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The Blooming Grove is peaceful in twilight. Of course, Essek reasons as he pops into existence a ways away from the Clay family homestead, it has always been a place of peace. The time when it wasn't does not bear remembering.
These days, Essek walks. Soft footfalls of well made deerskin boots through long grasses, only the rustle of his robes offering the same sound as his hover from so many years ago. It's good to feel terra firma under his feet, to know that there is so much life teeming there, beyond what his fey ancestry allows him to see. The Grove had taught him that, too, the value of tending things in the earth gently and watching them grow. The pleasure and pride of a job well done. That there is creation to be wrought from his fine-boned hands, not just destruction.
Gravestones jut out of the ground like so many crooked teeth, old and nearly illegible near the outskirts, only faint impressions of the names left behind. Caduceus will know.
Before long, the gravestones grow sharper edged, not as worn by wind and rain, and, perhaps, a little more meticulously cared for. Brilliant purplish-blue blooms erupt over one of the graves, climbing in creeping vines and tendrils up the proudly placed phallus that serves as a monument. "Hello, Jester," Essek murmurs, trailing his fingers along a remarkably yonic blossom until he brushes the cool stone tombstone. "I'm pleased to see you're doing well."
Beside her, a simpler headstone rests, the grave covered by smaller white flowers and beautifully colored fungus. The crooked eyes and smile of Captain Tusktooth smile sweetly at the lonely drow passing by.
On and on Essek walks, meandering through the gardens and graves of the grove, saying hello every so often as he passes by an old friend. The sun is far below the horizon before he realizes he's stalling.
"Hello, Caleb," Essek eventually says, folding down to his knees atop a grave a little ways away from Beau and Yasha. The large catalpa tree overhead creaks in the gentle wind, raining down sweet smelling blossoms. Tiny amber gems set into the eyes of a stone cat glitter under Catha's light, watching Essek, and he trembles. The small ochre blooms that litter the ground covering Caleb's grave are bare in one spot, which Essek is touched to see now has a mat made of woven reeds placed there for him. His presence was anticipated, then. Folding his legs beneath him, Essek sits upon the mat and crosses his hands in his lap, the plain golden hand sitting heavy on his left ring finger, suddenly at a loss for words.
Then again, he and Caleb never really felt the need to fill the silence.
It could be minutes or hours later that Essek becomes aware of another living person in the graveyard. The stars are high and the moons are full and everything is painted in dappled shades of grey, and Essek's body has long gone numb from staying in one position.
"I thought I might see you this week," Caduceus rumbles, coming to a standstill just at the edge of what Essek thinks of as Caleb's flowers. "Come on," he says, extending a hand. "I'll put tea on."
It's tempting to glide just to give his aching knees some relief, but no. Essek isn't that man anymore. Hasn't been that man for hundreds of years. It still feels like he's drifting when he follows Caduceus back to the thatched roof home, to where the smell of woodsmoke pours happily from the chimney. Once inside, Essek shrugs off his cloak, so much smaller than his old ornamental mantle, and hangs it on one of the pegs by the door. His boots, too, are removed, leaving him flexing his socked toes against the hardwood and desperately missing the sheepskin slippers Caleb had gotten him for their twentieth anniversary.
"Come now, Mister Essek," Caduceus calls from the kitchen. "No need to be shy. You know where everything is. Get comfortable. Clara and Callie are away, so it's just us here." He reemerges, a steaming mug in each of his big hands. "I thought you'd want it to be just us, if you came."
Essek accepts his tea with a murmur of thanks, the Zemnian slipping free easier than it has in years in this place. Earth and spice and smoke curls up into his face from the fragrant steam and Essek wants to cry. It's Caleb. Of course it's Caleb. Hands shaking, he raises the mug to his lips and takes a tentative sip, and it's like getting punched in the chest. A single tear drips off his nose and into his tea.
"How long has it been?" Caduceus asks quietly, as if he does not know, as if he doesn't feel each of the years as keenly as Essek. He brings his own mug to his lips, sweet and floral and alarmingly pink after a twist of lemon.
"Two hundred ninety-seven years, on Conthsen," Essek whispers, reaching up to tuck hair behind his ear that is no longer there. It got long, during the summer bright days he had with Caleb. He cut it the day Caleb went into the ground. He can't imagine letting it grow again.
"Nearly three hundred," Caduceus sighs, stretching his long legs out in front of him. White now streaks his candyfloss pink hair, and lines grace his bovine face in places they never used to be.
How long, Essek wonders, until Caduceus is another tea to drink? How long until he is once again alone in the world?
"Nearly three hundred," Essek agrees. "Lifetimes, for some of them. Many lifetimes over."
"A lifetime was never going to be enough," Caduceus says patiently, in that too-seeing way of his. Hundreds of years on, and Essek is still never prepared for it.
"I-" he stops, swallows hard, his hands clenching around the mug to his their trembling. "It was enough." Raising his golden eyes to Caduceus, Essek's mouth twists into a smile that used to hold so much bitterness. "It had to be enough; he gave me everything he had."
"It's okay to want more." Giving Essek a moment, Caduceus takes a sip of his tea, chuckling softly as if Jester has told him some grand joke. "It's a little bit, ah, out of my wheelhouse, shall we say. But I don't think it's a bad thing, Mister Essek, to want more time. Especially someone as versed in time as what I'm told you are."
"Isn't it?" Essek hisses, pressure building behind his eyes. "He gave me everything, how dare I claim it's not enough." They've had this conversation so many times the rug is worn thin, and yet it feels just as raw as the first time, when the dirt was still freshly turned on Caleb's grave and Jester and Veth and Yasha were still there to help him mourn. Essek is past middle aged, now, he should have matured beyond this.
Caleb always made him feel a little immature.
A memory hits him, hard and fast, of being chased through Caleb's - their - Rexxentrum home, around tables and up the stairs until he collapsed, laughing, upon the bed. The cats were terrified, and poor Trini was quickly ousted from her spot on his pillow when Caleb's ink and ichor covered hands pressed Essek down onto it and they stopped using words at all.
"You know," Essek says softly, afraid to speak this illicit thing into existence. He's never told Jester this, even, before she passed. What was the point? "When he was, oh, seventy or so, I offered to turn myself in." Caduceus makes an interested noise, but doesn't interrupt. "I was growing desperate, see. We'd just lost Fjord the year prior. And Caleb would talk of such things… so I offered to turn myself in to the Bright Queen, in exchange for his consecution."
Caduceus blinks placidly and gestures for Essek to go on, his rocking chair creaking quietly in the night.
"He denied, of course. Got quite angry with me, too. It, ah, hadn't escaped his memory that I, myself, am unconsecuted."
"Not much escaped Mister Caleb's memory."
"No, not much at all." Essek smiles into his cup and takes another sip of Caleb. "He made me promise that I wouldn't turn myself in after he was gone, anyway."
"You've kept your promise."
Essek rubs his wedding band with his thumb. "Many years before he died, in the bowels of a ship in a port of Nicodranas, I told myself I'd never break another promise to him. I endeavor to that every day."
"And you've made it nearly three hundred years. You're doing well, Essek. Mourning the time you didn't have, wanting more time together. That's all normal. That's not breaking a promise. You've kept your word." Long, fuzzy ears twitch forward to hear Essek's shuddering gasp. "You're a good man, Essek, and you deserved him."
It's unconscionable to set down his tea, to set down Caleb, as he cries, so Essek holds the mug to his belly and folds over at the middle as great heaving sobs wrack his slight frame. "I miss him," he gasps, his voice thick and utterly unrecognizable from the Shadowhand he once was. "I miss him so much."
"You'll see him again," Caduceus promises, unfolding out of his chair a bit less smoothly than he used to, with a few more creaks and pops. He crouches next to Essek's chair and wraps an arm around the other man's slim shoulders, so much less intimidating now for their familiarity. "And when it's your time, the Wildmother will take you into her embrace just as she took him, and there's a spot with your name, right next to his. And there you'll be, for the rest of the ages of Exandria, as long as the Clays take care of this Grove."
"I'll see him again," Essek whispers shakily, thinking of the empty half of the gravestone Caleb is buried under, with his own birth year already etched in.
"You will," Caduceus soothes. "Are you trancing in the guest room tonight, or with him? Skies are supposed to stay clear."
"I think I'd like to spend the night with Caleb, if it's all the same to you."
More tea is brewed, and happier stories are shared, until Caduceus's head nods so far forward that one of his ears dips into the mug in his hand. "Ah, I think that's a sign it's time for me to retire," he says sheepishly. Pouring one last refill into Essek's cup, he dips his chin to catch Essek's eye. "Don't be a stranger."
"I wouldn't dream of it." Gathering up his tea and his cloak, Essek embraces Caduceus fiercely. "Be well, old friend." Then, with tea in hand, Essek steps into the starlight to go trance next to Caleb for the first time in years, surrounded by his friends.