Chapter 28: Soup. I Made Soup. I Could Cry!
Cael was at the entrance when Neve came back.
Dusty from head to foot, rock powder in his hair and across his shoulders, looking like someone who had been doing hard physical work for hours till he had recently stopped doing it only to stand here and wait instead.
He saw Neve coming through the trees and something in his posture changed immediately.
"Where have you been?" he asked calmly with a worried voice.
"I’m sorry," Neve said. "I found food. I was collecting—"
"I was about to go into the forest." Cael’s jaw was tight. "You said before evening. It’s almost dark."
"I lost track of time." Neve held up both hands. "I’m here so nothing happened."
Cael looked at him for a long moment. Then he crossed the space between them and put his arms around Neve and held on, worried about losing him.
Neve stood in it and didn’t say anything.
He had been doing everything himself for so long that he had stopped noticing it as a thing.
Since he was sixteen. Fees, food, rent, shifts at the zoo on top of class schedules because nobody was going to pay for any of it if he didn’t. No family to call. No person to worry about where he was.
And here was this large dusty leopard beastman holding onto him in a cave entrance because Neve had been gone longer than expected.
’I guess Cael is my family now,’ he thought.
He pulled back before he got too comfortable with that thought.
"You look filthy," he said. "You’ve been working hard."
"I would do everything for you," Cael said. "Come see the rooms."
.
.
The back of the cave had been transformed.
Two openings where the wall had been. Cael had worked fast and the results were clean... the rock cut the floor level, the space larger than Neve had expected.
The first room was nearly as big as the main space with smooth walls and good height. The second was smaller, positioned just off the first with a natural crack along the upper wall that let in a thread of outside air.
Neve looked at the crack.
"I couldn’t dig further," Cael said, looking at it with minor dissatisfaction. "The rock changes near the end. It would have taken longer."
"That’s perfect actually," Neve said.
"It is?"
"It’s a window." Neve pointed at the crack. "Cold air comes through there. This room stays cooler than the main space. Food won’t rot as fast in here." He turned and looked at both rooms. "This smaller one is the kitchen. The larger one—" He thought about it. "Living space. We can use it properly."
Cael stared at the crack in the wall that he had been apologising for.
"A window," he said.
"A window," Neve confirmed.
Cael straightened slightly with the expression of someone whose accidental mistake had just been reclassified as a feature.
"You should check on Soren," Neve said.
"Soren is fine—"
"He’s your brother and he woke up yesterday after two years. You should spend more time with him than with me." Neve turned him by the shoulder toward the entrance. "I need to sort out what I brought back. Leave it to me."
"Where is the food? I’ll carry it—"
"Cael."
Cael looked at him.
"Trust me," Neve said.
A pause.
"I’ll be back soon," Cael said and left.
Neve waited until his footsteps faded.
Then he opened his inventory.
.
.
Everything came out at once.
Vegetables in piles. Roots and leaves and things he had spent six hours collecting spread across the floor of the new kitchen room in a way that was initially overwhelming and then deeply satisfying. The kitchen equipment came out beside it... pots stacked, knives laid flat, spoons and ladles and containers lined up along the wall.
He checked the system.
{Stockpile Mission: 80/100%}
"Eighty," he said.
He grinned.
Twenty more per cent. He could do that tomorrow. Another trip to the field, maybe some more meat from Cael’s morning hunt, and that mission was done.
He started organising.
Root vegetables in one corner... potatoes, the onion-adjacent things, the carrot-like ones. Dried meat from Cael’s roasting on the shelf that Cael had carved into the wall at some point. Fruits were stacked in the containers. The herbs from the forest in smaller portions, separated by type the way his medical memory now automatically sorted them.
He needed baskets. Something to keep the smaller things off the floor. He made a mental note to weave baskets tomorrow, there were leaves in the forest that would work, he had already identified three types during his walk.
He stood in the middle of what was now, undeniably, a kitchen and looked around at it.
’This is mine. I’m so happy I don’t have to pay rent,’ he thought. ’I built this. We built this.’
He heard Cael come back.
"What..." Cael stood at the kitchen entrance looking at the organised space with the expression of someone whose cave had changed significantly while he was gone. His eyes moved across everything. The pots. The vegetables. The systematic arrangement of a month’s worth of food in a space that had been a rock wall this morning. "Where did all of this come from?"
"I told you. I went to find food and I found a lot."
Cael looked at the pots. "And these?"
"I had them," Neve said.
Cael looked at him.
Neve looked back with the expression he had developed for questions he was not going to answer.
Cael looked around the kitchen one more time. His eyes settled on Neve and he decided to just catalogue several unexplained things and decide to let them be.
’He’s from the red panda tribe,’ Neve could practically see him thinking. ’According to what I’ve heard, they are secretive and strange. So this probably explains it.’
"I’ve never seen some of these," Cael said, pointing at the potatoes.
"I found them in a field. Don’t worry, once I cook them you’ll love them."
"Cook them how?"
"Soup," Neve said.
"What is soup?"
"Sit down," Neve said. "You’ll find out."
.
.
The fire from the main room came through in pieces as Neve carried the burning sections carefully. Cael was watching with the tense expression he still got around deliberate fire handling, and watched as Neve built it up under the pot using the stone rim arrangement.
Water from the vessel came first. Neve filled the pot and set it over the heat and watched it start to move.
Then the meat.
He took two large pieces from Cael’s pile and put them in raw... better for stock this way, the flavour coming out into the water as it cooked. He added one of the onions... adjacent things whole, and watched the water change colour slowly.
Cael was sitting in the kitchen doorway watching all of this with complete focus. He didn’t say a word, all he did was watch. Like Neve was doing something that required uninterrupted observation to understand.
Neve got the knife.
He had been looking forward to using an actual knife since the moment it appeared in the inventory. The spike had been functional. A real kitchen knife was a different experience entirely. He picked up a potato, felt the weight of the blade, and started cutting.
"What are those?" Cael asked.
"Something like a root vegetable. I found them in the ground at the field." Neve kept cutting. "They’re good for soup since they are heavy and filling. Good for winter."
"You knew to find them in the ground."
"I looked around a lot," Neve said.
He added the potato pieces to the pot. The water was moving properly now, a slow rolling boil, the meat starting to release into it. He added a careful measure of salt and then the second onion thing, chopped this time, and watched it all settle together.
The smell changed.
Cael’s nose moved.
It was a good smell that filled a space and made somewhere feel like home. Not just roasted meat over fire, not just fruit, but something warm.
Neve stirred it with the ladle and added the carrot-like things last because they needed less time and waited.
He tasted it once with the spoon, adjusted the salt by the smallest possible amount, and tasted again.
"Okay," he said.
He ladled it into two bowls.
Cael stood up immediately when Neve came out of the kitchen carrying both and accepted his bowl with both hands like he had been handed something fragile.
He looked at it.
The steam was rising and the broth was thick. The pieces of meat and vegetable sitting in it together. His expression was genuinely uncertain in a way Neve hadn’t seen before.
"Do I eat this?" he asked.
"Yes," Neve said. "It’s food. It’s very hot, be careful—"
Cael moved his hand toward the bowl.
"Hey! Use this," Neve said, holding out a spoon.
Cael took it and turned it over. He turned it back just to look at it from the side.
"It’s for scooping," Neve said. "Put it in, lift, eat."
Cael put the spoon in the soup carefully. He lifted it and put it in his mouth.
His eyes went wide. He immediately threw the spoon.
He picked up the bowl and drank the entire thing in one long continuous motion, soup and meat and vegetables and all, steam and everything.
He put the bowl down and looked at Neve.
"What is that," he said.
"That’s hot soup," Neve said. "You’re supposed to use the spoon."
"What is a spoon?"
"The thing you threw."
Cael looked at where the spoon had landed across the room.
"Can you teach this to me? For the winter festival?"
Neve picked up his own bowl and started eating with his spoon properly. "This is the second time I’ve heard someone mention this winter festival. What is it?"
Cael sat back down and looked at the empty bowl in his hands like he was hoping more would appear in it.
"The winter festival," he said, "is when all the tribes come together at the beginning of winter. Every tribe brings food and goods to trade. There are challenges between warriors." He set the bowl down. "The king of beasts presides over it. All tribes are required to attend."
Neve stopped eating.
"The king of beasts," he said slowly.
"Yes." Cael looked at him. "He comes every year. Vaelthorn. Though, he doesn’t show himself."
Neve looked at the mark on his neck without meaning to.
"But he’ll be present," Cael said. Watching Neve’s face. "At the festival."
Neve looked at his soup and took a spoonful and chewed.
"When does winter start?" he said.
"In two days," Cael said.
Three days until the winter festival.
Three days until he sees Vaelthorn, his mate.