"It's amazing what a hot bath can do," he said, setting the food down. "Shame they aren't more common. Which one of these books teaches you to conjure a tub of hot water?"
Her expression pinched into academic disdain. "You're referring to advanced hydro-thaumaturgy. The Mana cost alone would be prohibitive. A profound waste of arcane energy for trivial comfort."
She shook her head. "Magic is for understanding the fundamental principles of the cosmos, Projo. Not for taking a bath."
Projo's mouth opened, a sharp retort on his tongue about the "practical use" of not freezing to death or stinking like a corpse. He saw the argument play out in his head—a pointless clash of his grounded reality against her cosmic theories—and he let it go. It wouldn't accomplish anything.
He let out a slow breath, his frustration giving way to weary patience.
"Falira, eat your stew."
The command was quiet, but it caused Falira's rebuttal to die on her lips. She was prepared for a debate, for an illogical, emotional outburst she could easily dismantle with facts. She was not prepared for a simple command she couldn't argue against.
Slowly, she obeyed.
Projo paced the tower as he ate, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other—eyes wandering across the shelves. He saw titles that made his mind itch with curiosity: The Properties of Meteoric Iron, Principles of Elemental Forging, Runes of Warding and Abjuration. Other titles were completely foreign, whispers of a world he never knew existed: A Cartographer's Guide to the Astral Sea, The Lunar Cycles of Lycanthropy, The Lesser Arcanum.
His gaze lingered on an iron-bound tome titled A Compendium of Monstrous Anatomy. A practical choice, given his new line of work. That would be the next one. The practical knowledge he needed to survive long enough to understand the poetry.
Projo hefted the iron-bound Compendium of Monstrous Anatomy onto the table, its weight promising practical knowledge. He cracked it open, grimacing at a diagram of a Spindle Crab's internal organs. A grim smile touched his lips; he could have used this a few days ago.
He had just started deciphering the dense, spidery script describing the creature's nerve clusters when a small, sharp ahem broke the quiet.
Projo looked up.
Falira had set her spoon aside, The Poetics of Dust and Starlight open before her at the page he'd marked.
"Regarding the passage you highlighted," she said carefully, not looking at him. "The one concerning the 'tower of silence'." She paused, choosing her words with precision. "I have... re-evaluated my interpretation of the author's primary thesis."
She finally lifted her gaze to meet his. The usual condescension was gone, replaced by a raw, academic intensity that felt far more vulnerable.
"I had previously categorized emotional input as 'noise'—a chaotic variable to be eliminated to ensure the purity of the data. But your intervention suggests otherwise. Perhaps the noise is part of the pattern."
Projo closed the Compendium softly, giving her his full attention.
"The author's argument," she continued, "could be interpreted to mean that the 'noise' is not an impediment to the pattern, but is, in fact, part of the pattern. That to build a tower of silence is not to achieve focus, but to observe an incomplete equation."
She took a slow, shaky breath, the admission costing her dearly. "My methodology may have created a significant blind spot. The primary catalyst for your abilities appears to be this 'human connection' variable I have been systematically excluding. It is... an oversight."
A smirk appeared on his face.
"My dear Falira!" He jested loudly. "Did you just admit that you were wrong?" He stood abruptly, playing it up. "If you'll excuse me, I need to go warn the townsfolk that the end times are coming."
Her face went scarlet. "That is a gross oversimplification!" she snapped, "My statement was a methodological course-correction, not a precursor to some sort of apocalyptic anomaly!"
She tried and failed to rise, pain pulling her back into her chair. "Sit down, you insufferable blacksmith! The townsfolk are in no danger from my intellectual rigor!"
Projo's smirk vanished the instant he saw the pain on her face. An instinctive, protective lurch carried him three steps closer before his own promise brought him up short, his hand hovering uselessly in the air. "Are you alright? Do you need another potion?"
Her anger faltered into confusion at his sudden concern. "No. The potion has done its work. This is just… residual trauma. It will pass." She steadied herself with a controlled breath. "Your concern is… an unnecessary expenditure of energy."
Projo gave her a sad smile. "You know, if I said 'unnecessary expenditure of energy' as much as you do, my mentor would have unnecessarily expended his hand upside my head."
The simple statement landed in the quiet tower with a strange weight.
Falira's mouth opened slightly as if to form a rebuttal, but no words came out. She couldn't categorize the statement. It wasn't an argument to be dismantled or a variable to be measured. It was just... a piece of a life, offered up in the space between them. Her gaze flicked from his weary smile to her own hands, the certainty in her eyes faltering into confusion.
A silence followed, but it wasn't hostile or awkward. Just two worlds colliding and leaving both a little unsteady in the wreckage.
Projo tried to sit and read again, but found himself quickly disturbed by a familiar restlessness in his limbs. His body, honed by fifteen years of swinging a hammer, felt like a spring coiled to its limit. The goblin fight had been a brutal reminder of his own incompetence with a blade. He had won through sheer force and desperation, not skill. That couldn't last.
He closed the book and stood, stretching his arms over his head until his back popped. "I can't just sit here—my body isn't made for it. I need to move."
Falira looked up from her journal, her expression a blank slate. "A logical observation. The human musculature requires regular exertion to avoid atrophy."
"Right," Projo said, rolling his shoulders. "And I need to practice with this sword. You said it yourself, I swing it like a sledgehammer."
He walked to the center of the circular room, the space immediately feeling cramped and cluttered. He made a slow, experimental swing with an imaginary blade. "I need a place to... train. Somewhere I can swing this thing around without taking out a bookshelf."
Falira's quill stopped moving. Her analytical gaze, which had been fixed on his face, drifted downward for a fraction of a second, tracing the line of his shoulder and the corded muscle of his bare arm before snapping back up. Her face remained a neutral mask, but Projo saw a flicker in her eyes, a brief moment where the researcher was replaced by... something else.
She cleared her throat, her gaze becoming intensely focused on a crack in the stone wall behind him. "A designated area for... kinetic drills... would be required," she said, her voice a little too formal. "One that is spatially adequate and minimizes the potential for collateral damage or unwanted observation."
She paused, as if running a complex calculation in her head. A faint pink tinge appeared on the tips of her ears.
"The cliffside path," she said finally, her voice crisp and efficient again. "The one we took to the goblin cave. A half-kilometer north, it widens into a flat, stable ledge. It is isolated. It should be... suitable for your purposes."
She immediately looked back down at her journal and began to write with a furious, focused energy, as if the conversation was already over and the data was being logged.
Projo nodded simply. "That works, I suppose. Do you need anything before I leave? Or need me to pick anything up while I'm out?"
Falira's quill didn't stop moving. "My personal requirements are not a primary variable," she said flatly. "The integrity of the research takes precedence."
She was silent for a moment, the scratching of the quill the only sound. Projo waited, about to turn and leave, assuming that was her final, clinical dismissal.
"However," she continued, still not looking at him. "The poultice on my wound will need to be changed this evening. The current supply of herbs is beginning to desiccate." She finally stopped writing and looked up. "If you are already making a trip into town, procuring a fresh bundle of Kingsfoil from the apothecary would be an efficient use of the excursion."
Projo cocked one eyebrow. The words were a strange, foreign language to him, but the meaning was clear enough. "Kingsfoil," he repeated. "Right."
Outside the tower, Projo took a deep breath of the misty, salt-heavy air, the scent a welcome change from the tower's atmosphere of old paper and strange herbs.
He found Master Corvus, the cartographer from Silas's tip, at The Chart & Compass, a quiet shop filled with maps and charts. The man needed a guard for a dangerous day surveying reef formations and offered three gold pieces. Projo agreed, the arrangement settled quickly with no fuss.
Next, he stopped at the alchemist's shop, Philtered Seawater, and purchased a fresh bundle of Kingsfoil for Falira's wound. Two silver pieces exchanged hands, and Projo departed with his errands complete. Job secured, medicine in hand, he was ready to focus on the task that mattered most: learning to wield his sword.
He started his warmup by jogging back up to the tower. By the time he reached the top, his heart was a heavy drum against his ribs, and a thin sheen of sweat cooled his skin in the sea breeze.
He burst through the tower door—making Falira jump at the sudden noise—shouted "Hi!" as he dropped the Kingsfoil next to her book mid-stride, then looped behind her chair and headed back to the door. Right before he left the tower, he shouted "Bye!" over his shoulder—then he thudded the door shut behind him, footsteps already pounding north toward the cliffside ledge.
He found the wind-scoured shelf overlooking a churning grey sea. Waves slammed the cliffs below, the spray carried up on the cold, salt-heavy wind. It was a lonely, brutal empty space.
It was perfect.
Projo started with what he knew. He stripped off his shirt and heaved a water-smoothed boulder back and forth across the ledge, the burn in his muscles a familiar ache. When he could no longer lift it, he dropped and drove himself through push-ups, his chest pounding like a hammer on steel.
Finally, slick with sweat and breathing hard, he picked up the longsword.
The first swings were clumsy, all brute force and wasted energy, a sledgehammer where a scalpel was needed. He slowed down, breaking each strike into pieces: a thrust, a cut, a chop. The clumsy swings were a dull whoosh. But then, just once, he got the edge alignment right, and the blade sang with a high shiiing.
He chased that sound for the rest of the afternoon.
When he finally stopped, the sun had sunk over the sea, painting the clouds in hues of orange and purple. Sweat cooled on his skin, and his body ached in the best way. The sword was still foreign, but less so. He slung his shirt over one shoulder and started down the cliff path.
Around a bend, he spotted an old fisherman perched on a rocky outcropping, basket heavy with silver-scaled rockfish. On impulse, Projo climbed down.
"Good catch," he said, stopping a respectful distance away.
"Tide's been kind," the old man rasped.
"Would you be willing to sell one of those?" Projo asked. "The biggest one."
The man hesitated, but five coppers for a single fish convinced him. Soon Projo was climbing back to the main path, the cool weight of the fish in his hand. As he neared the tower, he caught himself smiling, curious to see the look on Falira's face when he asked where she kept the frying pan.
The heavy door creaked open, admitting Projo and a gust of cool, salty air. Shirtless, sweat-slick, and grinning, he held up the kelp-wrapped fish like a trophy.
"I brought dinner!" he announced, voice too loud for the quiet room.
Falira looked up, spectacles sliding down her nose as her gaze flicked from the fish to his bare chest. For half a heartbeat, her eyes lingered—then snapped back to his face, mask snapping into place.
His triumphant smile faltered. "It just now occurred to me… I have no idea how to actually cook this thing." He glanced around. "Do you have, uh… a frying pan?"
Falira stared at him for a long, silent moment, as if he had just asked her to explain the concept of humor. "This is a laboratory, Projo, not a tavern cookhouse. The hearth fire is calibrated for a consistent low heat for potion brewing. It is unsuitable for searing flesh."
She seemed to analyze the problem for a moment, then gave a curt nod toward the hearth. "However, that flat slate stone next to the fire is used for rapidly desiccating reagents. It will hold the heat. It should suffice."
She looked him up and down one last time before her gaze dropped back to her book. "Put a shirt on. You're dripping sweat on my floor."
Projo set the fish on the slate and pulled on his damp shirt, mumbling under his breath a stream of playful gibberish where the only intelligible word was "dripping." He gutted the fish, then arranged it on the slate and pushed it closer to the fire.
He looked at the dripping handful of slimy fish guts that were left over, then held them out dramatically toward Falira. "Do you need these? As like, ingredients?"
The quiet scratching of her quill stopped, and she slowly looked up from her book.
"For stuff," he added, wiggling the mess at her.
Falira slammed her book shut, color rising hot in her cheeks. "That is utterly unsanitary and the single most revolting question I have ever been asked. Dispose of that biological waste immediately! And try not to get any on the scrolls!"
Grinning, Projo carried the guts toward the door, yelling over his shoulder, "Let me know if you want me to ask an even more revolting question so you don't have to remember this one as being the worst!"
Outside, he flung the guts over the cliff, then returned to the fire and the sizzling fish.
He nudged the stone closer to the coals, and without looking at her, casually asked, "So, why is your hair blue?"
The pages of her book stopped rustling, and a long silence stretched.
"It is a stable chromatic alteration," she said finally. "An unforeseen but harmless side effect from a prolonged alchemical experiment involving a diluted Azurite solution."
She pushed her spectacles back up her nose. "The pigmentation is permanent. It is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant."
Projo slowly turned and looked at her over his shoulder. He gave a slow nod, then turned his attention back to their dinner. He let the silence hang, then murmured, "I think it's really… pretty."
The air in the tower went still. Even the cauldron seemed more quiet.
Falira stared at him as if translating an unknown tongue. "Pretty," she repeated clinically. "A subjective aesthetic judgment. It has no empirical value and is therefore an irrelevant data point."
But out of the corner of his eye, Projo saw her hand drift—just for a moment—to brush the end of her blue braid before snapping back to the page like she'd been burned.
He said nothing, only flipped the fish with his dagger, the sizzling loud in the charged quiet.
When the flesh finally flaked apart white and tender, they began eating in brittle silence. The meal should have been a triumph, but each bite sat heavy. He'd pushed too far, too fast. He worried he had made her feel cornered, uncomfortable in the only space she had. He found each bite of his fish seasoned with regret.
Projo kept his eyes on his plate, feeling a familiar loneliness creep back in. When they were finished, he cleaned the plates wordlessly before retreating to his corner. He lay back on the musty bedroll, the heavy Compendium of Monstrous Anatomy open across his knees. The dense script of the pages blurred together, lost beneath the weight of the silence across the room.
"I'll be leaving before dawn," he said finally, eyes fixed on the page. "Doing some bodyguard work for a map maker in town."
The scratching of the quill stopped. The stillness that followed was so sharp it hurt.
"Leaving?" Falira's voice was brittle, clinical in tone but cracked at the edges. "That is an unacceptable deviation. Our agreement was for collaboration. An entire day of unobserved activity, engaging in high-risk behavior with an unknown third party, introduces an unacceptable number of uncontrolled variables."
She paused, and when she spoke again, there was a raw, frustrated edge to her clinical tone. "The integrity of the research will be compromised. We have barely established a baseline. We cannot proceed with such a significant gap in the data."
Projo exhaled slowly, not looking up. "What would you have me do then? What's your plan?"
That broke something open in her.
"My plan?" she repeated. "My plan is not for you to sit on a bedroll and read. My plan is to stop gathering contaminated, anecdotal data and begin a structured, methodical protocol of discovery."
She rose, pacing with a predator's energy despite the stabbing pain in her side. "That cartographer offers you three gold to be a glorified pack mule. A reactive, defensive assignment with a high risk of uncontrolled variables and a low data yield. It is inefficient."
She stopped and turned to him. "Here is the alternative. We form a partnership. A research venture. We will seek out and accept local contracts—bounties, security assignments, artifact retrievals—that are conducive to our study."
She started pacing again. "We will be the ones to choose the environment. We will document every application of your abilities. Before each engagement, we establish a baseline. After, we analyze the output, the cost, the side effects. Every fight becomes a field test. Every monster becomes a new set of parameters. You need coin. I need data. Together, we get both."
She stopped directly in front of him, eyes bright with fear and hunger. "And when we are not in the field, we will continue the real work here. Safely. Methodically. Intimacy as a measurable threshold. The siphoning quantified. That is my plan. Not just coin—answers."
The tower rang with her words.
A chuckle broke from Projo's chest, deep and unexpected. He pointed at her, grinning. "You. I like you."
The sudden, genuine laughter caught Falira completely off guard, color rising in her cheeks.
He stood, paced around her once, then stopped in front of her. "There's just one problem." He bent over, his face deliberately close to her bandaged side. "How long can you walk around like this? Can you jump? Climb? Fight?"
Her face went crimson once more. "That is a temporary logistical impediment," she snapped. Pain tore through her side, forcing a hiss from her lips. "My physical condition is a quantifiable variable. The poultice is reducing the inflammation, and the cellular regeneration, while slow, is proceeding within expected parameters."
She glared at him, the wounded scholar refusing to be defined by her physical weakness. "My function is analysis. Strategy. You are the brute force. My capacity to leap is irrelevant. My capacity to think is not."
Projo studied her coolly, then asked, "Anyone ever tell you that you're stubborn?"
He rolled back onto his bedroll. "Fine, you can tag along, but you might want to get some rest. We leave early, and if your wound ends up slowing you down—" he rolled toward the wall, his voice like smooth iron:
"—I'll have to carry you back."