Chapter 76: Cooking Calfeeths

Arthur was the one who remembered the pot.

He dug it out of his pack, a slim little thing barely longer than a pencil, and held it up like he expected us to be unimpressed.

"Tony gave it to me before we left," he said. "Said it would come in handy."

Theodore squinted at it. "That’s a pot?"

"Watch."

Arthur pressed something along its side, and the whole thing unfolded in on itself, metal panels sliding and clicking into place until a full, wide-mouthed cooking pot sat in his hands, easily large enough for the five of us to eat out of.

"Okay," Theodore admitted, "that’s actually pretty cool."

"Everything Tony gives us is unsettling until it isn’t," Mary said, already crouched by the small fire pit Sera had started scraping together out of dead coral and dry moss.

I fished out Arthur’s water bottle, the small Awakened-ranked one that turned spiritual power into water, and poured a thin thread of power into it, filling the pot until it was maybe halfway full. The water shimmered faintly gold for a moment before settling clear.

"Meat," Sera said, holding up a dripping cut of pale flesh she had carved off one of the Calfeeths, and I decided very firmly not to think too hard about where exactly on the creature it had come from.

She dropped it in, along with a small pinch of salt from a pouch at her hip, our only real seasoning after everything we had been through tonight, and set the lid in place.

We waited...

The fire crackled low, casting warm orange light across all of our faces, and for the first time since we had stepped through Moon’s Door, the clearing actually felt like somewhere you could rest instead of somewhere you had to survive.

Puppeteer sat curled near Sera’s feet, feathers glowing faintly crimson in the firelight, entirely unbothered by the fact that its friend’s meat, technically, was cooking a few feet away.

"That’s not weird to anyone else?" I asked, nodding toward it.

"It doesn’t mind," Sera said. "Summons don’t really think about that stuff."

"Comforting."

After a while, Arthur lifted the lid, and steam rolled out thick and fragrant, carrying a smell that made my stomach growl loud enough that Theodore snorted.

"Alright," he said, reaching for a piece, "moment of truth."

We each took a portion, and I hesitated only a second before taking a bite, half-expecting something gamey or bitter given everything the creature had put us through tonight.

It wasn’t...

It was, somehow, incredible. Rich and tender, closer to lamb than anything else I could compare it to, but with an underlying savoriness that reminded me more of pork, the two flavors tangled together into something that didn’t need any spice at all to taste this good.

Juice ran down my fingers with every bite, and for a solid minute, nobody said anything at all, too busy actually eating.

"Okay," Theodore finally managed around a mouthful, "I take back everything bad I said about tonight."

"You said a lot of bad things about tonight," Mary pointed out.

"I’m retracting all of it. This is incredible."

Sera smiled, quiet and satisfied, watching the rest of us eat like she had personally arranged the whole meal instead of just carving one lucky cut off a dead monster.

Once the worst of the hunger had eased, the questions started drifting back in, the ones we had all been holding since the clearing.

"So," I said, watching her over the fire, "Silver Core. Since when, exactly."

She sighed, setting her portion down in her lap. "Last November."

Arthur’s eyebrows shot up. "That’s almost half an year ago."

"I know."

"How?" I pressed. "That’s not something you just stumble into."

Sera turned her attention to the fire instead of any of us, the light catching the side of her face as she thought through how to explain it.

"There was a bishop of the church," she said finally. "He, or well the church, wanted charms, a lot of them, protective wards mostly, enough to outfit an entire wing of acolytes heading out on a pilgrimage. The problem was timing. The church didn’t have the funds ready yet, not for that quantity, not all at once."

"So what did you do?" Theodore asked.

"I made them anyway." She shrugged, like it wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded. "Took me about a month. I was working over ten hours a day, every day, just charm after charm after charm until my hands cramped up so bad I couldn’t hold a pen afterward."

"Why?" Mary asked quietly. "If they didn’t have the money—"

"Because the bishop promised something better than money." Sera’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. "The church had a potion. The one that can push someone straight to a Silver Core. They offered it to me instead of payment, on one condition."

"Let me guess," I said. "Don’t tell anyone."

"Exactly. Church reputation and all that. Wouldn’t look great if it got around that they were handing out Silver Core potions like charity instead of guarding them properly." She picked her food back up, poking at it absently. "So I took the deal, drank the potion, and just... never said anything. Until tonight, apparently."

Silence settled over the fire for a moment, all of us processing that.

"Ten hours a day," Theodore said eventually, shaking his head. "For a month."

"It wasn’t glamorous."

"You could’ve told us," Arthur said, gentler than I expected.

"I know." Sera glanced up, meeting each of our eyes in turn, something almost apologetic in her expression. "It felt like mine to keep, I guess. Something I earned on my own, before any of this Realm nonsense, before Tony, before any of it. I wanted to hold onto that for a little while longer."

I thought about that for a second, about the exhaustion in her voice even now.

"Fair enough," I said.

The others nodded, one after another, and the conversation slowly softened back into comfortable quiet, the fire popped, Puppeteer shifted closer to the warmth and the last of the Calfeeth meat was taken by Arthur and Theodore because the rest of us were actually full.