Vacation Days
Kairi was absolutely certain she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. Too much had happened, and her mind was spinning with it all. Her master was gone—or more accurately, she, Kairi, was gone from her master. She’d been with the Moonshadow family for almost her entire life, been with Bezdeh almost her entire life. She’d built a place for herself there. It wasn’t a perfect one, she was aware, but things could have been a lot worse.
She was aware there were free humans, out there… trying to survive on the surface, she assumed, dodging monsterkin and living in tiny huts or trees or whatever. But she’d never actually been anywhere but here in the caves of Crian. Hell, she’d never been outside of this specific city. Or… well, she supposed she’d been there and now wherever here was. She actually had no idea where, physically, Khldom’s temple-thing was. She knew, vaguely, that he did have a physical temple where petitioners could go, but she didn’t actually know anyone who ever had.
She stared upwards at the glowing mushrooms framing the too-large bed, which she thought might be about the size of her bedroom. Her mistress had been punished for her sins by the god of justice. By her god, by their god. Kairi had always paid lip service to Khldom, had dutifully recited her blessings before every case and after filing her papers. She had worshipped him in the same kind of cheerful, thoughtless manner as she approached most things that weren’t the law firm. He was a source of cultural comfort, like pickled mushrooms or p’han nero with a thin spread of garum, like her simple slave’s robe that made her invisible in the marketplace.
Kairi had watched him stare into the eyes of her crying, trembling mistress; she had watched the tears that streaked her owner’s black cheeks turn red with blood.
Kairi pulled the excessively warm and soft blankets (plural, for some unfathomable reason) tighter around herself. Not cold, but shivering.
Her mistress was gone, and she was here, and now she had to figure out what to be next.
With all this going on in her head, it was obvious she wouldn’t be able to sleep, which was why Kairi was extremely surprised when she woke up.
The room was dark, and she groped idly for the candle she kept by the side of her bed. It was, of course, not there, because this was not her bed. However, it didn’t matter, because the room was beginning to gently light itself.
Right. The room. The mushrooms. Which magically responded to her desires. Because god said so.
She stopped groping, and considered rolling over and becoming unconscious again, which seemed easier. However, the terrified fog and confused exhaustion that had followed her out of the courtroom had faded with a good shift’s sleep. Or what she assumed was a good shift’s sleep. Khldom had neglected to put any form of time-telling device in here with her, so it could have been an hour’s nap or a full work and rest shift combined, for all she knew.
She supposed it didn’t matter. There was nothing for her to do here.
The thought made her uncomfortable. There had never been nothing for her to do, even on days off. Something always needed tending to. But her old life was over now, and her new life had yet to be born, or something similarly melodramatic. She suspected she was being very silly, but she felt melodramatic at the moment. Everything was too absurd. She was just a slave; the most interesting thing about her was her species. Who would even think up a bizarre scenario like this? And yet she couldn’t do anything else but face the reality.
When Khldom’s friend or colleague or follower or whatever arrived, she’d be whisked away to a new life, which didn’t sound all bad. But the idea of being away from the underground made her feel dizzy and sick. But, she countered her own counter, it wasn’t like her opinion or thoughts on the matter had anything to do with reality. It would happen whether she dreaded it or not, just like everything that had ever happened or ever would happen.
So, if she stopped concerning herself with what just happened, and stopped concerning herself with what was going to happen, what was she left with right now ?
The situation right now, as she understood it, was that she was being temporarily housed in a magical room in a temple to Khldom, god of justice. This was to protect her… to protect her from her mistress. No, her mistress’s state was… unknown, but bad. Maybe dead. So her mistress’s next of kin, which was her mother. Oh. Oh, right, yeah, okay, that made sense now. Her mistress’s mother was a very scary woman, in traditional dark elf matriarch fashion, and Kairi would not be looked so kindly on, having kind of, uh, directly caused her mistress to get obliterated by a god. And in front of a crowd! The family name would be recovering from this one for a while…
So she was here, instead. She looked around the room again, which somehow felt even larger from the bed. There was a chest of drawers, a desk, what looked suspiciously like a fainting couch, and more comfortable seating than was really justified for a room meant to house one person. She could only sit on one chair at a time. But the whole room was excessive. There were bookshelves by the desk and chairs, but also here by the bed, inset into the bed frame itself.
She had time to kill, and she was stuck in a room with a big comfy bed and books. Reasonably, there was only one thing to do. She grabbed one at random.
It was a romance novel. Kairi wrinkled her nose, set it aside, and grabbed another one. This was a law book, which was infinitely better and more interesting, although them being shelved next to each other was a nightmare. She examined it, and realized it was a law book for a completely different jurisdiction, which was pretty wild because there was only one jurisdiction in underground Crian. She was aware that the weirdos who lived on the surface had their own legal system out of necessity, but the only real Crian was underground. This was for Vieilile. She’d never seen a law book for Vieilile, or any of the other associated dark elf kingdoms. They weren’t really relevant to her.
But, she supposed, if she was going to be going elsewhere, it might be. She could hardly stay in Crian, she supposed. Another dark elf kingdom would be easier to adjust to, surely? And she didn’t really have any marketable skills other than being a well-trained house and secretarial/law slave. Kairi chewed on her bottom lip, considering. It wasn’t the worst idea. And this was at least something to read.
And so Kairi read, and read. She moved around on the bed, flopping this way and that. She figured out how to brighten just the mushrooms directly over head, and got distracted for a bit making them change brightness level on purpose and individually. She knew it was childish and silly, but couldn’t help it. She didn’t think she’d be here for very long, and it wasn’t like “magical mushrooms I can control with my mind thanks to a god” was going to be a feature in her life again. Surely she could be forgiven for a little childishness.
But reading law tomes, while interesting and engaging, was problematic in its own way. She kept forgetting where she was, looking up, and remembering. Remembering everything. She wasn’t back home, and she was never going to be back home and she couldn’t even think about it long enough to consider how she felt about that. It was just a big screaming abyss that she refused to look into.
She was in the process of bouncing between existential dread and trying to focus on court manuscripts when something appeared by the door. She wouldn’t have noticed, except for the fact it arrived with an audible ‘ding!’, which startled her so badly she jumped and probably would have fallen off the bed if it weren’t so unreasonably large. As it was, she just flailed around uselessly, and then squirmed around in the bed until she gathered enough traction to pull herself towards the door.
It was a plate of food.
Of course! Of course the food magically appeared in the supernatural god-made mushroom room! The MushRoom! Of course. Kairi was so far outside the realm of belief that she ’d come full circle and this seemed fine and normal. She slipped off the bed for the first time since she’d woken up and wandered over to the dish. She had to pick it up with both hands; it was heavy with food. She had thought maybe she wouldn’t be able to eat; she hadn’t felt an ounce of hunger up until now. But the smell hit her nose and she was suddenly salivating.
She placed it on the desk and stopped to take it in. There was toasted bread and fried rock snake eggs and slices of meat which, upon examination, she realized must be strips of nox boar belly, which she’d prepared before but never eaten. There were multiple cheeses, hard and soft, and a dull knife with which to spread it onto the bread, and black sesame porridge and blood sausage and she was fucking starving.
Her normal breakfast, it needed to be noted, was generally sargassum soup and plain p’han nero, the black bread that was served here in thick, toasted slices, astonishingly fresh. It was a good breakfast, and if she tried to eat something like this first thing in the morning under most circumstances, she would most certainly make herself sick. It was far too rich. But right now, she was abruptly starving and couldn’t think of anything better than tearing into the boar meat. It was salty and rich and astoundingly fatty and earthy, and she had to follow it with porridge to sop up the excess of flavor it seemed to leave behind in her mouth after she swallowed.
It made perfect sense that a god would eat like a king, and also that a god wouldn’t think anything of giving such a fare to his guests. Kairi informed herself, in between sopping up egg yolk with bread and downing a liquid she realized was honest to god fruit juice of some kind, that obviously it would be unspeakably rude to not eat what she was given when she was a guest. She knew it was a justification. She would feel slave-guilt later, after the boar was one hundred percent completely encased within her stomach.
It was probably the fastest she’d ever eaten a meal. In retrospect, she probably should have savored it. Her stomach grumbled in astonished protest at the richness and sheer amount of food that had just been crammed into it. She was pretty sure she had a visible pooch from just how much she’d swallowed at once.
With an audible groan, she stumbled back over to the bed, crawled in, curled up with her law book, and almost immediately fell back asleep.
The problem with falling asleep at random was that at this point, Kairi had no fucking idea what time or what day it was. She was divorced from the passing of time in this weird little mushRoom, and it was getting pretty disorienting. There were books to read, and every so often, food appeared, always as rich as that first meal had been, but all she had to tell time by was the number of meals she’d eaten. That was no method of telling time at all, because it always showed up before she even registered she was hungry. She had no idea how often it was coming, and she slept randomly and frequently, to an extent that it concerned her. It wasn’t like her to be so lazy.
So for an amount of time she could only register as “five meals worth,” that was her little transitionary life. She read books, slept, and ate. Five meals was how long it took for her to get super, super restless with doing just that.
Even if she told herself that five meals reasonably couldn’t be more than two and a half days—she would have gotten hungrier if she’d been being fed less than once per cycle—she found herself beginning to go a little stir crazy. The room was huge, but it was meticulously clean already. She made the bed in between bouts of sleep. She reorganized the desk. At one point, tired of browsing, she pulled all the books off the shelves and actually put them in something resembling a sensible order, which was how she discovered it was a very eclectic mix of books, with the only notable emphasis the sheer number of law books—some of them ancient.
A lot of the books, law books and otherwise, were in languages that Kairi didn’t recognize. Kairi’s Common was… adequate, but all legal proceedings were done in Elven. Because of that, she rarely used Common, and had only picked up the language because it was simply what was done. Her mistress could speak and read it as well, but they never used it, not in the house, not at work, not at the market. The language was mostly used by slaves and the hunter-gatherers who braved the surface to hunt and trade, going in large parties and coming back with all number of goods. But Kairi had little interaction with either group. Even Khldom, who seemed unclear on exactly how little association Kairi had with anything other than dark elf culture, had spoken Elven with her. Her private diaries were in Elven, for pity’s sake.
At least she recognized the Common language books. Some of the others, she hadn’t the foggiest clue.
It made her wonder what this room was. She didn ’t know how god powers, like, worked. Some of the things he’d said implied he’d generated this room for her to stay in, but that seemed absurd. Maybe it was a modifiable guest house or something? Or, oh, maybe it was a room for priests or clerics. Lucky bastards if so. There had been that desk in the room they’d passed through to get here, which implied there was someone working here and it wasn’t just a big empty temple filled with god. And temples needed priests and clerics and stuff. She’d been past the really big temple to The Silken Mother, and it had a ton. Priests, clerics, slaves, plus, while they might not live in there, there was also the entire Opal family to consider. They were spiritual leaders, but only to do with The Silken Mother. The spider goddess of darkness was ancient and timeless and the dark elves had been worshipping her since before the fall of the elder gods. Khldom was very new on the scene, as far as dark elf lifespans went, and the church was… not, like, super happy about it, from what she’d picked up. She supposed that having to share after aeons of only having one temple around would put anyone out of sorts.
It was all timeless to Kairi, of course. There was her lifespan, and her mother’s, and everything past that was insurmountably long ago and only important inasmuch as older case law wouldn’t hold as much weight if there was newer stuff that contradicted it. It was all just numbers. After meeting Khldom, though… If that was what a young god was like, she sure as fuck never wanted to meet something like The Silken Mother. Not that she had before. A human slave would only meet her if they were being sacrificed, and no one wanted that.
But it would make sense if this room belonged to some ultra-cool priest or cleric of Khldom. That would explain the somewhat eclectic collection of books—she wasn’t going to judge a cleric for the romance novels—in all the different languages. Whoever it was must have been super smart. I mean, if you were serving the God of Justice, that was like being a lawyer and a law secretary, combined and times a thousand, probably! Maybe even a judge, too.
They didn’t have any clerics of Khldom in Crian that she’d ever heard of—and she would have heard of them, given her job and her fami—ex-fam—ex-owners. So she supposed maybe this wasn’t in Crian after all, then.
She supposed she didn’t even know if this was on the same plane as Crian.
Being a slave who specialized in law, Kairi didn’t know much about the planes. She knew about Hell, because she’d heard the word bantered around enough times to have picked up the general gist. She knew about Vathys, the plane of darkness, because that was where The Silken Mother lived.
This could be Vathys.
Please, Khldom, let this not be Vathys.
It was kind of well-lit for Vathys. Could they even have light in Vathys? It was the plane of darkness for fuck’s sake. Probably not Vathys. But it could be anywhere, was her point; gods weren’t limited to the mortal realm. She could be anywhere.
The more she thought about it, the more she was growing curious. She was in a temple of Khldom, she was pretty sure, and she’d thought maybe she’d been in the one she’d heard bits and pieces about, but if there was a cleric here… Well, but maybe clerics of Khldom were just shut-ins. She didn’t actually know much about the like, theology. Khldom was just a name and a concept. Despite all her casual prayers and oaths in his name, she’d never really considered what worshipping him would entail.
It was such a shame to be actually in a mysterious temple of Khldom in an unknown location and to be stuck in a room of books the whole time. Her eyes glanced towards the door and away.
It’s not like she was ungrateful for the really cool room and all the food! She was extremely grateful! It was just, he’d never actually told her to stay in here. If he didn’t want her to look around, she reasoned, the door would be locked. He was a god and she was just some random human. It wasn’t like she could do anything he didn ’t want her to , all he had to do was make her not able to do it. Like by not letting the door open.
Some people in this situation might be freaked out by being locked in a room and not want to know for sure, but Kairi was a slave and being locked in a room was pretty standard. Trying not to think overly much about whether it was technically a good or bad idea, she snuck—there was no need to sneak but she did—towards the door and, after a lot of hesitation, carefully tested the knob.
It turned.
She turned it, and pulled.
The door opened.
It really felt like it should creak ominously, but it didn’t, opening smoothly and in perfect silence. The light from her room cascaded out into the hallway, which was completely unlit. Kairi frowned. Right. Dark elves barely lit anything, ever. Back home, she’d always had a supply of candles, but she hadn’t exactly worn her work pack into the courtroom. She was woefully without supplies.
After hemming and hawing for a moment, she closed the door briefly and went over towards some of the mushrooms growing above the bed. She jumped, failed to reach, and then climbed up onto the bed and halfway up one of the bedposts. She stretched her hand out until she could brush up against some of the dangling, glowing spores. They were on there a little more firmly than she’d thought, but with a bit of shaking, she managed to knock some loose into her hand.
Kairi slid awkwardly down the bedpost and then, glowing spores cupped in one hand, opened the door again.
The hallway was long and ominous, seeming like it was built for someone much taller than her—which, to be fair, it was. She was short for a human, and Khldom was tall for a dark elf. Or maybe it was a god thing. Gods probably got a couple of extra inches.
There was a variety of doors, which she hadn’t noticed the first time she was coming through. She tried a few door knobs, but three in a row were locked. She was beginning to think Khldom had, in fact, locked her in, just one room further along than she’d thought, when one of the door knobs turned.
She opened it a crack, peeking through. She told herself she wasn’t sneaking around, she just didn’t want to disturb any worshippers or clerics of whomever might be here. She was curious, not an asshole, that was all.
Oh, it was the room she’d come through before! That made sense… maybe she was in some sort of wing of living quarters, and the other rooms were also bedrooms, locked from the inside. Maybe she could have locked hers somehow. It hadn’t occurred to her at all to look; generally speaking, the rooms she inhabited locked from the outside if they locked at all.
She opened the door a little wider to get a better view, but the room looked empty. All she’d really noticed when she’d come through before was that it was like if an office was also a temple. Now, looking in, it seemed even weirder. The desk had caught her eyes before, but looking at it now, it was on a raised dais at the very back of the room that sort of separated it off. The rest of the room was largely empty, and yet it still felt claustrophobic. Even with her spores, the darkness felt oppressive, like it was pushing down against her. The roof was high enough up that her dim light didn’t reach it, but rather than feeling cavernous, like The Silken Mother’s temple did, it felt… intimate was definitely the wrong word, but she was struggling to find one that fit better. If intimate could be intimidating. Intimatidating…?
It was empty, though. She was more sure of that the further she crept in. It was dead silent—unfortunate choice of words, perhaps—and it wasn’t like there was much to hide behind. There were some statues, but mostly it was occupied by the desk.
As if putting off the inevitable, she padded quietly over to one of the statues, examining it. It loomed tall, but if she held up her light and peered, she could see enough contrast to make out what it was. A woman—dark elf, obviously—carved from black stone, blindfolded. In one hand she held up a pair of balanced scales, and in the other, she held a terrifyingly realistic sword. The whole thing was too realistic. It felt like she might come to life and lop Kairi’s head off with that sword. Kairi shivered. She was familiar with the symbolism. Justice was meant to be blind, the scales represented balance, the sword represented power. She’d read somewhere that there used to be a lot more of these sorts of statues around courtrooms and stuff, but most of them had been modified to depict Khldom. This was the first time she’d actually seen an unmodified Lady of Justice… how weird that it was here, in a temple to Khldom. Kairi would have thought there’d just be statues of him, symbols of him. That was how The Silken Mother’s temple was, at least.
She looked away from the statue, and explored the rest of the room, bare feet padding quietly against stone. There really wasn’t much in it, save the desk, which she was circling back around to. There were two other doors besides the one she’d come through, but she was wary about exploring further. This room, at least, was quiet and empty. She really didn’t want to bother anyone.
Finally, the desk on the dias. It was deeply ominous, in a way, but Kairi thought that might be be because it was designed for someone larger than her. That wasn’t uncommon. It probably belonged to a cleric or priest that worked here. As before, she couldn’t help frowning at it. It should be a crime to have something so disorganized be so prominently displayed. It was one thing if the desk in one’s room got a little cluttered time-to-time, although even that Kairi had a relatively low tolerance for. But this was a desk on a freaking dias! It was elevated! Even if this was just someone’s private office, it felt disrespectful to have such clutter on proud display. Particularly in a god’s temple, for pity’s sake. There were disorganized piles of paper spilled every which way, stones and charms and baubles strewn haphazardly here and there. Quills that weren’t even properly in their rests! Just looking at it was making her twitch.
To Kairi’s credit, she managed to resist for about three whole minutes. She told herself she had no place touching someone else’s things, that she didn’t even know who this desk belonged to or if it was in use at all. But in the end, the siren call of disorder overcame her entirely, and before she knew it, she was organizing papers into neat piles, clipping relevant case files together, cleaning dried ink off of quills and setting them neatly in what holders she could find, and even wiping the desk clean. She couldn’t do a proper job, with no cleaning supplies readily available, but even just dusting was a step up for this desk.
When she was done with the top of the desk, she found that the drawers were even worse. Doing her best to keep to the general order of where things went, she organized, cleaned out, and carefully unfolded and flattened crumpled pages. She didn’t throw anything away; anything and everything could be important. She just organized. Made sure everything was where it ought to have been based on what little rhyme and reason there was to find amongst the chaos. She may have labeled a few things, just to make it clear where certain things could be found.
All told, it was an infinitely more satisfying way to spend her time than locked in a cool room. For the entire time she was cleaning, Kairi did not think once about her current circumstances or her old master. There was only the task in front of her, simple and satisfying.
At least, until the door opened, anyway.
Kairi looked up, eyes wide, from where she stood organizing quills by nib size. She had been lulled into a false sense of security by the quiet as time rolled past, but this was, in fact, a temple, and those did, in fact, tend to have people in them. Kairi was expecting to see a priest, but what she saw instead was much worse. Who had walked through the door but Khldom, god of Justice, himself?
Kairi leapt away from the desk, putting the quills down with a clatter. The room seemed to compress inwards, and it wasn’t just her anxiety—it was the pressure associated with being around divinity, which she’d experienced in crushing amounts in the courtroom and to a lesser extent in the time she’d spend in Khldom’s presence since. If the room had felt ominous or intimidating before, the effect was tenfold or more now. Kairi stumbled off the dias as if gravity had increased and was pushing her down.
“What were you doing at my desk?” Khldom asked, and Kairi felt a wave of dizziness; she couldn’t tell if it was coming from an internal or external source.
“Y,” she squeaked. “Your desk?” She risked a glance upwards, and was slightly relieved to see that Khldom was not looking directly at her—she had seen exactly what his gaze could do in the courtroom—but at the desk, which he was walking slowly towards. Or maybe it only felt slowly because she was existing in some kind of twisty-turny upside-down reality made up entirely of anxiety and the side effects of divinity.
“Indeed. No one else is here,” he said. She was too out-of-it to read his tone, but she didn’t think he sounded angry. Not that that would mean he wasn’t, of course. “So it could not belong to anyone else.”
“No one? But… but this is a temple, you said, I thought, that is,” she stammered out.
“It is.”
“The… priests…”
“I have none.”
“The worshippers…”
“Visit only when they have exhausted all other options. You did not answer my question,” he informed her.
Question? Oh. Right.
“I was just cleaning it!” she squeaked out. “I swear!”
“Cleaning it?”
“I-thought-it-belonged-to-a-priest,” she rushed. “I was just… straightening up.”
Khldom had stepped on to the dias, circled behind the desk, and sat down on the grand chair that she now knew was grand for a good fucking reason. He was examining the desk, flipping idly through paper stacks. She saw him lift up one of the little notes she’d written and her head swam with panic. She’d fucking cleaned God’s desk. She’d been rummaging through his things without even knowing what they were. She’d just recognized mess and legal documents and set to it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, to be fair, it was to her.
He glanced up at her and her entire world seized down to the just his shockingly green eyes, seeming as bioluminescent as her mushroom spores in the dim light. Her heart might have stopped beating as the moment before the inevitable punishment stretched out.
Then he blinked.
“Why are you on the floor?”
Kairi was unable to break eye contact, but realized from the context her body was giving her that she had, at some point, collapsed onto her hands and knees on the stone floor.
“Uh?” This really did come out as more of a squeak. She didn’t want to not answer a direct question again, but also didn’t know that ‘abject terror’ was the answer he’d want to hear. “Because I love… floor?” she attempted.
Khldom squinted at her, a slight narrowing of the eyes. “Are you feeling ill? Perhaps the food has been too rich after all.” He stood up. “Let’s get you back to your room.”
He looked away to step off the dias, and that broke whatever had been freezing her in place.
“Oh-totally-fine-I-can-get-there-myself-I-know-the-way-of-course-I-do-haha-I-got-here-myself-didn’t-I-sorry-about-that-by-the-way-I’m-leaving-now-sorry-bye.” She half scrambled, half ran out of the room and, not looking back, all the way down the hallway, to her room, and slammed the door shut behind her. She sunk back down onto the floor immediately, legs trembling, back against the door.
For fuck’s sake. She’d been here for three days and she’d already managed to do a sacrilege. Was this a sacrilege? It felt like one. She’d cleaned a god ’s desk. She whimpered quietly to herself, just relieved she’d managed to get out of there without being immediately smote. She was so frantic and relieved in equal measure, in fact, that it took her several hours to calm down enough to wonder why a god’s desk had been so untenably messy in the first place.