and saffron cake, but I don’t think that would be practical here and now. I mean, we’d have to order the saffron, and unless we had it delivered by dragon courier or something like that there’d be no guarantee of it arriving early enough.”
“You have a point, especially with all the people ordering the ingredients for their pepper bread and black cake at the last minute. The spice traders must be swamped this time of year. Was there anything special you did with the circus?”
“Mysterion the Magnificent made angel toffee for all the children.”
“Was it made from real angels?”
“He claimed it was a secret family recipe. I never asked.”
“Do you remember the stuff glowing in dim light, or getting feathers stuck in your teeth?”
“No, it was a sort of pearly light pink color and had a texture like sticky meringue. Unless it had been really humid that year, in which case it could be used as carpenter’s glue. But even then, no feathers.”
“How’d it taste?”
“Very sweet and minty, with a faint spice aftertaste."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
And to all a good night!
Notes: This is a snippet of holiday-themed quirky miniboss squad domestic fluff. Thanks to pukingtoreador and Levi for their feedback.
Warnings: work safe, brief references to human sacrifice and substance abuse, incomplete and ends rather abruptly.
“I can’t believe it!” Lalitsya ranted, “It’s a month until the Solstice, and we haven’t started any preparations for Longest Dark! Doesn’t anyone in this blasted fortress have any holiday spirit?”
“I would be most happy to oblige you,” replied Madhumakhi, who was seated in the corner of the room preparing a vat of meat scraps for her scorpions, “but I have no idea how you northerners do this sort of thing. Where I come from the big seasonal holidays are all around the start of the rainy season. Which makes things rather awkward when the first storm comes late and all the flowers people bought in advance start wilting. Not that this is an issue right here, since I haven’t seen anything green outside the glasshouses that wasn’t from a conifer or bread gone off in weeks.” Madhumakhi gave a little wistful sigh.
Lalitsya’s education had been thorough, but not universally broad, and she knew more about the inscrutable realms her pets came from than she did of mundane geography. She had worked with Madhumakhi since Lalitsya herself started plying her trade at the Obsidian Fortress, and she still didn’t know much about the culture of the other woman’s homeland. She knew quite a few of Maddie’s personal quirks, but that wasn’t necessarily a representation of what was normal over there. After all, Madhumakhi had to have left for a reason, and if there was any country within the known world where raising giant hornets was a popular pastime, Lalitsya was sure she would have heard of it by now. Geography wasn’t her best subject, but she had a good memory for offbeat information.
Lalitsya’s train of thought was interrupted by a soft scuttling noise coming from the ceiling. She looked up. “Honestly, Skitters, don’t you realize it’s not smart to sneak up on people in a place like this? What if you’d surprised one of the guards, or something like that?” There was no reply, but the shuffling on the ceiling progressed to Madhumakhi’s end of the room.
“Why, hello there,” Madhumakhi said, with rather more warmth than Lalitsya had used. “What brings you down here? No, sorry, you don’t want to eat that, it already has the pheromones and nutrient supplements mixed in, and you know they don’t agree with you. But how about this?” Madhumakhi picked up a mutton bone from her basin of leftovers that had not yet been converted into scorpion chow and chucked it at the ceiling above her head. It didn’t come down. Madhumakhi returned to her work with all appearance of contentment, and no visible apprehension regarding the unseen carnivore lurking over her head. A few minutes passed, and the patch of shadow over Madhumakhi’s work table gave a few soft, reproachful chitters, which ceased when the woman tossed up a couple of ribs.
For someone who apparently devoured the bones as well as the flesh, Lalitsya thought, Skitters ate awfully quietly. She would have suspected a few crunching noises at least. But then, she wasn’t entirely certain that Skitters had teeth. He tended to stick to the less well-lit corners of the fortress, and despite being friendly in his way, wasn’t one to get close to people. And that was assuming that there was only one of him - and that he was male, for that matter. It was a bit of a blow to one’s professional pride as an expert in exotic life forms to live with a creature for over a year and still have no positive identification of his sex, species, or even phylum. All she knew for sure, apart from his love of meaty bones, was that he wasn’t something their boss had summoned within the past few decades - people in Lalitsya’s profession had a sense for these sorts of things, and Skitters’s energy signatures had nothing otherworldly about them.
Contemplating the weird biology of one’s house mates was all well and good, but the practical problems at hand still hadn’t been addressed. “Hey, Maddie. Do you think Skitters would let us dress him up for Longest Dark? I don’t know if any of the festive hats would fit, but I could at least put some ribbons around his neck. Wouldn’t that be adorable?” At this suggestion there was a burst of indignant chirps and hisses from the ceiling over Madhumakhi.
Madhumakhi rolled her eyes and looked up at her companion. “It was just a suggestion, Skits. Nobody’s going to force you to do anything, hiding out in the barn to preserve your dignity will not be necessary. And why are you so upset anyway? It’s only a few ribbons.”
“I’ll take that as a no,” Lalitsya said to herself, but added, “Would he be willing to help put the decorations up? He knows the ceilings better than any of us, and it would save a lot of messing about with ladders.” A resounding silence from above greeted this suggestion. Lalitsya had no idea whether this signified a less vehement degree of indignation, or a refusal to dignify the idea with a response.
“Do you think you could get the rest of the girls to help you?” Madhumakhi asked. “I am, of course, very willing, but someone who actually grew up with the holiday might have more useful ideas. I don’t even know what the traditional menu is, except that there are parsnips involved, and those little round cabbage things, and too much roast meat so everyone lives on hash and sandwiches for a week afterwards.”
“You forgot the sweets, but that’s the basic principle. See, you’ve picked up more than you think you have.”
“I still think you should ask everyone else. If this holiday is that important, they might have ideas of their own, and you don’t want any irate assassins trying to hunt you down and murder you for ruining their Longest Dark.”
“Point taken.” All the women who worked at the fortress were such good friends that Lalitsya sometimes forgot the sort of people they were in their professional capacities. But then, most of them, besides Maddie and her ubiquitous arthropod entourage, didn’t flaunt it. You’d never know Lalitsya was a Class Alpha-Three demon summoner if you met her in her time off. She reserved the red leather and chainmail evening dress with the brass corset and the thigh high boots for major summonings, when making the right impression was worth a little chafing. Demons respected a woman who dressed like a militarily inclined courtesan, but Lalitsya didn’t believe in torturing herself in order to impress every imp she talked to with her fashion sense. Bribery worked better with the little guys, anyway.
“Maddie, is there anything you want? It doesn’t need to be strictly traditional. We’re not exactly a normal household here, in any case.”
“If I think of something, I’ll be sure to tell you. Now, Skitters,” she said, turned towards the ceiling again, “I’m down to the last few ribs. Speak now or forever hold your peace.” Lalitsya couldn’t hear any reply, but Madhumakhi tossed up a bone anyway, and then resumed dismantling one of the few remaining ones. “You might as well start asking the others now - Chernobiya takes her lunch at about this time, so she should be free to talk at least. As soon as I finish up with this I’m going to be feeding my scorpions. The little ones don’t eat much, but Typhon and Echidna more than make up for it. I swear, sometimes I worry about their digestions, they bolt it down so fast…”
“Tell them bon appétit for me. Goodbye!” Lalitsya sensed that she was being urged to go and let Maddie get on with her work, so she left to look for any of her coworkers who might be in a position to make conversation. First - Chernobiya. Now where was that big girl?
Lunch. Right. Now, that didn’t solve the entire problem, since she could have taken something with her or had the kitchen send her something, but if the latter possibility was true, then Mrs. Aconite would know where she was, at least. The woman kept better track of her dishes and silver than some ministers of state kept track of their country’s secrets. And if she was eating in, she’d probably be using the informal dining room, unless she was eating with the guards in their mess. But that was a quarter mile away - longer but warmer and dryer if you took the tunnels - so Lalitsya decided to exhaust the nearest options first. Her current work shoes, while far more comfortable than the boots that went with her formal summoning outfit, weren’t made for tramping through the residue of an early blizzard.
Making her way to the kitchen from Madhumakhi’s workroom had two possible routes - three if you counted the experimental teleporter, but those always made Lalitsya sick to her stomach, which was the last thing you wanted before plunging into a warm steamy room that smelled like onion gravy. She could take a boat across the branch of artificial underground lake that extended around the back, or she could take the tunnels.
Both had their advantages and hazards. The lake was a shorter trip, and the lapping of the water was rather soothing, and one didn’t have to worry about some employee or escaped experiment with a malign sense of humor jumping out at one from around a corner, given the difficulty of performing such acts in open water. Unfortunately, the little boats, while picturesque, were not that easy to steer in Lalitsya’s experience, she knew nothing about their safety record, and being pounced on from under the water is just as bad as having it done from around a dark corner on dry land - and potentially much worse, if one adheres to the quaint custom of air breathing.
The primary attraction of the tunnels was a much lower risk of accidental drowning - there had been once incident with a guard and a very large puddle, but she’d been out of her skull on wine of wormwood at the time, and Mistress Daciana had been able to revive her eventually in any case. The primary disadvantages were the abundant unnecessarily convoluted branching paths that led to things like supply closets, and their popularity as a place for guards on a spree to sleep it off out of sight of their commanding officers. Not that Lalitsya was one of your mad-eyed temperance advocates or anything like that, but some of the guards could get a bit weird under the influence. Particularly the trolls. There was one otherwise promising young recruit who’d had a bad habit of licking Madhumakhi’s discarded lab glassware and cauldrons until her sergeant assigned her a patrol route that didn’t take her past the trash heaps. Hearing about the details from Maddie had left Lalitsya simultaneously impressed with the girl’s foolishness and her fortitude. She hadn’t known a person could survive ingesting some of those substances for long enough to get anything interesting out of the experience. (Which was probably true for humans, but in this day and age acting as if “human” and “person” were completely synonymous can get you into all manner of trouble, and not just from the wrath of people you’ve offended. Lalitsya remembered reading about the last Dark Lord but one before her boss, who remembered the existence of female soldiers and had the prophecy changed to “no human of woman born shall overthrow me.” The guy wound up getting stabbed by a goblin - and a male goblin at that. Is there any plague more painfully lethal than irony?)
Lalitsya chose the tunnels. She could use the extra time to think, and didn’t feel like wrestling with one of those strange little gondolas again. And talking to Chernobiya about holidays might require a little diplomacy.
“Sensitivity” was not a word one often used in connection with the big gray soldier. During Lalitsya’s acquaintance with her, she’d seen Chernobiya in four basic moods: exuberant cheerfulness, outspoken mild annoyance, boredom, and advanced inebriation. She’d seen Chernobiya doing sword practice in her underwear - the big girl had just arrived, and there had been no practice armor that fit her, since all the human equipment was too small and she wasn’t shaped like a troll - and shrug off the heaviest blows Captain Tiberia could hit her with as if the Captain had been wielding a feather duster instead of a well-constructed wooden sword. The woman’s idea of a “bracing winter punch” was undiluted pepper vodka heated with some spices and orange peel - and she drank it in pint mugs. But despite all this, Lalitsya decided it was better not to push superficial jollity too far, especially when you might be messing with feelings of someone who could throw you with one arm. She didn’t trust the cushioning power of the castle tapestries that much.
The heart of the problem was that Chernobiya was a Harbinger, and Lalitsya was, quite possibly, the only person in the fortress besides their boss who knew the full implications of this. And they were hardly cheerful. Judging by her appearance and energy signature, Chernobiya was a Nightbringer, and they tended to be created by people who were trying to bring about the end of the world, but didn’t have the raw magical power available to just blow it into the aether. Lalitsya didn’t believe in judging people by their religion - there were plenty of members of the Order of Eternal Light who were loving parents and good citizens, even if they could be awfully prejudiced against demons - but there was a part of her that couldn’t believe that doomsday cultists would make very good parents. Whether or not her parents had done their best, they clearly hadn’t been good enough for her, because the only reference Lalitsya had ever heard Chernobiya make to her childhood had been a story about running away at the age of nine to join the circus and performing in a strongman act. She hadn’t sounded overtly bitter at the time, but Lalitsya was wary of dredging up ancient issues with someone twice her size.
The air was growing warmer and even more humid, and the mosses and fungi were growing more thickly on the walls. Lalitsya knew she was approaching the kitchen. She heard a faint noise above her head that sounded like metal hitting the floor. Well, at least it wasn’t crockery. Tin plates were reasonably resilient, at least when put to their intended usage and not used as makeshift armor for practice dummies (Mrs. Aconite still twitched a little whenever anyone talked to her about new guard recruits.) As Lalitsya continued on her path, the air grew slightly cooler and drier, and she eventually found herself in the cheese cellar. She stopped to take a look at the progress of this summer’s experimental Double Cream Mammoth’s Milk (coming along nicely, from what she knew of cheese, although one of them was developing blue veins. Was this supposed to happen?) Lalitsya had hoped to be able to take the big dumbwaiter up to the kitchen and save herself the walk, but it was in use elsewhere and she had to take the steps up like an ordinary person.
Mrs. Aconite was elsewhere, leaving the kitchen to be supervised by Mandragora, the head kitchen maid. Lalitsya was a little relieved by this. Mrs. Aconite’s clairvoyance where her dishes were concerned could be useful, but the woman was rather intimidating to talk to even by a summoner’s standards. “Mandy! Just the woman I wanted to see!”
“Whatever it is, make it quick,” Mandragora replied. “We’re making strudel dough, and in about a minute and … oh, ten seconds, Olga is going to need to stand right where you are to stretch it.”
“Could you tell me where Chernobiya is?”
“Informal dining room. She settled down there with an oyster pie and a half-bottle of claret about five minutes ago.”
“Many thanks. And by the way, that sorrel-noodle thing you did last night was delicious.” And with that, Lalitsya hurried out. She’d seen what Mandy could do with a pastry roller.
Chernobiya was as Mandy had described her, and has obviously made serious inroads on both pie and bottle. She was also reading a novel with the title in curly writing on the cover and a picture of a woman in a low-cut dress holding an impractically large crossbow. Lalitsya was a little surprised by this, as she’d never thought of the other woman as much of a reader. She hoped that Chernobiya wasn’t at such an unbearably exciting part of the story that she wouldn’t tolerate an interruption.
“Hey, Chery.”
“Yes, darlin’?” Chernobiya put the book down with the handle of her fork stuck in the place where she’d left off.
“You know Longest Dark’s coming up, and I was wondering if you wanted to do anything special.”
“Hmmm… well, when I was little they always observed the solstice with human sacrifice and saffron cake, but I don’t think that would be practical here and now. I mean, we’d have to order the saffron, and unless we had it delivered by dragon courier or something like that there’d be no guarantee of it arriving early enough.”
“You have a point, especially with all the people ordering the ingredients for their pepper bread and black cake at the last minute. The spice traders must be swamped this time of year. Was there anything special you did with the circus?”
“Mysterion the Magnificent made angel toffee for all the children.”
“Was it made from real angels?”
“He claimed it was a secret family recipe. I never asked.”
“Do you remember the stuff glowing in dim light, or getting feathers stuck in your teeth?”
“No, it was a sort of pearly light pink color and had a texture like sticky meringue. Unless it had been really humid that year, in which case it could be used as carpenter’s glue. But even then, no feathers.”
“How’d it taste?”
“Very sweet and minty, with a faint spice aftertaste."
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
And to all a good night!