The week that followed the candle experiment was almost a blur, a strange new rhythm taking the place of the chaos. The tower, once a cage of tension, became a quiet, shared space.
The morning of Tyr's Day, Projo met Kael at sunrise. His first attempts at fishing were a clumsy disaster of tangled lines and lost bait, earning him nothing more than a glare from the old man. But he returned every morning, slowly learning the delicate patience of the line, until by Sater's Day, he was bringing back a small, but steady, catch of rockfish for their meals.
Every few days, he would take his longsword to the secluded cliffside ledge. The grueling workouts were a familiar comfort, but sword practice was a different story. He chased the memory of the blade's clean shiiing, and little by little, the sledgehammer blows began to feel less like brute force and more like real technique.
The rest of his time was a voracious dive into Falira's library. He devoured half a dozen books: A Primer on Warding Glyphs, The Alchemical Properties of Common Reagents, Histories of the Silent Age.
When his questions overflowed, Falira answered, her passion for knowledge briefly outweighing her guarded nature. Their conversations became lessons of their own, and her quill never stopped after he retired to his bedroll.
On Thorn's Day, he took a job guarding a merchant's warehouse for two gold. The work was dull, but the weight of the coins in his pouch was reassuring.
The evening of Sater's Day, Projo returned to the tower, muscles burning with a pleasant ache after a punishing workout. The last light of the sun bled away into bruised purple as he pushed open the heavy door. The air inside was thick with the familiar scents of parchment and simmering herbs.
Falira sat rigid in her chair, eyes closed, a statue of concentration as she once again meditated on her Mana channels. The plate of bread and cheese he had left earlier was scraped clean, the crumbs brushed neatly aside. One more small victory.
He passed her without a word, splashed cold water over his face and chest at the basin, then dried himself with a roughspun cloth. Hunger gnawed again, sharper after the strain of training.
He looked around the cluttered mage's sanctuary. He could always walk back to town for a meal, but the thought felt wrong. Too transactional. Thanks to Kael, fish had become routine, and he was craving something different. Variety. His eyes settled on Falira—still lost in her own mind, and a simple, practical thought formed.
He walked over to the table, stopping a few feet from her.
"Falira," he said, quiet but clear.
Her eyes snapped open, clear and focused, as if she hadn't been meditating at all but simply waiting.
"I'm hungry," Projo said simply. "And fish is getting monotonous."
He looked at her, his expression earnest. "You have a tower full of strange plants and bubbling pots. You must know how to cook something."
The simple question seemed to ripple the reality of her tower.
Falira stared at him for a long, silent moment, her head tilted slightly, as if he were a strange new species of fungus she was attempting to classify.
"Your assertion that I 'must know how to cook'," she began, "is based on the flawed premise that proximity to reagents equates to proficiency in the domestic arts."
She rose stiffly, wincing as her side tugged, and crossed to the curtained alcove where she kept her stores. Her tone shifted, gathering momentum: "However, cooking is merely a rudimentary form of alchemy. The objective is to apply thermal energy to organic compounds to alter their chemical structure, rendering them more palatable and digestible."
She pulled the curtain aside, revealing a small collection of supplies: a few sacks of grain, some dried, withered vegetables, and a vast array of herbs in labeled jars. "The available materials are less than optimal, but a nutritional slurry can be formulated."
Projo's brow crept upwards. "A nutritional… slurry."
Now in full experiment mode, she pointed. "The cauldron is currently occupied with a long-duration distillation. Fetch the small iron pot from that hook. Stoke the fire evenly, we require a low consistent simmer—not the brutish heat you would use for... fish."
A slow grin spread across Projo's face.
He had asked for dinner and somehow ended up in a science project. Shaking his head, he did as he was told, the familiar, simple work of tending a fire a welcome anchor in her strange, clinical world.
What followed was the most bizarre meal preparation he had ever witnessed. Falira directed the entire process with the detached precision of a master alchemist. A pinch of dried nettle for its iron content. Three slices of a hard, pale root vegetable for starch. Oats for bulk and a spoonful of pungent gray powder "to aid the breakdown of fibrous tissues."
The result was a thick, gray paste that bubbled with an earthy smell like boiled leaves. She ladled the "nutritional slurry" into two wooden bowls and handed one to him, her expression that of a researcher awaiting test results.
Projo stared at the goo for a moment, then at her.
He took a hesitant spoonful.
It wasn't terrible.
It wasn't really good, either.
It was simply... fuel. It had no discernible flavor beyond a vague, earthy warmth.
Across the table, Falira ate with quiet diligence, sometimes pausing to murmur a small "hmm" as though mentally noting data on the texture and efficacy of the meal.
"Well," Projo said, after swallowing a large mouthful. "It's... food."
A small sound slipped through her lips—short, sharp, not quite a laugh. It was more like a surprised exhalation of breath.
She didn't look up, her gaze suddenly becoming intensely focused on the contents of her bowl, but he saw the corner of her mouth twitch.
In the hush of the tower, it felt like the loudest sound he'd ever heard.
Projo smiled to himself as he spooned more of the boiled matter into his mouth. "Falira. What exactly are you making in that cauldron?"
Falira's spoon paused halfway to her mouth. She slowly lowered it back to her bowl, the brief, almost-smile from before vanishing completely. Her eyes narrowed as the detached mask of the researcher slid back into place.
"That is a long-duration alchemical distillation. I am attempting to refine the essential quintessence of phosphorescent deep-sea coral."
Her eyes took on the distant, focused look of a scholar deep in her element.
"The coral, when harvested only under the light of a new moon, absorbs latent arcane energy from the ley lines that run beneath the Menhir Sea. The process is... delicate."
She looked back at him, her expression serious. "When properly refined over a period of weeks, the resulting essence is a potent stabilizing agent. It prevents volatile potions from... well, from exploding."
She turned her attention back to her bowl of grey slurry, the lecture apparently concluded. "It is a crucial component in many of Master Eldrin's more ambitious formulae."
Projo watched her, spooning more of the bland paste into his mouth. He didn't understand most of what she had said, but he understood the core of it: She wasn't just hiding in this tower, reading books. She was creating something important.
Suddenly, the stubborn, mysterious woman across the table felt less like a puzzle and more like a master of a craft he couldn't begin to grasp.
"Interesting," he said, slurping a spoonful. "So you can't leave this tower for too long then."
Falira's eyes flicked to his, a barely perceptible twitch of annoyance crossing her otherwise neutral mask.
She set her spoon down with a deliberate click.
"Correct," she said, her voice returning to its clinical, lecturing tone. "The initial distillation is the most volatile phase. It requires constant thermal regulation and the infusion of stabilizing reagents at precise, astrologically determined intervals."
She glanced at the cauldron, then back to him. "I have already… needed to restart… several times. An interruption of even a few hours can render the entire batch inert, or worse, cause a catastrophic energetic decay."
He nodded slowly, finishing his slurry. He looked around the tower, at the towering shelves of books, the glowing crystals, the ever-bubbling pot. It wasn't just her laboratory.
It was her gilded cage.
"Wait," he said, curiosity sharpening, "but you left with me on the cartographer job."
Falira's spoon froze again, halfway to her lips.
She lowered it back into the bowl. Her expression shifted into a mask of cold, analytical neutrality, the kind she wore when confronted with an unexpected and potentially problematic variable.
"That was a calculated risk. A necessary methodological deviation."
She pushed her spectacles up—a sign he was beginning to recognize as a tell—when she was carefully navigating something she didn't wish to confront.
"The long-duration distillation is a predictable, controllable experiment. The variables are known. You," she said, pinning him with her stare, "are not. Leaving the primary subject to engage in high-risk, unobserved activity in an uncontrolled environment for an entire day would have resulted in an unacceptable gap in the observational data."
Though she often used words Projo didn't always recognize, he did connect the dots on what she may not have intentionally revealed. If the distillation was predictable, and she had already needed to restart, that could only mean something had caused the process to fail.
Like human error.
She took a slow breath, preparing to drill the point further. "Before we left, I added a dual-infusion of ground pearl and silver dust to the solution. It retards the reaction, slowing the distillation process for a period of no more than twelve hours. It was not without consequence. The final quintessence will be... less pure."
Leaning forward, her gaze burned with a quiet, academic intensity that was far more revealing than any emotional outburst. "A necessary sacrifice of purity in one experiment for the acquisition of invaluable data in another. You, Projo, are the more volatile—and more important—experiment right now."
"Falira." He flourished his tone with exaggerated drama. "Falira.I ammore important than assisting your master?" He leaned back, deliberately shifting in his chair for maximum effect. "Sweet talker."
He loudly attempted to slurp more paste from his empty bowl.
Falira dropped her spoon this time, her face going blank. He saw the gears turning behind her eyes as she tried—and failed—to categorize his statement. It was not data. It was not logic. It was… chaos.
A crimson blush flared up from the collar of her robes, racing up her neck. She picked up her spoon and slammed it into the bowl, splattering a bit of grey slurry across her pristine notes.
"You are…" she began, her voice a high, strangled wire, "intentionally misinterpreting a statement of logical priority as a... a form of social overture. The two variables are categorically, fundamentally, and unequivocally dissimilar!"
She sprang to her feet, her chair scraping loudly against the floor. "The importance of one experiment over another is a matter of scientific triage, not sentimental value!"
She snatched up her bowl and marched over to the washing basin. Once more, he had found a way to completely fluster her with but a single, well placed compliment.
A deeply satisfied grin spread across Projo's face.
He stood up and walked over to Falira, stopping a few feet from the basin. She scrubbed the bowl with furious energy, set it on the drying rack with a sharp clatter, and finally turned, arms crossed and an expression of pure annoyance.
"That was, without a doubt, the most delicious grey paste I have ever eaten," Projo said, holding out his empty bowl toward her.
Falira's eyes dropped to the bowl, then flicked back to him, suspicion sharpening behind her spectacles. She hesitated a beat, clearly debating whether this was mockery or sincerity, before finally reaching out to take it—
He caught her hand—gently grasping her fingers—and planted a kiss upon her knuckles before she could pull away.
"Thank you," he said softly, still holding her hand.
Her entire body went taut.
Her mouth opened, then closed again without sound.
A flush bloomed, quick and fierce across her cheeks.
Falira yanked her hand away as though he were made of pure fire. "That—! That is not… an appropriate, valid, or standard form of gratitude!" she stammered, her voice pitching higher than usual. "It is socially manipulative—a ritualized gesture of intimacy designed to—to—" She faltered, her usually precise diction tripping over itself. "—to destabilize the subject!"
Projo walked back to his chair, grinning. "Excellent observation, it appears to be working."
Falira stood frozen, lips parted as though she had more to say, but nothing coherent made it out. At last she spun away, muttering furiously about "uncontrolled variables" as she attacked the washbasin with far too much energy.
When she turned back, drying her hands, it was apparent that the blush refused to leave her skin.
She let out a long, weary sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire day.
"If you are finished with your... infuriating culinary review," she said slowly, forcing her composure back in place, "then perhaps you could read your book and allow me to work in peace."
The dismissal was absolute.
The drawbridge of her fortress was slammed shut, the portcullis dropped. The brief, chaotic interaction was over, and the cold, scholarly silence of the tower rushed back in to fill the space between them.
Later that night, Projo found himself smiling at the memories of Falira's flustered responses—brief flickers of genuine emotion in a woman otherwise walled in self-imposed academic exile.
Yet, beneath his amusement, a shadow of worry lingered: had he gone too far? Pushed too hard? The thought of fracturing the fragile connection they were building haunted him both that night and the next.
But when he awoke on the first morning of the new month:
He heard her dreaming again.