Chapter 177: Nourishing Tea
Aaron lowered himself onto the hammock chair, his weight poorly distributed and his coordination still shot from the teleportation.
The chair swung generously beneath him as he grabbed the sides to steady himself, trying — and mostly failing — to maintain some semblance of composure while looking in the direction of the empress’s silken bandana.
The sudden shift in surroundings had rattled him more than he wanted to admit.
It reminded him of a film he’d watched back on Earth, one where the god of hammers had stumbled into a magician’s house and experienced random teleportations and crazy things.
This wasn’t quite that, but it wasn’t far off either.
He looked around slowly. The ceiling was rock, low and uneven, and the walls were the same — rough stone with deep cracks running through them like old scars.
But the cracks glowed. A faint, pulsing purple light breathed from within each one, steady and soft, turning what should have been a cold and oppressive cave into something unexpectedly cozy. Intimate, even.
It was a strange place. He liked it more than he probably should have.
As if she’d noticed his gaze drifting, the empress hummed once. A small circular table materialised between their chairs, and two cups of tea appeared atop it without ceremony.
"Tea?" she offered, her tone carrying the faint shape of a smile. "It’s not narcotic or poisoned, don’t worry."
Aaron laughed — a real one, short and genuine. "I’m not worried about that. You wouldn’t need those kinds of methods if you wanted to hurt me."
He leaned forward and picked up the cup, settling back into the hammock and letting it sway gently beneath him.
He’d thought, initially, that conducting any kind of meaningful conversation from a swinging hammock chair was going to be an exercise in awkwardness. A few minutes in, he was starting to revise that opinion. There was something about the slow, rhythmic movement that dissolved tension without asking permission.
"What would the empress like to know?" he asked, easing them into the conversation himself. He had already clocked that she was the type of woman who could sit comfortably inside silence for as long as the silence would have her.
If he left the opening to her, they’d be here until the stone walls forgot what sound was.
She seemed like someone for whom time had simply stopped being a relevant concern several centuries ago.
"Ah, yes." She took a slow sip of her tea. "Also — this blend is made from specialised nourishing leaves. Your poison should be cleared by the time you finish it."
Aaron went still.
He had been planning to work up to that. Build some familiarity first, find the right moment, frame the request carefully so it didn’t come across as presumptuous. He’d had a whole quiet strategy mapped out in the back of his head.
She’d rendered it completely unnecessary without even being asked.
He didn’t overthink it. He brought the cup to his lips and took a careful sip.
The liquid was warm and greenish, and for exactly one moment it tasted like nothing at all.
Then it hit.
It burned going down — not the pleasant, spreading warmth of a good alcohol but something sharper and more concentrated, like the tea had opinions about the state of his insides and intended to act on them.
He felt it travel the full length of his throat, heard the faint sizzle somewhere around his sternum as it continued south. Heat bloomed outward from his core immediately, rising fast, and within seconds he was sweating through his collar and his hands had developed a faint tremor around the cup.
He focused very hard on not dropping it.
She had no reason to lie to him. He understood that. She could have removed him from existence somewhere between the venom tribe and this cave if she’d wanted to — the tea wasn’t the threat.
So he held onto the cup, held onto that logic and breathed through it.
And then he felt it — his blood moving differently. A rushing, shedding sensation working through his kidneys, the poison being stripped away like sediment from a riverbed, leaving the current clean behind it.
Which was, unfortunately, extremely thorough.
The urge hit him without much warning and with absolutely no patience. He pressed his thighs together, clenching hard, deeply unwilling to be the man who excused himself to use the bathroom thirty seconds into a conversation with the woman he intended to court.
"E-Empre—"
The empress’s lips curled into an amused smile as she rested her cheeks onto her palm, looking like a bored immortal that was having fun watching the mortals struggle with mundane things.
Without a word, she raised the hand that held her cup and pointed at a wooden door carved directly into the stone wall.
"Uh — thanks—"
He was already moving. He set the cup down, stepped off the chair, and walked toward the door at the fastest pace that could still technically be described as a walk, every muscle below his waist locked in silent negotiation.
The bathroom was not what he expected.
Clean milky-white tiles covered the floor, modern in a way that sat completely at odds with the carved stone walls around them — which still carried their glowing purple cracks, because apparently the aesthetic extended everywhere. And they acted as a light source, so it was a win-win.
Two sleek cabinets were fitted into the rock. A wide mirror stretched across the opposite wall above a pair of wash basins, and Aaron’s tightly wound expression stared back at him from it.
He closed the door, dropped every last shred of the composed demeanour he’d been working to maintain, and moved.
He nearly slipped on the tiles. He caught himself on the cabinet door, wrenched up the lid of the western-style toilet inside, and finally — finally — stopped fighting it.
The relief was profound and embarrassingly audible.
He exhaled like a man who had narrowly survived something, one hand braced against the cubicle wall as his body took care of itself. His blood was still filtering, he could feel it — the thirst was already building steadily at the back of his throat, but that was manageable. The rest of it was handled.
He stared at the plywood cubicle walls while he waited. Then at the stone ceiling. Then back at the tiles.
’Does the empress actually use this kind of toilet?’
The thought arrived uninvited and refused to leave quietly. There was no logical reason for a primordial being — ancient, blindfolded, capable of reconstructing entire settlements with two snaps of her fingers — to have a fully functioning western-style bathroom tucked into her cave. It was too specific. Too human.
Unless it had been designed with a human in mind.
’Do primordials even use toilets? How would she look on o--’
He decided, wisely, to stop thinking about it before he thinks the wrong thing and finds himself travelling across the void in the chariots of the grim reapers.
He flushed, zipped up, washed his hands, and took stock.
He needed a topic for when he went back out. Something that would hold her interest — he’d noticed quickly that she ran on a short fuse when it came to boredom, and he had no illusions about what would happen to the conversation if he let it go flat. She would simply stop having it.
He was still running through options when his hand moved automatically to his jacket pocket.
He stopped.
Alyssa.
She had been perched on his shoulder when the empress arrived. He’d moved her to his pocket in the chaos of everything — partly as a contingency, if things went badly enough that he needed leverage, and partly, if he was being honest, because he’d grown more attached to the small, hair-pulling, occasionally life-saving creature than he’d intended to.
He reached into the pocket slowly.
She was there. Curled into a tight ball, knees drawn up to her chest, completely motionless. He lifted her out onto his palm with the same care he’d give something made of glass and poked her once, gently, with the tip of his finger.
Nothing.
He poked her again.
Still nothing. She lay flat across his palm, small and too still, her stillness carrying that specific quality that made his chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the poison.
Sadness landed first. Guilt followed it closely, heavier than he expected.
Was she dead...? He didn’t even allow that thought to form.
Instead, what he thought was, ’Maybe the empress can save her...’
The thought was immediate and certain, the way only a few thoughts ever were. He didn’t weigh it. He turned around, pushed the bathroom door open, and stepped back out into the warm purple glow of the cave, Alyssa resting flat across his palm.
The empress didn’t move from her position in the hammock chair. One hand still cradling her jaw, tea still in the other, swaying gently like she hadn’t noticed any time pass at all.
"Oh?" She tilted her head with the tone of someone who had just spotted something mildly diverting. "You brought me a gift from the venom tribe? How thoughtful."