The Glass Wizard - The tale of a somewhat depressed wizard

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By then, every other drink order had slipped from his mind except one: something foreign-sounding, pronounced like Astra Kor, requested by Branwen. Yu had no idea what it was, nor how any part of it might be spelled. He scoured the shelves until the task took on the heat of compulsion, and then turned feverish. First, he was hunted by failure, then by anger. He was on the verge of accepting he had fallen for a stupid joke when he unearthed a bottle marked Estjeque. It was the closest match to what he recalled Branwen say. Yu's first impulse was to simply pour him that – in the spirit of close enough – but at the last moment he stopped. For one, the name was just too far off, and for the other, the bottle looked too clinical, the glass thick in the way of things meant to clean, strip or dissolve. It looked suspiciously like something meant for Bubs' surgical tools. Or maybe for his knives and saws. Less so for his guests. One mildly disappointed traveller was safer than a poison-dead one.

Except … Branwen was not merely a traveller, was he?

Yu felt his eyes drawn to where the Sharran Vey stood in the shadow. He forced his gaze away, upwards, sideways, half around the room and further still, until it struck the surgery door.

----It was still … the better choice ?

No one looked back from there. He stood too far away for his face to reflect on the metal.

----------For now.

Yu did not want the hassle and humiliation that came with asking Branwen to repeat the name; the stares and mockery and laughter about what he had been doing all this time if not fetching that drink, thank you no thank you bye. So instead, he brought Nion his Dundinway and then announced they were out of the other thing. Then he threw himself back into the loop: ask again what the others wanted, listen, try to memorise, fail, search, mis-search, resign, bring water for Harrow instead, and begin the cycle again, with another round of apologies and asking. Somehow – by error, by attrition, or by the blind mercy of dumb luck – he eventually found the juice for the two brannok and the various types of Sulfa Spirit that made everyone else happy.

Happy.

Yes, that was the right word. It was highly concentrated alcohol. They grew happier with every swallow, dissolving caution and decency by degrees into unearned ease.

Yu envied them their dissolutions. He tried it. The spirit. But he had to stop immediately, recoiling as the unmistakable sour crease of whey brushed his tongue.

Inevitably, he also had to tend to the krynn and the borman. Unfortunately, by then it was only the borman who remained at the table. Yu approached with a mug of water, put it down, took six steps back, paused, took one forward again, and then forced himself to ask, "Do you know what the krynn wants?"

The borman looked down at him, with his massive, lumpen head and his dumb, buried, beady eyes. "No."

Yu stared back.

The borman added, in that gravelled weight of a voice, "Thank you."

Yu still stared. This was so stupid. Even he knew – with zero friends and close to no voluntary exposure to any social gatherings whatsoever – that you looked after the people you were with. Even if you had no idea about their preferences and did not dare to order for them, you should at least say something sensible like, Please bring him water for now, he'll choose later. Anything but this blank, bovine uselessness.

"I have Dundinway," Yu said. "There is also mikkin juice, and three types of Sulfa, and Sharran Vey."

His feathers bristled. The last one had slipped out of nowhere. His eyes darted toward the fireplace cluster, then back again. "I mean, I can bring you Dundinway. Or something else. Do you want Dundinway?"

"Yes, I take. Thank you," the borman said.

So Yu brought that for the krynn and the borman.

Every time he slipped through the doors – to fetch bowls, to return mugs, to collect plates – he tried to shut out the sight of the surgery door. And he tried not to imagine the shaman alone with the selder, and not to invent what the fireplace people murmured when his back was turned, and not to infer how the guards intended to get rid of him — how and when.

More than an hour dragged past like that, bowl after bowl and mug after mug, and still the adventurers showed no sign of stopping. Nion alone was gobbling down his fifth bowl — that is, the fifth Yu had brought him. Yu had no idea how many the nepter had inhaled earlier, while Yu had been upstairs tending to his burns, but the sheer bottomlessness of his hunger filled Yu with bitter resentment. Nion was tall, yes, but his limbs were all bone and stringy tendon. So where did it all go?

The borman matched him, bowl for bowl. Yu had served him five as well. He had never asked whether the borman wanted more. He had simply carried out a new bowl whenever there was a brief lull at the fireplace. Likewise, the borman had never asked for more, not after the second, third or fourth, and also not after the fifth bowl. He simply waited, once for half an hour, and he ate everything that Yu placed before him. He thanked Yu each time. But he never asked for more.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The krynn drifted in the silence between them, dividing himself between the borman's table and the sick bay. He ate only two bowls in total, spooning each mouthful with the dull efficiency of someone who ate only because he needed sustenance, not because he sought satisfaction. Nothing in his taut frame suggested want. Nothing in his eyes suggested taste. It made Yu wonder if he was used to live kill.

Eventually, Yu cleared both their bowls and brought no more — neither for them, nor for the others. The moment was agonisingly awkward and he was panic-screaming inside from start to finish, but he managed to declare that from now on there would be drinks only. He did not say why. He just tried to sound firm. Official. Like Bubs, with that quiet, immovable sort of tone that implied his authority as a given, as if Yu actually had the right to say, Time to shut it, you spoilt pieces of shit.

He did not use those exact words.

Still, it was not un-true. Far from it. Though, Yu's true reason was another. He needed to stop because the stew was more than half gone, and he would not risk reaching further down with the ladle. He would not go fishing at the bottom of that pot, not for the life of him, and certainly not for their gluttony. Whoever was still hungry would just have to suck it up and sleep it off until Bubs cooked breakfast.

Of course, no one took him seriously. Well, Jerakill and Bawal actually nodded politely, while Harrow, Fallem and Branwen did not really care. But Kal, Nion and Ondahr seized upon the moment like fish spotting the first morning insects. They made an entire performance of theatrical grief, from mock-protests to guilt-tripping Yu:

"You are starving us, Yu?"

"Has that little flicker of authority already gone to your head?"

"Woe the fina that forgets his friends!"

"And who won't feed his friends!"

"Did we not, for weeks, share our rations with you, friend?"

"Yeah, well…," Yu fumbled, put on the spot. He was caught in the centre of their play like a bug on the lake, with wet wings and fish all around. "I mean, I believe you got that all back. Tonight. With how much you ate, I mean."

A cheer broke from the group, delighted, rolling, entirely too loud. All but Fallem, Branwen, and the two brannok were in high spirits. It was Sulfa Spirit that buoyed them, to be precise. It was painfully obvious that food was not the only thing they had taken in excess. Painful for Yu.

"Really?" challenged Nion.

"Really????" echoed Kal, pitching his voice into farce.

"Yes," Yu said. He was past the point of retreat; they all hungered for more. "And that is just speaking mass," he added. "Not quality." He meant it. He could not believe they compared that shit press-paste with the stew.

"What, Yu!" Ondahr clutched at his chest. "Don't say you didn't like our rations!"

"I thought that was obvious," Yu said. It had been obvious. He had said so. Many times. Aloud. To their faces.

"No, no," Nion protested, "You took far too many seconds and thirds to come out with that now!"

"Yeah, well, I mean — so what?" Really, what had they expected? What should he have done, given the choice between eating shit or starving to death. He had not had the dignity for the latter.

"So what, he says!" Nion exclaimed.

"I'll have you know …," Kal declared, but stopped to take another drink.

"Yes, he'll have you know …," Ondahr filled the pause.

"He will indeed have you know …," Nion underlined.

Encouraged by their echoing eagerness for entertainment, Kal puffed with performative offence: "I'll have you know that those were prime corpensolas, prepared with the best fats and bits one may find south of the Albweiss, dusted with precisely the right measure of herbs, and splashed to perfection with stamina potion."

"Right, sure," said Yu, exhausted beyond the reach of their humour. "I need to do work now. If you like the rations so much, you can just eat that. Until tomorrow, I mean. If you're still hungry. Or you do like Harrow, and get yourself a rock."

That left them reeling long enough for Yu to slip back into the kitchen.

At least none of the guards demanded food. Throughout the whole time, they never settled in the common room. Deltington remained with Bubs. Estingar drifted in and out, mostly standing sentinel at the entrance until Gurs relieved him. After that, the ulbatan lingered just long enough to coax Harrow into letting him try her weird rock, then vanished upstairs. Yu knew there were guardposts above, and another somewhere along the eastern wing from where he had first entered the guild, though inside the building he had seen little more than the stairs between the common room and the washroom, and the corridor leading to his own petty cell.

Yu had not heard of any who-goes-where schedules, so he never knew when a guard would appear. Those who did appear did not approached him. No one corrected or directed his work. Estingar granted him the occasional nod, but that was really it. Yet Yu was not so dumb as to mistake their distance for disinterest. Of course they were watching. They assessed him, for sure, even if he did not see them do it. So Yu kept going with the drinks, and did his best to appear engaged, obliged and industrious; in short, idiotically eager to serve. And because he needed the exhaustion. He needed the body to smother the restless mind.

But the exhaustion refused to return. Not the right kind. Not the deep, settling heaviness that should have long sunk into him, after all the countless climbs up and down the stool, and the hour-long scooping of stew, and the never-ending lifting of bottles in between.

So he worked without pause, ferrying drinks and wiping up spills. In between all of that, he mopped the puddles of meltwater that had been tracked into the common room earlier — because of course he would do that too. That would well confirm to everyone that he was exactly the kind of idiot who thought of nothing but his work and dutifully absorbed every additional scrap of drudgery as if it were a personal honour; the sort who did all the wapa-shit and grunt work nobody asked for, and apparently fucking loved to do it twice, as though the afternoon humiliations had not yet met his daily minimum. Yes, Yu did all of that, while everyone else basked in the fire and watched.

The night grew, but Harrow's group kept ordering drinks as though the whole affair were a competition between them that doubled as a joke on Yu. After two hours of scurrying back and forth like some frantic servant-creature, Yu started to suspect that these people – who knew perfectly well that he had been pressed into kitchen duty for less than a single day because they had dragged him here themselves – had realised that they could wring him for an endless stream of presumably free drinks. The thought began as a faint itch, but it soon settled into focus: Yu came to understand, with disturbingly bleak clarity, that there was a really good reason behind Bubs' stingy meal schedule. The realisation had come far too late, but once it took root, it coiled within him, threading itself through his pride and frustration until they formed a dense knot of pulsing resentment. That thing grew with startling speed, blooming into a thrumming mass of indignation that became impossible to ignore. So Yu did the unthinkable: he gave notice that from here on out they would be getting water, and only water. And oh, of course, who would have guessed, suddenly no one was thirsty anymore.

The hours dragged on. It was past nine when the laughter and chatter of the fireplace cluster finally faded into the softer murmur of satisfied and drowsing diners, and when Yu at last found the time to stack the final greasy bowls in the sink. Then he sat down on the suicidal stunting stool and allowed himself his first break in forever.

It lasted exactly zero seconds.

A creak.

The metal door beside the hearth opened.

Bubs stepped out of the surgery.

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