Chapter 020 - Treasured Memory

  For what seemed to be a long time, the only sounds were the soft clink of a teaspoon against ceramic and the quiet, rhythmic sounds of Mark’s own breathing as he wrestled to restore his composure. The Irish coffee was warm, the scone, surprisingly light and fluffy, simple things to focus on as his mind relaxed. He ate slowly, methodically, each bite a conscious act to rebuild what had moments ago crumbled to dust.

  Across the table, Dawn was giving her own scone an intense, almost predatory level of attention. She sliced it with precision, a calculating and perfect cut that seemed out of place for enjoying a pastry, applying the jam and cream in neat, perfectly contained layers. She wasn't eating it so much as she was dissecting it, inspecting the results then assembling it to an unseen specification, her focus absolute. It was her own shield, a task to occupy her hands and eyes, a way to avoid the broken man sitting opposite her. Maybe this world has its own levels of toxic masculinity, expectations he had just broken as opposed to being stronger.

  Mark finished, his plate empty, so he pushed away to the side. The silent, grounding task was over, the void still present, but neatly packed away for now. He took a final, long sip of the coffee, he was exhausted, but the frantic panic had subsided. In its place, something else, a need to create even a little balance in the scales. It was a petty thing on many levels, he had just dumped the raw truth of his existence on a complete stranger, and now he wanted a little something in return.

  "So," he began, his voice surprisingly even, though raw from his earlier outburst. He looked directly at Dawn, forcing her to finally lift her gaze from the half-eaten pastry. "You have your report."

  She blinked, confused by the sudden shift in his tone, the emotional wreckage becoming almost professional. "My report?"

  "For the guildmaster," Mark clarified, his voice flat. "Assuming it's one of those, or whoever paid you at least. You wanted to know what I was doing, who I was talking to. Well, you just got the full, unabridged version. I imagine someone will enjoy the details." He leaned back against the plush seat, a flicker of his old professional confidence returning. "Now how about something in return?"

  Dawn stared at him, her sharp eyes narrowed in assessment. The dynamic had shifted again, and she was struggling to keep up. "Return for what exactly?"

  "Just exchange of information," Mark stated simply. "You have my origin story here, a more personal one than you really have any rights to. So, I want a story of yours, not of the guild, or the job, tell me something real about Dawn the Dissector of Delicate Desserts."

  The request hung in the air between them. Dawn looked genuinely taken aback, her default expression of guarded professionalism faltering. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, clearly searching for the right words.

  Dawn’s first instinct was to refuse. To shut him down with a cold, clipped dismissal and walk out of the shop. This wasn’t part of the job. Her life was her own, private. This man, this emotional wreck had no right to ask. It was an unreasonable, unprofessional request.

  And the title he had just adorned to her name, Dissector of Delicate Desserts, was he attempting to insult her, imply she was some kind of savage that couldn't eat with company? She glanced towards his plate, a mass of crumbs, jam and cream, the signs of a person that wasted more than he ate, the illusion of someone that enjoys things for their extravagance over substance. Then she looked at her own plate, the neat lines across the crumbling sides of her half eaten scone, not a single crumb wasted, no spilled jam… precise almost like a surgeon…

  She looked at him, truly looked at him, she saw past this fresh professional illusion he had made, magic or not there was some talent there, but she could see the hollowed-out emptiness in his eyes. He had given her something real, a raw and unfiltered glimpse into his grief, immeasurable and uncomparable by its scale, even if it a fantasy, he believed it enough to be affected deeply. She could keep this simple.

  “I’m technically part of the Provisioner’s Guild, part of the scouts and hunters”, she started, but his face only displayed disinterest, he at least let her carry on.

  She slipped the glove from her left hand, revealing her tattoo, “I possess the Heart of the huntress, and…” she reached to her left shoulder, tapping herself and pausing for a moment, “I also possess the Heart of the Feline, it allows my bond with Taz.”

  Mark just stared at her, the disinterest replaced with a void of offense? She had given what he had asked.

  He gave a small motion to the side with his head, it felt like he was reading her like one with the right Heart may do the mind, but he couldn't, could he?

  His question broke as he answered, “I think that's what you are, and it seems you didn't believe part of that yourself.”

  He was right, but…

  “I’ve no interest in your secrets, I just wanted something real, something that makes you who you are.” And with that he stopped, returning back to his destroyed scone.

  Maybe… maybe a small piece of her own story wouldn’t hurt, a settling of accounts for what he had given. Maybe it would give him some ground to not feel so alone, something small from here, something real. She let the moment hold for a while.

  “I’m alone,” she started, words she failed to remember saying to anyone else, “For the last 10 years, since my grandfather passed from this place.” Mark remained silent, maybe from surprise she had agreed, or truly listening.

  “My grandfather was a great man,” she began, the words feeling rusty in her mouth. She had not spoken of him in years. “Not great like a warrior, but… solid. Like an old tree, rooted deep in the mountain. Unmovable.”

  She remembered the feel of his hands, calloused from a lifetime of work she never understood, the faint, clean scent of wood varnish that always clung to him. “He wasn’t from the Collective. He was a migrant, one of the last to leave First Landing before the gates were sealed. He came to the mountains looking for a new start, like everyone else.”

  He had lived to be just over five hundred years old, a respectable age for any in the Jade-tier, but his power was of a kind the Titan Collective had no use for, no respect for. “He possessed the Heart of Color,” Dawn explained, her gaze drifting to the window, to the memory of a light that no longer existed for her. “It was a precious design, one of the old ones from before the exodus, but it was unwanted here. The Guilds want Hearts that can shape stone or steel, that can reinforce a shield or track a beast. His was… different, He was… different.”

  A flicker of warmth, a ghost of a memory, touched her. She fought to keep the emotion from her voice, to keep the words as flat and factual as for any mission report, any conversation with an officer.

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  “His magic… it wasn’t for war, or for industry. It was for art. For joy.” She remembered being a small child, sitting on the floor of his cramped workshop as he worked. “He could bring a thought to life. He’d pull a color from the air, a shade of blue so deep it felt like the sky at midnight, and weave it into shapes. He could make a bird of pure light that would flutter around the room before dissolving into motes of dust, or a butterfly with wings of shimmering sunset. It was… foolishness. Childish things.”

  She stopped, the memory too sharp, too warm. She cleared her throat, pushing the image away, and finally met Mark’s gaze across the table. “That was his magic.”

  She watched him process the idea of magic as art, his expression shifting from confusion to something she couldn't quite read. It made her uncomfortable. She pushed on, she’d started this, and was going to get this over with.

  "He's the reason for my ice leopard's name," she said, the admission tasting like rust. "Taz."

  She saw the flicker of recognition in Mark's eyes. The name of the beast that had just jumped him in the streets, that had terrified him. "My grandfather used to tell me stories, he remembered some from the old books, the ones from the first generation on The Ark. There was one about a snarling, mindless beast, a whirlwind of teeth and fury that tore through the landscape, causing chaos wherever it went. He called it ‘Taz’. When my own companion came into my life, the name… it just seemed to fit."

  The memory brought a fleeting, ghost of a smile to her lips before she stamped it out. "The children loved him. He'd draw crowds in the market, painting pictures in the air for them. But the Guilds…" Her voice hardened, the warmth vanishing completely. "They scorned him. They saw his magic as a frivolous distraction, a pointless waste of five centuries of dedication. They treated him like an outcast that had no place in the mountains."

  She looked down at the table, at the intricate patterns in the wood, anything to avoid the sympathetic look she assumed she would find on Mark’s face. She didn’t want his pity, she could stop here, it was enough, but his memory deserved more.

  "I never knew my parents," she stated, the words simple, it was a fact, clear and un-denyable. "My grandfather protected me, kept me safe before we were allowed within the walls." She finally raised her eyes to meet his, her own gaze as cold and hard as the mountain peaks. "They weren't as lucky. Living outside the city is unsafe, he could only save me."

  She somehow felt lighter, maybe better to have told his story, even the fragment of it, the pride she felt, it was real and it needed to be shared. She drained the last of the Irish coffee, the unexpected warmth of the whisky and the sweetness of the cream a strange but welcome sensation. She hadn't realized how tense she was until the heat began to loosen the knot in her shoulders. The scone, which she had initially dismissed, had been surprisingly good. It was a moment of simple, unexpected comfort in a day that had been anything but.

  Setting the empty mug down with a soft click, she replayed the conversation in her head. The words had left her feeling exposed, raw. She had shared more of herself with this stranger in the last ten minutes than she had with anyone in ten years. She questioned herself as to why, what was a reason to share such a thing, was the whisky in the coffee stronger? No she could taste it was just a splash.

  Yet, as she thought back on it, one detail stuck out, a piece of data that didn't fit the expected pattern. When she had spoken of Taz, of the snarling, chaotic beast from her grandfather’s stories, she had been watching Mark closely, expecting to see a fresh wave of fear, a flinch of remembered terror, being ready in case such a creature would trigger him again.

  But that’s not what she saw.

  For the briefest of moments, beneath the exhaustion and the lingering grief in his eyes, she was almost certain she had seen the corner of his mouth twitch. It wasn't a grimace of pain. It wasn't fear under his cracked mask. It looked, impossibly, like a smile.

  Mark listened, letting the silence settle as she finished. He didn't offer sympathy, his own grief was too raw for that, and he suspected she would have rejected it anyway. Instead, he just gave her the space she had stolen from him, a quiet moment of acknowledgment for a life that had clearly been complicated. Her story, though alien in its details, held a familiar shape. The loss, isolation, and the struggle to find one's place in a world, a struggle he was starting once again.

  Her voice pulled him from his thoughts, the guarded, professional tone returning, though it lacked its earlier edge. "When I mentioned the beast he created… Taz," she said, her sharp eyes searching his face. "Your reaction… it wasn't the fear I expected. You almost smiled."

  The image formed in Mark’s mind instantly, not of a terrifying monster, but of a spinning, gibbering brown cartoon character.. A snarling, mindless beast, a whirlwind of teeth and fury. There was no mistake, she had been given stories of The Looney Tunes' Tasmanian Devil. It was a fragment of his own childhood, the cartoons of an age before streaming, waiting after school as its schedule approached.

  He could have explained. He could have told her about television, he assumed there wasn't an equivalent here, about animation, about his world where monsters were designed for laughter, not fear. He could have told her that her grandfather, in his loneliness and love, had passed down a treasured, wildly inaccurate memory.

  But as he looked at her, at the rare, unguarded flicker of emotion in her eyes when she spoke of the man who raised her, he saw the story for what it was. A memory of her grandfather, a shared joy between an old man and a small girl in the shadow of the mountains. To correct her, to explain the simple truth, would only be a cruelty, a petty attempt at point scoring. Some things were more important than being right, even now.

  He simply shook his head slightly, a small, weary gesture of dismissal. "Its a treasured memory," he said, his voice quiet. "Who am I to find terror in something like that."

  The quiet returned to their booth, but it was a different kind of quiet now. The raw, emotional charge had dissipated, leaving a fragile truce in its place. Mark finished the last of his scone, the simple sweetness a stark contrast to the bitter taste of his own confession. He felt drained, but also strangely lighter, he had said what he knew no one would want to listen to, his start that was also his end.

  After a few more minutes of shared silence, he caught the waiter's eye and gestured for the bill. The young man returned promptly, placing two small slips of paper on the table. Mark looked at his, a set of numbers that was a bit higher than he'd have liked, but he was relieved to see the Irish coffees hadn't been included. He counted out the coins, the small act of commerce another step back toward a semblance of normalcy.

  "The scones were excellent, by the way," Mark said to the waiter as he collected the payment. "And thank you for the coffee. It was exactly what I needed."

  The waiter beamed. "My pleasure, sir. Tomorrow those are our special. Thank you again for the idea."

  With a final, polite nod, he departed, leaving Mark and Dawn alone once more. As he gathered the remains of his shopping, preparing to leave, Dawn finally spoke, her voice quiet and thoughtful.

  "I appreciate... what you think you've lost," she said, choosing her words with precision. "The grief is real, I can see that." She paused, then met his gaze directly, her sharp eyes filled with a new, analytical intensity. "But I can't accept that you're a nobody, or the scale of what you told me."

  Mark let out a weary sigh. "It's the truth. I wish it wasn’t."

  "No," she countered, shaking her head with a certainty that was unnerving. "There has to be something more. You just don’t learn to see people like me, you don’t get to fish out half-truths, and I’m sure Oracles don’t favor nobodies,"

  She had all but confirmed what he suspected earlier, she hadn't been honest when she mentioned her Hearts. But now it was his turn to be skeptical. "Then how?" he asked, the challenge born from his continued and prolonged exhaustion. He was tired of being the curiosity, the potential political pawn. "How do I prove that I have noone left, that I am nobody? To you. To anyone else who comes for me?"

  Dawn was silent for a long moment, her brow furrowed in concentration. She stared at him, not as a target or a threat, he had proved he was unworthy of one and laughable to be the other. He could almost see the gears turning in her predatory mind.

  "There is a simple way," she said slowly, leaning forward slightly. "Just because the library confirmed you are not from here, doesn't mean you don't belong to someone. Let's go find out."

  And with that she was out of the chair and heading to the door, patience in the moment was obviously not her strong point. Mark was left questioning, was there wisdom in following her, or would this lead to some elaborate trap from some politician. What choice did he really have, answers would not be found in another coffee…