Chapter 34: The Blueprint of The Bloom
The frantic pivot to ventilation logistics was the verbal equivalent of a man throwing a single wooden bucket at a forest fire.
Elian knew it. Kaelis certainly knew it. The heavy, intoxicating Bloom saturating the taproom did not miraculously vanish just because the tavern-master rigidly demanded a discussion on airflow. It still clung to his clothes, pooled deep in his lungs, and kept his pulse hammering at a highly unprofessional rhythm.
Kaelis, however, took pity on him. She let out a soft snort of genuine amusement and mercifully pushed herself back from the Iron-heart bar, giving him a precious few feet of breathing room.
"Draft control is completely useless if the room's footprint is wrong," she pointed out, her tone settling back into the practical, worn cadence of a seasoned traveler. "And you cannot fix a floor plan from behind a counter."
Elian blinked, his fingers tightening around his piece of charcoal. "I have the rough dimensions. Standard beast-kin clearances—"
"Are you building for a standard beast, Elian, or are you building for me?"
He didn't have a good answer for that. He looked down at the chaotic, heavily annotated floor plan on his vellum. He had arrows pointing everywhere. Wash stations. Privacy screens. Cooling corners. But he was guessing. He was an architect trying to guess at a load-bearing reality.
Kaelis flicked her dark tail, the hair brushing against her hocks. "If you want this waystation to actually work, you need real numbers. Stop hiding behind the wood. Bring your measuring twine out here."
From the corner pen, Barnaby let out a loud, muffled groan through the empty burlap grain sack he had draped over his own nose twenty minutes ago.
We are absolutely not measuring the giant horse-woman's anatomy, the mule’s rigid posture declared. This establishment has officially lost all usable boundaries.
Elian swallowed hard. He looked at the spool of waxed hemp twine resting beside his ledger. Seventeen feet of it. Under normal circumstances, it was exactly enough to map out the clearance for a freight wagon. Right now, coiled tightly on the bar, it felt like a death sentence.
"Business," Elian muttered strictly to himself, forcefully shoving the ache in his trousers and the thick fog in his head into the deepest, most heavily locked vault of his mind. "It is purely infrastructure."
He grabbed the twine, stepped out from the relative safety of the bar, and immediately regretted his life choices.
Up close, without the heavy timber counter separating them, the sheer scale of her was staggering. Her human torso began at a height that put her collarbones level with his forehead, seamlessly merging into the massive, dapple-grey withers of a warhorse. And the heat radiating off her... it was like standing next to an open furnace burning wild honey and summer grass.
"I need your maximum turning arc first," Elian managed, aiming for the crisp, detached tone of a Guild surveyor. "If you could step parallel to the hearth-stone, please."
Kaelis obliged, her iron shoes clicking sharply against the reinforced floorboards. "Most builders just guess," she noted, looking over her shoulder as he approached her flanks. "Or they measure the length of a draft horse and add two feet, completely forgetting that a horse doesn't have a human upper body dictating its center of balance."
"Most builders do not have to personally repair the walls when their guests misjudge a turn," Elian replied, his voice only shaking a fraction.
He unspooled the twine. He needed to measure the drop of her back, the width of her hips, and the exact clearance her hindquarters required to pivot safely. It required proximity. Terrible, overwhelming proximity.
He stepped close to her flank. His knuckles brushed the edge of the midnight-blue silk caparison draped over her hindquarters. A sudden, electric jolt of heat shot straight up his arm.
He froze.
He was a professional. He was a man of ledgers and logic. But as he stood mere inches from the powerful swell of her dapple-grey hip, the Bloom aggressively attacked his freshly rebuilt mental walls. An intensely vivid, deeply unhelpful part of his brain immediately stopped thinking about turning radiuses and went right back to wondering what was hidden beneath the curve of her tail.
He shifted his stance, crossing one leg awkwardly over the other to hide the undeniable ache straining against his trousers. He squeezed his eyes shut, frantically blaming the roaring hearth, the heavy winter clothing he was wearing, and the residual adrenaline from the Fire-bite peppers.
Kaelis glanced back at him, her dark eyes entirely too perceptive. A slow, knowing smile touched her lips.
"Breathe through your mouth, Elian," she advised softly, the rumble of her chest vibrating into the air between them. "Just take the width of my hips, and we'll see if your math survives the winter."