Chapter 019 - You Just Ruined Tomorrow's Breakfast

  The wave of warm, sweet air of The Sweet-Tooth was almost disorienting against the contrast of the cold mountain air from the street. The adrenaline and terror already being tempered by the almost normal scents of baked bread, sugar, and what could be cinnamon.

  Groups of small round wooden tables were arranged neatly across a clean polished stone floor, the space filled with a low murmur of quiet conversations. Through a large glass counter, an array of intricate cakes and pastries were displayed as if awaiting awards. Under any other circumstances, he would have been fascinated by the variety, another piece of this world that could be compared to his own. Right now, the details were lost, his mind struggling to process anything beyond the frantic thumping of his own heart.

  A young man with a reassuring smile and an impeccably clean apron approached them. "Just the two of you?" he asked, his voice soft. He didn't seem to acknowledge the tattered, grocery-leaking basket Mark was clutching, or the fact that his new companion was a hunter of some description, or even if they were involved in the commotion in the main square.

  Mark could only manage a numb, almost automatic nod.

  "Right this way," the young man said, leading them towards one of the quiet booths in the corner, away from the main window. "Can I get you something to drink while you decide?"

  Mark sank onto the plush bench seat, placing the ruined basket beside him. He could feel Dawn slide into the seat opposite, her movements stiff and near silent. The adrenaline was beginning to fade, leaving behind a deep, trembling exhaustion. He really wanted something to steady his nerves, but his mind recoiled at the thought of anything stronger than water.

  "Just water for me, please," Mark said, his voice sounding distant and raspy to his own ears. "Thank you."

  The young man gave a polite nod and departed, leaving Mark alone in the booth with his stalker. The silence that descended was awkward, Mark stared at the polished surface of the table, tracing the patterns in the wood grain with his eyes. He could feel Dawn shifting uncomfortably on the bench opposite him, her hands resting on the table in fists, looking as out of place as her leopard would have been if it sat there in her place.

  When the server returned with Mark's water, he turned towards Dawn. "And for our Huntress?"

  "Mint tea," she said, her tight. "Two sugars."

  The waiter accepted the request and moved on without another thought.

  The detail was so unexpected it momentarily pierced through Mark's haze of exhaustion and fear. He glanced up at her, the professional hunter of sorts, whose monstrous companion had nearly scared him to death, asking for sugar in her tea. It was a small, humanizing detail that felt out of place with the rest of her demeanour.

  It was Dawn who finally broke it, the words spilling out of her in a rushed, quiet torrent, as if she were afraid the air would run out before she could finish.

  "Look," she started, refusing to meet his eyes, her gaze fixed on a point somewhere over his shoulder. "It wasn't my idea… It was a job. An order. They just told me to watch you, to report on where you went, who you spoke to. That's it. Observation only."

  The words hung in the air, a flimsy excuse against the backdrop of numbing terror of only moments before. A job. To her it was just a job. The thought did nothing to calm him. He felt the carefully constructed mask of confidence, one he'd so carefully constructed over the past week, the quiet resolve, the small victories, the belief that he could handle this, begin to break. The sheer terror of the confrontation, the feeling of being helpless, adding to higher levels of stress, stress no one should be expected to endure, it wouldn’t take much more…

  The silence that followed was excruciating. Dawn, for all her unnerving professionalism in the street, was completely out of her element. She opened her mouth as if to say more, then closed it, her jaw tight. She repeated the motion a moment later, clearly struggling to find some words that could undo what had happened. Mark simply stared at the condensation on his glass of water, letting the silence stretch, giving her nothing.

  He saw the waiter returning out of the corner of his eye, a small tray balanced expertly in one hand. Dawn, lost in her own internal turmoil, didn't seem to notice the young man's approach at all, a failure of observation that Mark found grimly satisfying.

  The waiter set her tea down with a soft clink. "Have you decided on anything to eat?" he asked politely.

  Mark finally looked up, his gaze moving past Dawn to meet the waiter's. He had ignored her and her attempted explanation completely. He'd seen something on the small menu, for now that would be his lifeline, something small that maybe could be the same.

  "Yes," Mark said, his voice surprisingly steady. "Could I get a fruit scone, please? With red jam, and cream."

  Dawn blinked, her focus snapping back to the present. She looked from the waiter to Mark, then back again, confusion in her eyes. It was clear she hadn't been following the conversation, waiting for something specific to be said, not about food. She simply gave a short, jerky nod. "Yes. The same." The waiter smiled, made a note on his pad, and then gestured subtly to the edge of their table.

  "Just so you know," he said, his voice dropping to a confidential murmur, "there are privacy wards available on this booth, should you require them. Just a touch to activate." With another polite nod, he turned and walked away, the table returning to silence in his wake.

  Mark watched as Dawn let out a slow breath she seemed to have been holding. Her earlier confidence was completely broken, at least for now. It was replaced by awkward uncertainty. She brushed a finger over an intricate, leaf-like pattern carved into the wood at the edge of the table.

  Mark had assumed it was just a decorative flourish. He watched as the carved lines pulsed with a soft, momentary golden light before fading back to inert wood. He didn't feel or hear any change, but Dawn seemed to relax fractionally.

  "It stops anyone outside our booth from hearing conversations," she explained, her voice low. "And muffles the sound from outside. Most respectable places have a few tables with them."

  Privacy. He almost laughed. What did he have left that was private? His thoughts had been read, his dreams invaded, and he had just been made into a public spectacle by a cat. The ward was a lock on an already empty house, even the skeletons had long since bolted.

  "Fine," Mark said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. He looked directly at Dawn, attempting to project his professional status as a project manager, his final desperate defense against the impending tide of despair. "You want something to report? Let's make a report."

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  He began to speak, his tone clipped and professional, dictating a status update to a clueless manager of another department. "Subject: Mark Shilling. Status: Broken. Origin: Manchester, Earth. Apparently dead. According to your library Gods, there was once a gateway connecting our worlds, until there wasn’t." He thought he saw the color draining from her face as he spoke, and decided he didn't care, enough was enough.

  He took a shaky breath, the professional facade already beginning to crumble. "On the other side of this gateway, everyone I have ever known," his voice cracked, the first tremor of what was to come, "my family, my friends… now all been dead… dust for a millennium." A single, hot tear escaped and traced a path down his cheek. He didn't bother to wipe it away. He was fighting a losing battle for control, the effort of holding it all in for two weeks finally reaching its breaking point.

  "Magic," he continued, the word catching in his throat as a sob broke through, "There is no magic on the other side. To me, until arriving in this god's forsaken place, it was just stories. Fantasy. The dreams of children wishing reality away."

  Dawn's eyes widened, a look of genuine alarm replacing her professional annoyance. "Wait," she interrupted, leaning forward. "That’s not right. Maybe you're just... overwhelmed. You were injured, and town this size, the crowds... it can be a lot for someone not used to it."

  Her attempt at a rational explanation was the final blow. A raw, hysterical laugh tore from Mark's throat, a sound halfway between a sob and a scream, bystanders thankfully protected by the strange privacy ward. "Overwhelmed?" he choked out, wiping at the stream of tears now flowing freely from his eyes. "By what? This place is tiny! Empty! The city I'm from has three million people! This! To me this feels like an empty shopping center!”

  The laughter died, replaced by a ragged, gasping breath. He leaned forward, his head in his hands, the full weight of his loss crashing down on him in that small, quiet booth, the true isolation now on full display.

  "Everything," he whispered, the words muffled by his hands. "Everything I knew. My home, my job, my life... it's all gone. Broken. Lost and forgotten." He looked up at her then, his eyes red-rimmed and filled with a despair so profound it seemed to suck the air from the space between them.

  "And you," he finished, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, the final, pathetic truth of his current misery. "You just ruined tomorrow's breakfast. I had so little, and you took that!"

  He took a few deep, shuddering breaths, the kind to leave a hollowed-out calm in its wake, a moment of artificial stability. He pushed himself upright, wiping his face on the sleeve of his tunic, some fragile, limited control of himself. The professional mask was long gone, leaving only a raw, exhausted version of the man beneath, one even his healers had yet to see.

  Dawn just stared at him, her sharp, perceptive eyes now wide and completely lost. She had no frame of reference for this. What could a hunter do when their target breaks down and confesses that their entire reality is gone. She possessed the look of recognition that she was not the one that should have been there.

  Seeing she had no response, Mark continued, a level of bitterness tainting his words.

  "You want more details for your report?" he asked, the question purely rhetorical. "Let's be thorough. My first day here, I landed in a forest and was immediately assaulted by an imp..."

  "It wasn't an imp," Dawn interrupted, the words reflexive, a professional correction slipping out before she could stop it. "It was an Ash Sprite. They're territorial, but usually not that aggressive."

  Mark's head snapped up, and he fixed her with a glower so intense that she physically recoiled. He didn't care what that hateful creature was called. He pushed past the interruption, his voice low and trembling with remembered fear and anger, he was using that anger now to rebuild his facade.

  "My first introduction to your glorious magic world," he continued, pointedly ignoring her correction, "was having one of your healers take it upon herself to assault me in my own dreams." He leaned forward slightly, the memory giving his words a sharp, accusatory point. "And I imagine your colleague, Tori, probably has a phobia of cats now. I won’t apologise for using your cat as a template to protect myself."

  Dawn flinched, from Tori’s name or the mention of her cat, he wasn't sure. She obviously wanted to give a response, her mouth opening to form a reply that never came. She was saved by the timely arrival of the waiter, who returned bearing a small tray. He placed two plates on the table with a practiced gentleness, each holding a large, golden-brown scone that smelled perfect.

  "Two fruit scones, with red jam and cream," he announced cheerfully, oblivious to the oppressive tension clouding the booth. "Can I get you anything else?"

  Mark looked from the scone to the waiter, his earlier resolve wavering. The water wasn't going to be enough. He needed something sharper, but not without the attention he assumed early day alcohol would bring, perhaps something more dismissive.

  "Actually, yes," Mark said, amazing himself at how level his voice sounded. "Do you have coffee? And whisky?"

  The waiter looked puzzled for a moment. "We do, sir. Separately."

  "Could you make me an Irish coffee?"

  The young man's brow furrowed in polite confusion. "I'm sorry, sir, an... Irish? I'm not familiar with that term."

  Mark took a slow breath, the act of explaining something so simple and familiar feeling both surreal and grounding. "It’s a drink," he explained, breaking it down. "Hot, black coffee in a glass mug. Stir in a spoonful of brown sugar until it dissolves. Add a generous measure of whisky. Then, float a thick layer of whipped cream on the top. You don't stir it, you drink the hot coffee through the cool cream."

  The waiter's confused expression slowly melted away, replaced by one of genuine professional interest. A slow smile spread across his face. "Whisky... in coffee," he mused. "That sounds... exceptionally warming for these cool days. I believe we have all the necessary components, sir. An excellent idea."

  He gave a final, impressed nod and walked away, leaving them once again in the privacy of their warded booth, leaving them both in silence once again. His slow methodical breathing coupled with the simmering rage from his early days created an unstable, but functional stability.

  The waiter returned much quicker than Mark had expected, a testament to the efficiency of the staff here. He carried a tray with two steaming glass mugs, placing one in front of Mark and, to his surprise, setting the other in front of Dawn.

  "I took the liberty of making two," the waiter said with a proud, conspiratorial smile. "An idea this good deserves to be shared. On the house, these will be a hit once added to the menu."

  Dawn stared at the strange concoction, as alien to her and the world was to him. The dark liquid beneath a pristine white cap, he watched her examine it like it was some insidiously designed trap. She in turn watched Mark take a sip, then tentatively raised her own glass, drinking a small amount of the hot coffee through the cool, sweet cream. A flicker of genuine surprise crossed her face.

  She set the mug down, the moment of shared novelty apparently giving her the opening she needed. Her professional pride had been brutally damaged today, and it seems she wanted answers for that more than the report.

  "My glamour," she began, her voice low and direct, "it's a Tier 2 weave, it's not a simple one either. It's designed to make eyes slide away, to dismiss what they see. You shouldn't have been able to see me, but you did, again and again. Most Garnets would have trouble. How did you do it?"

  A short, dry laugh escaped Mark's lips, one of genuine, weary amusement. The sudden shift from the raw, emotional chaos of his breakdown, to something so simple to himself was the opportunity to settle back into his projected self.

  He took a long, slow drink of the Irish coffee. The warmth of the whisky spread through his chest, a familiar feeling of bottled courage that would hold the lingering chill of his terror. The taste was a ghost of home, and it steadied him.

  He finally met her gaze, his own eyes clear for the first time since the leopard had appeared.

  "As I said… there is no magic, where I’m from…" he said, his voice calm, stronger and maintained. "My city has… Had three million people crammed into a space smaller than this valley. Some valued their own interests above other people.”

  Without thinking, the coffee was almost already gone and he started on the scone, the jam being strawberry or if not it was something very similar.

  “You have little choice but learn to watch your back. There were pickpockets, muggers... you develop an instinct to notice those that want to go unnoticed, to see those who don’t want to be seen.”

  Mark looked directly at Dawn.

  “You were perfect, I never saw your cat. But everyone else never saw you.”