Chapter 104: Bast’s Choice

THE GLAMOUR FELL like a shed skin.

It did not fade or flicker the way it usually did — those brief slippages that revealed a pointed ear, a too-bright eye, a flash of something inhuman beneath the surface. This was different. This was deliberate. Bast released the glamour the way a man releases a held breath, all at once, and what stood in the common room of the Waystone Inn was no longer the slightly unusual young man who poured drinks and wiped tables and played at being human.

What stood there was Fae.

Chronicler had seen glimpses. Over three days, he had caught fragments — the ears, the eyes, the movements that were too fluid to belong to anything mortal. He had noted these details in the margins of his manuscript with the clinical detachment of a scholar documenting an unusual phenomenon.

He was not detached now.

Bast was beautiful. Not in the way humans were beautiful — not the beauty of symmetry, or health, or youth, though he possessed all of these. His beauty was absolute. It existed in the same category as a mathematical proof or a perfect chord — something that could not be improved upon because it was already complete. His features were sharp and fine and luminous, cast with a pale inner light that seemed to emanate from beneath the skin itself. His ears rose to delicate points. His eyes were vast and deep and the color of midnight sky, shot through with flecks of silver that moved like living things.

He was also terrifying.

The beauty and the terror were not separate qualities. They were the same quality, perceived differently depending on whether you were looking at Bast as an aesthetic object or a physical threat. And right now, in the aftermath of the soldiers’ visit, with his glamour discarded and his patience exhausted, Bast was very much a physical threat.

He moved through the common room with a predator’s economy. Not pacing — pacing implied indecision. This was patrol. Perimeter assessment. The instinctive behavior of a dangerous thing evaluating its territory and finding it insufficiently defended.

“Five soldiers,” he said. His voice had changed too — deeper, resonant, carrying harmonics that human vocal cords couldn’t produce. “Five soldiers, and one of them clever. They’ll be back by morning. By noon at the latest.”

“Perhaps,” Kote said.

“Not perhaps. Certainly. That sergeant looked at you the way a hound looks at a fox gone to ground. He knows. He might not be sure, but he knows.”

Kote didn’t argue. He stood behind the bar with his hands flat on the wood, watching Bast with an expression that Chronicler couldn’t quite read. Not alarm. Not anger. Something closer to sadness, tinged with the particular heaviness of a man watching something he knew would happen finally happening.

“He’s one man, Bast.”

“He’s one man with a chain of command. One man who will ride to Abbenton and file a report and send for reinforcements. And then it won’t be five soldiers, it will be fifty. With a mage, probably. An arcanist loyal to the Penitent King, someone trained to detect disguises and see through lies.” Bast’s hands flexed at his sides. “We have hours. Maybe less.”

“And what would you do with those hours?”

The question was quiet. Deliberately so. The kind of quiet that falls before lightning — not empty but charged.

Bast stopped moving. He stood in the center of the common room, between the empty tables, and his shadow was wrong. It didn’t match his posture. It stretched behind him, long and dark and sinuous, and in its shape there were suggestions of things that did not belong in the mortal world — angles and curves that followed rules of geometry that Euclid had never dreamed.

“I would follow them,” Bast said. “The five soldiers. On the road, in the dark. Before they reach the garrison.”

“And then?”

“And then they wouldn’t reach the garrison.”

The words fell into the silence of the Waystone like stones dropped into deep water. They sank. They spread. They reached the bottom and settled there, sending up slow circles of implication that expanded outward until they touched every wall.

Chronicler’s hand tightened on his pen. Not writing — gripping. Holding on.

“Five men,” Kote said. “You would kill five men.”

“I would stop five men from bringing an army to your door.” Bast’s voice was flat. Matter-of-fact. The voice of someone for whom the calculation was simple: five lives weighed against one life, and the one outweighed the five, and that was all there was to it.

“And their families? Their children? The sergeant — did you see the ring on his left hand? He has a wife somewhere. He has someone waiting for him to come home.”

“Everyone has someone.” Bast’s voice cracked, just slightly. A fracture in the flat certainty. “That doesn’t mean—”

“It means everything.” Kote’s voice sharpened — a sudden edge, like a blade drawn from a sheath that everyone had assumed was empty. For a moment, he was not the innkeeper. He was someone else entirely. Someone whose authority was absolute and whose judgment, however quietly delivered, carried the weight of consequence.

Bast flinched. It was involuntary — the deep, instinctive flinch of a student before a master, of a young creature before an old power. His Fae nature, which recognized hierarchy with the precision of a compass finding north, acknowledged what his conscious mind resisted.

“Not like this,” Kote said. The edge was gone. The voice was quiet again, gentle, almost kind. “Not like this, Bast.”

The silence stretched between them.

It was not the comfortable silence of companionship or the tense silence of confrontation. It was the silence of two people who love each other standing on opposite sides of an impassable divide, each seeing the other clearly and each knowing that clarity changes nothing.

Bast broke first.

Not with anger. With grief.

“Then what?” His voice was raw. Stripped of the harmonics, the resonance, the inhuman qualities that marked him as Fae. What remained was just pain. Old pain, carried for years, rising to the surface because the container that held it had finally cracked. “What am I supposed to do, Reshi? Stand here? Watch them come for you? Watch them drag you to Renere in chains and execute you in the public square while I — what? Wipe the bar? Serve drinks to an empty room?”

“Bast—”

“I have watched you die for years.” The words came in a rush, tumbling over each other, fighting to be first. “Every day, a little more. A little quieter. A little further gone. I have watched the man I followed out of the Fae — the man who burned so bright I could see him from across the world — I have watched him fade to nothing. To this.” He gestured at the Waystone. At the empty room. At the silence. “An innkeeper in a town that nobody visits, waiting for a death he won’t even fight.”

“I’m not waiting for death.”

“Aren’t you?” Bast’s eyes were wet. In the Fae, tears were silver rather than clear, and they caught the firelight like liquid metal. “Tell me what you’re waiting for, then. Tell me what the plan is. Because I have been here for years, Reshi — years — and I have never once seen you take a step toward anything. Only away. Only backward. Only deeper into this…” He grasped for the word. “This performance.”

Kote said nothing. His hands rested on the bar. His eyes were very green.

“I left everything for you,” Bast said.

The words were quiet. But they were the kind of quiet that exists at the center of a hurricane — not an absence of force but its concentration.

“Do you understand what that means? Do you know what I gave up?”

Chronicler’s pen was moving. He couldn’t help it — the reflex was too deep, the habit too ingrained. When truth was being spoken, he wrote it down. That was what he did. That was who he was.

Bast either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“In the Fae, I was a prince.” His voice had leveled. The rush of emotion had passed, and what remained was something more careful, more deliberate, more devastating. “Not a metaphor. Not a courtesy title. A prince. My mother is Remmen, Lady of the Twilight Court. My father —” He stopped. Started again. “I had lands. I had a court. I had a name that opened doors and commanded attention and meant something to the oldest powers in the oldest places.”

He paused. Drew a breath.

“I was being groomed for the Seren Chair. Do you know what that is?”

Chronicler didn’t. But Kote’s expression shifted — a minute widening of the eyes, a slight parting of the lips — and Chronicler knew, from that reaction alone, that the Seren Chair was something significant.

“You never told me that,” Kote said.

“Because it doesn’t matter.” Bast’s voice was fierce. “None of it matters. The title, the court, the succession — I abandoned all of it. Walked away. Told my mother I was leaving and didn’t look back.” His jaw tightened. “Do you know what that costs, in the Fae? Renouncing succession? It’s not like your mortal politics, where a prince can abdicate and retire to the countryside. In the Fae, power is organic. It grows into you. The court shapes you. The land shapes you. When you walk away—”

He held up his hand. In the firelight, Chronicler could see something he hadn’t noticed before — a faint tracery of lines across Bast’s palm, like the ghost of a map. Not scars. Something more fundamental. As if the skin had been emptied of something that had once filled it.

“When you walk away, you leave part of yourself behind. The part that was connected to the land. The part that drew power from the court, from the title, from the name.” Bast’s voice was steady, but his hand trembled. “I’m less than I was, Reshi. Every year I spend in this world, I diminish. The iron in the air, the iron in the ground, the iron in every horseshoe and nail and knife — it wears at me. Grinds me down. And without the court to replenish what I lose…”

He let the hand drop.

“I’m dying.”

The word landed like a hammer on glass.

Silence.

“Not quickly,” Bast continued, into the silence. “Not dramatically. Nothing so convenient as a mortal death, with its clear beginning and definite end. I’m dying the Fae way — slowly, incrementally, losing pieces of myself so gradually that I barely notice. One day I won’t be able to hold a glamour. The next I won’t remember the old songs. Then my eyes will dim, and my hearing will dull, and I’ll become… ordinary. Mortal. A creature made entirely of flesh, with nothing of the Fae left in me.”

He looked at Kote. His eyes burned with the silver of Fae tears.

“That is what I am giving up. For you. Every day I stay is a day I can never recover. Every year in this iron world costs me a decade in the Fae. By the time I go back — if I go back — I’ll be diminished beyond recognition. My mother won’t know me. My court won’t remember me. I’ll be a stranger in the only place that was ever truly home.”

Kote was very still.

“I know,” he said.

“You—” Bast stopped. The word caught in his throat like a bone. “You know?”

“I’ve known since the first year.” Kote’s voice was soft. Careful. The voice of a man handling something that will shatter if he grips too tightly. “I can see it, Bast. The changes. They’re subtle, but I know what to look for. The way your glamour takes longer to settle. The way iron affects you more than it used to. The way you flinch from things that wouldn’t have bothered you when we first met.”

“Then why haven’t you sent me away?”

“I tried.” A ghost of something crossed Kote’s face — not a smile, exactly, but the memory of one. “Three times in the first year alone. Twice more the year after. You wouldn’t go.”

“Of course I wouldn’t go.” Bast’s voice cracked. “You needed me.”

“I needed you to be safe.”

“I needed you to be alive.”

They stood on opposite sides of the bar, the width of polished wood between them like a border between countries.

Kote was the first to move. He reached beneath the bar — not for a bottle or a glass but for something else entirely. His hand emerged holding a small object that caught the firelight with a warm, honey-colored gleam.

A ring. Made of wood — not ordinary wood but something richer, denser, with a grain that seemed to shift and move in the light like water flowing beneath glass. The surface was smooth as silk, worn by years of handling.

“This was my mother’s,” Kote said. “Or rather, it was from the Lackless line, generations old. Roah wood. The grain tells a story, if you know how to read it.”

He set the ring on the bar between them.

“There’s a binding in this ring,” Kote said. “Old Fae work. Very old. It was made for a purpose I won’t explain, but among its properties is this: it can anchor a Fae creature to the mortal world without the usual cost. A tether that draws power from the old places and feeds it through the link, keeping the bearer from diminishing.”

Bast stared at the ring. His expression cycled through several emotions too quickly for human eyes to track — surprise, hope, suspicion, confusion.

“You’ve had this,” Bast said slowly. “This entire time.”

“Yes.”

“An anchor that would stop my decline. You’ve had it for years. And you never—”

“It has a cost.” Kote’s voice was quiet. “Everything has a cost, Bast. You know that. This ring can sustain you, but in doing so it binds you. Not in the way you’ve bound yourself — not by choice, but by nature. Put this on and you cannot leave the mortal world. Not for a day, not for an hour. The door to the Fae closes permanently.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care.”

“I don’t.” Bast reached for the ring. Kote’s hand covered it first, pressing it flat against the bar.

“Listen to me.” The intensity in Kote’s voice was startling — a sudden flare of the man he had been, the man who had once commanded attention simply by deciding to speak. “You are Fae. That is not a condition. It is not a role. It is what you are, in the deepest sense of the word. The courts, the old songs, the twilight roads — those are not luxuries. They are your nature. To cut yourself off from them permanently—”

“Is my choice.” Bast’s voice was steel. “Mine. Not yours.”

Their eyes held. Green against midnight blue. Mortal against Fae. Master against student, or perhaps the reverse — perhaps it had always been the reverse, the student teaching the master the one lesson the master could never learn alone.

The lesson of being loved by someone who would not stop.

Chronicler watched from his table and felt the particular helplessness of a witness at a conversation that is not his. He was a vessel. A recording device. His purpose was to capture, not to intervene. And yet—

“May I speak?” he said.

Both faces turned to him. For a moment, caught between those two gazes — one human, one emphatically not — Chronicler felt the full absurdity of his position. A mortal man, an academic, a collector of other people’s stories, sitting at a corner table in a doomed inn while the forces of the world gathered outside and two extraordinary beings argued about the nature of sacrifice.

“This isn’t your concern,” Bast said. Not unkindly.

“Everything I’ve been told in the last three days is my concern.” Chronicler’s voice was firm. Steady. The voice of a man who has decided that professional detachment has limits. “I’ve listened to a story about love and loss and the cost of power. I’ve written it all down. And now I’m watching the same story happen again, in real time, right in front of me.”

He looked at Kote. “You want to protect him by pushing him away. You’ve been doing it for years — the silence, the withdrawal, the performance of ordinariness. You think that if you’re empty enough, broken enough, nothing enough, he’ll finally give up and go home.”

He looked at Bast. “And you refuse to go. Not because you don’t understand the cost, but because you’ve decided the cost is worth paying. You’ve made a calculation — a terrible, generous, irrational calculation — and nothing he says or does will change the math.”

He looked at the ring on the bar.

“You’re both doing the same thing,” he said. “You’re both sacrificing yourselves to save the other person. And you’re both failing, because neither of you will let the other make the sacrifice.”

Silence.

“It’s Denna,” Chronicler said quietly. “It’s the same story. Love that tries to protect by withdrawing. Love that refuses to let go. And the damage done by the gap between them.”

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Kote’s face went very still. Very blank. The mask of the innkeeper, but emptied even of the innkeeper’s humanity — just a face, waiting.

“Don’t,” Bast said softly. A warning.

“I’m not trying to cause pain,” Chronicler said. “I’m trying to name what I see. That’s what I do. That’s what this whole exercise has been about — naming things truly.” He met Kote’s eyes. “You couldn’t save Denna because you couldn’t stop trying to save her on your terms. You couldn’t accept that she had her own way of loving, her own way of sacrificing, her own choices to make. And now you’re doing the same thing with Bast.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same. You’re making his decisions for him. Deciding what he should want. Deciding what he should be willing to sacrifice. You held onto that ring for years rather than give him the choice, because you were afraid he’d make the wrong one.”

Kote’s jaw tightened. A muscle flickered beneath the skin of his temple.

“And maybe he will,” Chronicler continued. “Maybe choosing to stay in this world permanently is the wrong choice. Maybe he’ll regret it. Maybe it will destroy him. But it’s his choice to make. Not yours.”

The fire crackled. The darkness outside pressed against the shuttered windows. And somewhere in the distance, the keening rose and fell, and the deep vibration pulsed, and the things in the night continued their patient vigil.

Kote lifted his hand from the ring.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t nod. Didn’t give permission, because permission was not his to give. He simply removed the obstacle, and let the choice be what it had always been — Bast’s alone.

Bast picked up the ring.

He held it in his palm for a long moment, studying it with Fae eyes that could see things no mortal gaze could perceive. The grain of the roah wood moved and shifted beneath his attention, telling its story in a language older than words.

“This will close the door,” he said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Forever.”

“Yes.”

Bast closed his fist around the ring. His silver eyes were bright and steady and absolutely certain.

“I closed that door years ago,” he said. “This just makes it honest.”

He put the ring on his finger.

Nothing happened. No flash of light, no surge of power, no dramatic transformation. The ring settled onto his hand like it had been made for it — which, perhaps, in some deeper sense, it had.

But something changed. Chronicler felt it — a shift in the air, a settling, as though the room itself had exhaled. The fire burned steadier. The shadows softened. And Bast — Bast straightened, just slightly, his spine aligning, his shoulders squaring, as though a weight he’d been carrying had been redistributed rather than removed.

His glamour flickered. For a moment, both versions of him were visible at once — the human mask and the Fae truth, superimposed, neither dominant. Then the glamour settled, smoother than before, more natural. Less a disguise and more an expression.

“Don’t think this changes anything about the soldiers,” Bast said. His voice was lighter. Not happy, exactly — but unburdened. “They’ll still come back. And when they do—”

“When they do, we’ll face them together.” Kote’s voice was very quiet. “Not with violence. Not with running. Together.”

Bast looked at him. In that look was everything he had been holding back for years — the love, the frustration, the terror, the hope. All of it, layered and contradictory and impossibly Fae.

“Together,” he repeated.

He said it the way some people say prayers.

Chronicler dipped his pen in the inkwell.

His hand ached. His wrist throbbed. The wrapped cloth around his finger was dark with dried blood. But the pen was steady, and the ink flowed, and the words found their way to the page with the particular inevitability of water finding its level.

He wrote what he had seen. What he had heard. What he had understood.

He wrote about a Fae prince who had traded immortality for loyalty, who had burned his bridges and barred his doors and committed himself to a mortal world that was slowly poisoning him, all for the sake of a broken man who couldn’t see that the breaking was mutual.

He wrote about an innkeeper who had held a ring for years, keeping it secret, trying to protect the one person who refused to be protected. Who had watched his student diminish day by day and said nothing, because saying something would have meant admitting that the situation was as dire as they both knew it was.

He wrote about the moment when the ring changed hands, and the silence in the Waystone changed with it — from the silence of two people failing each other to the silence of two people finally, painfully, telling the truth.

And he thought: This is the story. Not the adventures. Not the magic. Not the kings and the killings and the doors. This. Two people, trying to love each other across an impossible distance, making terrible choices out of good intentions, and somehow — somehow — not giving up.

The fire burned. The darkness waited. The night was deep and full of things that had no names.

But inside the Waystone, for the first time in years, the silence felt like something other than emptiness.

It felt like a held breath.

The kind that comes before speaking.