Eldas regards me with a guarded expression. “I would care for the next one you recommend.”
“Pardon?”
“You had others, correct?”
“Yes, but—” Eldas is already crossing the room. “Wait, where are you going?”
“To your apartments,” he says, as if the fact is obvious.
“Excuse me?”
“The other journals are there, yes? I would like to start the next one you recommend. I admit I glossed over some of the more detailed notes on plants, however. So please give me one with more margin notes and personal anecdotes alongside the herbology.”
“All right,” I say, as if this conversation is totally normal. “Actually, come this way.” I start for the door in the back of the throne room.
“But—”
“There are two specific ones I want to recommend to you. Well, three, but I’m not finished with the third yet. The last one I have in my apartments, but the others I’ve already returned to the laboratory.”
“Very well, lead on.”
If he’s trying to be normal then I will also. If he doesn’t want to address last night, then I don’t need to either. Ignoring it is the best, healthiest, most mature response, right? Right.
Hook pushes past me as I open the door. The wolf scampers halfway up the stairs, stopping to look back at me, as if frustrated I’m not going fast enough. He clearly already knows where we’re headed.
“Go on ahead,” I encourage. “We’ll be right behind.”
Hook lets out a small bark and bounds away.
“I started doing some other research last night,” Eldas says.
“Other research?” I laugh. “You had time to research something else and finish that whole journal?”
“I already told you I skipped the sections of herbology,” he says somewhat remorsefully, as if the very idea of not reading every word in a book is embarrassing for him.
“Fair. What is it that you researched?” I assume he wants me to ask. Otherwise, why bring it up?
“If there have been any other instances of Fade beasts wandering into Midscape.”
“And?”
“It’s not entirely unprecedented. But, usually, they do not linger this long. Fade beasts are the animals that were caught between when the worlds pulled apart. They might look and feel mortal…but they are part of the Fade itself.”
“Part of the Fade itself,” I repeat. “So every animal, tree, creature, was trapped in place when Midscape split from the natural world?”
Eldas nods.
“The Fade is almost like a creature unto itself, then. Isn’t it?”
I pause on the stairs, noticing Eldas has fallen behind. He stares up at me with his shining blue eyes. He stares at me in a way I haven’t had him look at me before. Yearning, if I had to describe it.
“That is correct,” he says gently. “The Fade is very much like something living, breathing, thinking.”
“And trapped in stasis.” Somehow, I pity that dark, primordial mist.
“No one has ever recognized that before,” he says with a note of surprise.
“I’m sure someone has.”