Chapter 102: Interlude — What Bast Is

KOTE WAS ASLEEP.

Not the way humans sleep — the boneless sinking, the slack jaw, the soft animal surrender to unconsciousness. Kote slept the way a candle goes out. One moment the flame was there, flickering behind his eyes, keeping the semblance of wakefulness alive. The next it was gone, and what remained was darkness. He sat behind the bar, his back against the wall, his chin on his chest, his hands in his lap. Still. Silent. A man-shaped absence where a man had been.

Bast watched him from across the room.

He had been watching for a long time. Minutes. Hours. In the Fae, time moved differently, and Bast had never fully learned to count it the way mortals did — in ticks and tocks, in measured portions, in the anxious arithmetic of minutes remaining and hours spent. For Bast, time was a river. You stood in it. It moved around you. You noticed when the temperature changed.

The temperature had changed.

Something in his Reshi had shifted during the telling — some wall had crumbled, some door had opened, some locked and guarded thing had been released into the open air. Whether this was good or bad, Bast could not yet say. Change was like that. It announced itself and then sat down and waited for you to decide what to make of it.

The fire was embers. The candles were low. The inn was wrapped in the particular silence that comes to old buildings in the dead hours, when the wood remembers being a tree and the stone remembers being a mountain and everything settles into its oldest, truest shape.

Chronicler was awake.

He sat at his corner table, surrounded by the sprawl of three days’ recording — pages and pages of cramped, precise handwriting, blotted here and there with the evidence of haste or emotion. His hands were still. His pen was dry. He was staring at the pages before him with the expression of a man who has eaten too much and is only now beginning to feel the weight of it.

Bast moved.

He unfolded from his place by the cold hearth and crossed the room in a few quick, soundless steps. Not the careful quiet of a person trying not to be heard. The effortless silence of a shadow. Of something that has never had to worry about being heard.

He sat down across from Chronicler. The chair didn’t creak. It wouldn’t dare.

Chronicler looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, circled with the bruise-colored shadows of exhaustion. But behind the tiredness, something else. Wariness. The instinctive, animal alertness of a man who has just realized he is alone in a room with something that is not what it appears to be.

“He’s sleeping,” Bast said.

“I can see that.”

“He won’t wake for hours. The telling takes something out of him. Something more than energy.” Bast’s voice was low, pitched for privacy, though there was no one to overhear. “He sleeps like the dead when the story has been bad. Tonight the story was very bad.”

Chronicler nodded slowly. “Is there something you want to say?”

Bast tilted his head. The gesture was almost human. Almost. There was something in the angle of it, the quickness, the precision, that reminded Chronicler uncomfortably of a bird — a hawk, perhaps, or an owl. Something with sharp eyes and sharper instincts.

“I want to tell you what I am,” Bast said. “Because you need to understand, if you’re going to write this story properly. If you’re going to understand why it matters.”

Chronicler reached for his pen. Bast’s hand was on his wrist before he’d moved an inch.

The touch was light. Barely a contact. But there was something in it — a current, a charge, like touching a piece of amber that has been rubbed against silk. Chronicler’s arm tingled from wrist to shoulder, and for a single, vertiginous moment, he felt the shape of something vast pressing against the inside of his perception. Something that existed just behind Bast’s face, the way a fire exists just behind a lantern’s glass.

“Not tonight,” Bast said. “Tonight is not for the page. Tonight is for you. For what you carry out of this inn and into the world.” He released Chronicler’s wrist. “Someday you may write it. When you understand it well enough. But tonight, you listen.”

Chronicler’s hand withdrew. He folded both hands in his lap, the way a child does when told to sit still in temple.

“I’m listening.”

Bast leaned back in his chair. The firelight — what little remained — caught his face at a new angle, and for a moment he looked different. Older. Not aged the way humans age, with wrinkles and grey hair and the slow collapse of flesh. Old in a way that had nothing to do with time and everything to do with depth.

“You think you know what I am,” Bast said. “Fae. A creature from across the border. Something charming and dangerous and a little bit foolish, the way the stories always make us. A trickster. A tempter. A beautiful boy with pointed ears and a talent for mischief.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I am all of those things.” Bast smiled, and his smile was the smile of a blade turning in the light. “In the same way that the ocean is water. True. Incomplete. Dangerously incomplete.”

He reached up and touched his own face. His fingers traced his jawline, his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose. It was an oddly intimate gesture — the way a person touches a mask they have worn so long they’ve forgotten where the mask ends and the face begins.

“This is a glamour,” he said. “You know that. You’ve seen it slip. The ears. The eyes. The way I move when I forget to move the way humans move.” His fingers paused at his temple, pressing lightly. “But you’ve only seen it slip. You haven’t seen it fall.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“No,” Bast agreed. “You don’t. But you need to.” His hand dropped. “Because you need to understand what is sitting across from you. What has been sitting across from your host for years, serving drinks and sweeping floors and playing at being a student. What Felurian sent to guard the last ember of the brightest fire she ever knew.”

The name landed in the silence like a coal dropped on wood. Felurian. The most beautiful and most dangerous creature in the Fae. The Lady of Twilight, who had seduced and destroyed a thousand poets, a thousand kings, a thousand men who thought themselves strong enough to survive her embrace.

Chronicler’s mouth went dry.

“Felurian sent you?”

“Felurian begged me.” Bast’s eyes held Chronicler’s, and in them was something that was not quite human and not quite animal and not quite anything that had a name in any language Chronicler knew. “Do you understand what that means? Felurian, who has never begged for anything. Who has never asked for anything. Who takes what she wants and discards what she doesn’t and has never, in all the ages of the Fae, lowered herself to requesting a thing she could not simply claim.”

He paused. Let the weight of it settle.

“She begged me. She came to my court — to the Court of Twilight, where I hold power that would make your mortal kings weep with envy — and she knelt before my throne and she begged.”

The word — court, throne — hung in the air between them like something physical. Chronicler felt his understanding of the young man across from him shift and resettle, the way a building shifts on its foundation during an earthquake. The same structure. A different angle. Everything suddenly, terribly changed.

“Your court,” Chronicler said.

“My court.” Bast’s voice was quiet. Matter-of-fact. The voice of someone stating an obvious truth, the way one might say my hand or my name. “I am Bastas, son of Remmen, Prince of Twilight and Telwyth Mael. In the Fae, I am lord of the gloaming places — the borders, the thresholds, the spaces between one thing and another. The dusk and the dawn belong to me. Every moment when the world holds its breath between day and night, between sleeping and waking, between what is and what might be — that is my domain.”

He said it simply. Without pride, without performance, without the theatrical grandeur that a human prince would have brought to such a declaration. He said it the way the wind says I am wind. The way fire says I am fire. As a fact of nature, neither boastful nor humble, simply true.

Chronicler felt his hands trembling in his lap and stilled them through force of will.

“In my court,” Bast continued, “I have commanded armies that would darken the sky. I have bent the fabric of the Fae to my will, reshaped landscapes with a thought, unraveled the names of things for the pleasure of hearing them come apart. I have played games with beings so old they remember the creation of the mortal world as a minor curiosity.” He paused. “And here, in Newarre, I cannot convince the grocer to sell me fresh bread.”

Something complicated moved across his face. Not bitterness — Bast was not, by nature, a bitter creature. Something closer to bewilderment. The expression of a being that has traveled very far from home and still hasn’t quite adjusted to the local customs.

“The mortal world is… limiting,” he said. “The rules here are different. Smaller. More rigid. In the Fae, power flows like water — it finds its own level, fills every available space. Here, power is locked in boxes. Bound by laws. Contained in bodies that age and break and die.” He looked at his hands. “My body, such as it is, is a translation. An approximation. The mortal world cannot hold what I am, not fully, so it makes a version of me that fits. A beautiful boy. A loyal student. A slightly odd young man who is good with a knife and bad with money.”

“But that’s not what you are.”

“No.” Bast looked at him steadily. “That’s what I wear.”

The fire had died completely. The room was dark now, lit only by the last guttering candle on Chronicler’s table. The shadows were deep and thick and layered, the kind of shadows that existed in places where the night was old and unafraid.

And in those shadows, something changed.

It was not dramatic. There was no flash of light, no crack of thunder, no theatrical revelation. One moment Bast was sitting in the chair across from Chronicler, his familiar face composed and calm and human enough. The next, the face was different.

No. The face was gone.

What sat across from Chronicler was something that his mind struggled to process, the way the eye struggles to process the sun after hours in a dark room. It was bright. Not with light — with presence. With the sheer, overwhelming intensity of a thing that was more real than the room it sat in, more solid than the chair beneath it, more true than anything Chronicler had ever seen or would ever see again.

The features were still there, in a sense. The high cheekbones. The dark hair. The mouth that was made for smiling. But they were stripped of their softness, their humanity, their careful ordinariness. What remained was the architecture beneath — the bones of something ancient and wild and incomprehensibly beautiful — beautiful the way a thunderstorm is beautiful, the way the deep ocean is beautiful when you understand that it could swallow you without noticing.

The eyes were the worst.

They were not blue anymore. They were not any color that had a name. They were the color of the sky at the exact moment when day becomes night — that impossible, transitional shade that exists for a single heartbeat and then is gone. They held depths that Chronicler could not fathom and heights that made him dizzy, and in their centers was something that was not quite intelligence and not quite hunger and not quite love, but some older, vaster thing that contained all three.

Chronicler’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed back involuntarily. His heart was hammering. His skin had gone cold. Every instinct he possessed — the ancient, bone-deep instincts that predated language and reason and civilization — was screaming at him to run. To flee. To put as much distance as possible between himself and this thing that sat across from him wearing the shape of a boy.

He didn’t run.

He had the bones of a hero, Chronicler. Not the grand, storybook kind. The quiet kind. The kind that sits still when everything says move, that looks when everything says look away, that stays when everything says leave.

He stayed.

And he looked.

And what he saw, when the first wave of terror receded and his mind began to function again, was not a monster. Not a god. Not even a prince, in any sense that the word meant in the mortal world.

What he saw was a being of staggering power and staggering tenderness, sitting in a tavern in the middle of nowhere, watching a broken man sleep. What he saw was something that could unmake villages and reshape mountains and bend the laws of reality to its will, and had instead chosen to sweep floors and wash dishes and learn the names of human herbs and pretend, day after day, year after year, that it was something small.

Something ordinary.

Something that belonged here.

“This is what I am,” Bast said. His voice had changed too. It was layered now — not multiple voices, exactly, but a single voice with depths that shouldn’t have been possible, like hearing a single note played on an instrument with a thousand strings. “This is what Felurian sent to watch over the man who loved her. This is what sits across from him at breakfast and pretends not to notice that he’s fading. This is what sweeps the floor and stocks the shelves and smiles at the village girls and lies awake at night listening to the silence eat him alive.”

The glamour settled back into place. Not all at once — in stages, like a lake refreezing after a stone has been thrown through the ice. First the eyes dimmed, losing their impossible depth. Then the features softened, rounded, became human again. Then the presence receded, pulling back into the shape of a young man like a tide pulling back from shore.

When it was done, Bast was Bast again. Beautiful. Young. Almost human.

Almost.

Chronicler realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, slow exhalation that fogged slightly in the cold air.

“Why are you showing me this?” he asked. His voice was steady, which surprised him.

“Because you need to understand the stakes,” Bast said. “You need to understand what is being wasted. What is being lost.”

Bast leaned forward. His elbows on the table. His chin in his hands. The posture was young, almost childish, and the contrast between what Chronicler had just seen and this casual, easy slouch was enough to make his head spin.

“Felurian loved him,” Bast said. “In her way. Which is not the human way — not promises and permanence and the comfortable lie that love can survive anything. The Fae love differently. We love completely, in the moment, without the safety net of commitment. When Felurian took Kvothe to her bed, she wasn’t claiming him. She was experiencing him. The way you experience a sunset or a song.”

He paused.

“But something happened. Something she didn’t expect. He stayed in her memory after he left. Not fading, the way mortal lovers always faded, becoming dim and then distant and then nothing at all. He stayed bright. He stayed present. She would be walking through her twilight gardens and suddenly think of his hands, his voice, the way he looked at her with wonder instead of worship. No one had ever looked at her with wonder. They looked at her with desire, with fear, with adoration. But wonder — the genuine, childlike astonishment of a person encountering something beyond their comprehension — that was his alone.”

Bast’s eyes were distant. Remembering. Or perhaps seeing — the Fae had senses that mortals lacked, perceptions that bridged the gap between memory and present reality.

“She felt him,” Bast said. “Across the border. Across the boundary between what is and what might be. She felt him the way you feel a change in the weather — a pressure, a shifting, a subtle wrongness in the texture of the air. Something was happening to him. Something was hollowing him out, taking the fire and the music and the Kvothe out of him and leaving behind a shell.”

He met Chronicler’s eyes.

“She came to me because she couldn’t go herself. The Fae doesn’t work that way — she’s bound to her twilight, to her glade, to the particular fold of reality that is hers and hers alone. She can’t cross the border without unraveling, without losing the very thing that makes her Felurian. But I can. The Prince of Twilight walks the borders. That’s what I am. That’s what I do. I exist in the spaces between.”

“So she asked you to come here,” Chronicler said. “To watch over him.”

“She begged me.” Bast’s voice was very quiet. “She said: He is going out. Like a candle in a room where someone has opened a window. The flame is still there but it is guttering, and soon it will be gone, and the room will be dark, and I will feel it, and it will be the first time in all my ages that I have felt the dark.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“She who never begs. She who never asks. She who has outlived a thousand mortal loves without shedding a single tear. She knelt before me, and there were tears on her face, and she said: Save him. Or if you cannot save him, be with him. Do not let him go out alone.”

The candle was almost gone. The wick was drowning in a pool of wax, the flame a thin blue thread barely clinging to existence. In its fading light, Bast’s face was all shadow and suggestion, a sketch rather than a portrait.

“I came,” he said. “I found the inn. I found the man. And I found —”

He stopped. Started again.

“I found what she meant. About going out. He was already half-gone when I arrived. The red hair was dull. The green eyes were flat. The hands that had played music and shaped wind and held Felurian herself were wiping a bar. Over and over and over. The same motion. The same cloth. The same wood. As if he could wear through the surface and find something underneath. Some hidden door. Some escape.”

“But there was nothing underneath. Just more wood. Just more silence. Just more of the endless, numbing routine he had built around himself like a coffin.”

“And I thought —” His voice cracked. The first true crack Chronicler had heard from him. Not the theatrical emotion of the Fae, who felt everything intensely and expressed everything immediately. A real crack. The sound of something under pressure. “I thought: I am the Prince of Twilight. I have power that would make the mortal world tremble. I have knowledge that spans ages. I have the love and the loyalty and the absolute, unwavering determination to fix this.”

He looked at his hands. At the ordinary, human-seeming hands that could, in another place, in another form, unmake the world.

“And it hasn’t been enough.” His voice was barely audible now. “Years, Chronicler. Years of trying. Years of being cheerful, being patient, being the student who asks the right questions, the friend who tells the right jokes, the companion who never gives up. Years of watching him fade and trying to hold the light together with my bare hands.”

He looked up. His eyes were bright. Not with tears — with something fiercer. Something that burned.

“In the Fae, I could unmake this village with a thought. I could rewrite the shape of reality around him, could rebuild his mind, could reach into the silence and tear it out of him like a weed. Here —” He gestured at the room, at the dark inn, at the sleeping man behind the bar. “Here I am a boy who fetches water and chops wood and argues with the grocer about the price of flour. Here I am small. Here I am nothing.”

“You’re not nothing,” Chronicler said.

Bast looked at him. And in his too-bright eyes, for just a moment, Chronicler saw the thing he had seen before — the vast, ancient, terrifying presence that lived behind the mask. It flickered, like lightning behind clouds, and was gone.

“I am the most powerful being within a hundred miles,” Bast said. “And I cannot convince one man to pick up a lute.”

The words sat in the air between them, heavy with the particular weight of truths that are both absurd and devastating.

“That is what I am, Chronicler. Not a student. Not a servant. Not a charming boy with pointed ears. I am a prince who has traded his kingdom for a dying man’s company. A power that has made itself powerless. A creature of twilight living in permanent midnight, because the man I came to save won’t let the sun in.”

Across the room, Kote stirred.

Not waking. Just shifting. The unconscious adjustment of a body that has been in one position too long, the small, animal motion that means nothing except that life continues, that breath follows breath, that the heart goes on beating even when the mind has given up giving it reasons to.

Bast watched the movement with an attention that was almost unbearable to witness. The way he tracked the rise and fall of Kote’s chest. The way his head tilted at the small sound of Kote’s breathing. The way his whole body oriented toward his Reshi the way flowers orient toward light — involuntarily, instinctively, with the desperate certainty of a thing that knows it will die without what it is reaching for.

“Why do you stay?” Chronicler asked.

Bast didn’t answer immediately. He watched Kote breathe. Watched the sleeping face, the red hair dim in the darkness, the still hands. Watched the man who had once been everything and was now, by his own choice, nothing.

“Because she asked me to,” Bast said. “Because I promised. Because the Fae do not break promises — it is not in our nature, not the way lying is not in the nature of stone.” He paused. “But those are the reasons I came. Not the reasons I stay.”

“What are the reasons you stay?”

Bast turned to face him. And in his expression — the human expression, the glamour, the mask — Chronicler saw something that transcended the Fae. Something that was neither ancient nor young, neither powerful nor helpless, neither beautiful nor terrible. Something simply, recognizably, heartbreakingly real.

“I stay because he taught me,” Bast said. “Not sympathy. Not alchemy. Not the things you’d expect a student to learn from a teacher. He taught me what it means to care about something fragile. To watch something precious break and choose to keep holding the pieces instead of letting them fall.”

He glanced at the sleeping figure behind the bar.

“In the Fae, nothing is fragile. Nothing breaks that cannot be remade. We are eternal and we know it, and that eternity makes everything we do feel light. Weightless. Beautiful but hollow, like glass. Kvothe —” He caught himself. “Reshi taught me that the weight is the point. That things matter because they break. That love matters because it can be lost. That a life matters because it ends.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“He doesn’t know he taught me that. He doesn’t know he teaches anything anymore. But every day I watch him carry his grief and his guilt and his silence, and I see a man who has lost everything and still gets up in the morning and wipes the bar and pours the drinks and goes on living. Not because he wants to. Because he chooses to. And that choice — that small, stubborn, unremarkable choice to keep going — is the bravest thing I have ever seen.”

His voice broke on the last word. Broke cleanly, the way a bow breaks across a string, producing not silence but music. A single, clear note of grief and love and the kind of determination that outlasts empires.

“So I stay,” Bast said. “I stay and I watch and I wait. And someday — maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe a year from now, maybe a century — he will remember. He will reach for the lute. He will speak a name. He will open a door. And I will be here. Ready. Waiting.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Bast smiled. And it was the saddest, most beautiful, most terrifying smile Chronicler had ever seen.

“Then I will be here for that too.”

The candle died.

The room fell into darkness — absolute, complete, the kind of darkness that exists in places where there is no light at all. For a moment, Chronicler was blind. He sat in the blackness and listened to his own breathing and felt the weight of everything Bast had told him pressing down on him like deep water.

Then, slowly, his eyes adjusted.

Moonlight was seeping through the windows. Not much — just enough to paint the room in shades of grey and silver, to give the furniture edges and the walls depth and the sleeping innkeeper a faint, spectral glow.

Bast was still sitting across from him. His eyes were the only things that caught the light. They gleamed in the darkness like coins at the bottom of a well — bright, distant, ancient, and utterly alien.

“You said I shouldn’t write this down,” Chronicler said. “Not tonight.”

“Not tonight.”

“But someday?”

“Someday.” Bast’s eyes held his. “When you understand it. When you can write it the way it needs to be written — not as a story about a prince who lost his kingdom, but as a story about a thing that chose to love something it could lose. Because that’s what this is, Chronicler. Not a tale of power. A tale of choice. The choice to be small in a world that wants you to be vast. The choice to be present in a world that would let you be eternal. The choice to sit in a dying tavern and watch a man wipe a bar and call it enough.”

He stood. The chair didn’t scrape. The floor didn’t creak. He moved to the fire and knelt, and with the practiced motions of long habit, he built a new flame from the ashes of the old one. The kindling caught. The fire grew. The room filled with warmth and light, pushing back the darkness, softening the edges of things.

Bast crossed to the bar. He took the blanket that was folded on the shelf beneath the counter and draped it over Kote’s shoulders with a tenderness that made Chronicler’s chest tighten. The blanket was old, worn thin in places, the kind of blanket that has been washed so many times it has become soft as skin. Bast tucked it around his Reshi’s shoulders, adjusted it at the neck, smoothed a fold that didn’t need smoothing.

Kote didn’t wake.

Bast stood beside him for a long moment, looking down at the sleeping face. In the new firelight, his expression was human again. Young again. Worried and loving and fierce and afraid, all at once, in the way that only the very young and the very old can feel all of those things simultaneously.

“Goodnight, Reshi,” he said softly. “Dream of music.”

He turned and walked to his place by the hearth. Folded himself onto the floor. Curled up like an animal — like something wild that has chosen, against all instinct, to sleep near a fire that was built by human hands.

And in the Waystone Inn, in the small hours, in the silence that was neither empty nor full but simply waiting, the Prince of Twilight closed his eyes. And for a little while, in the warmth and the dark and the company of two sleeping mortals, the most powerful creature in a hundred miles let himself be small.

Let himself be nothing.

Let himself be enough.