I. Before Sunrise #
Zyneese woke because the void was insufferable.
Up. Butter temperature matters. Your standards are the only thing standing between civilization and collapse.
“That is dramatic even for you.”
She found her glasses, tied back her hair, and began.
Flour sifted into a bowl. Sugar followed. Butter arrived by frost conjuration at exactly the temperature she preferred and nobody else would ever appreciate properly. She cut it through the mixture with the small enchanted blade she claimed was for correspondence and absolutely not for baking.
The dough came together beneath careful hands.
This was, technically, a practical act. The warband needed food. Morale. Texture. Predictability.
It was also shortbread shaped into circles because round things felt complete.
You could just say you care about them.
“I could also walk into the sea.”
She baked the cookies over controlled layers of frost and low arcane heat, then carried the tray outside while the camp was still mostly dark. Fire rebuilt. Kettle set. Cookies on the flat stone.
Evidence abandoned.
Across camp, Avelreese stepped into the cold in training clothes, chestnut hair tied high and expression already disciplined into usefulness. Push-ups first. Then dips between two crates. Then pull-ups from the reinforced bar she had insisted was temporary and had therefore permanently installed.
Zyneese watched for half a second, then looked away before it could count as watching.
Avel, meanwhile, definitely smelled the shortbread by the third set.
II. The Arrangement #
By the time the sun bruised the horizon gold, Avelreese was standing at the fire with one cookie in hand and the expression of a woman being spiritually repaired by butter.
She ate a second.
“That’s two,” Zyneese said.
Avel nearly dropped the third.
“I wasn’t stealing.”
“No,” Zyneese said. “You were participating in the arrangement.”
“There is an arrangement?”
“Obviously.”
Avel looked at the tray, then at the fire, then at the kettle already warming for someone else.
“You do this every morning.”
“I enjoy order.”
“You rebuilt Reyneese’s kettle.”
“It cracked.”
“You fixed Vyrneese’s armor strap.”
“It was inefficient.”
“You alphabetized Brasskeese’s supply ledger.”
“That was an act of mercy.”
Avel’s mouth twitched despite herself. Then the amusement thinned into something quieter.
“You take care of everyone when they’re not looking.”
Zyneese adjusted her glasses. “That is an extremely irresponsible interpretation.”
“It’s the correct one.”
The void, infuriatingly, stayed silent. It did not need to comment. The point had landed cleanly on its own.
Avel held the untouched third cookie and looked at Zyneese the way people looked at a lock once they realized it had been a door the whole time.
“Why hide it?”
Zyneese stared into the fire. “Because once people know where the kindness is, they start expecting it.”
“And?”
“And expectations are how you get hurt.”
That was more honesty than she usually allowed before breakfast. Enough that she almost walked away.
Avel stopped her with the simplest weapon in the world.
“Thank you.”
Zyneese went still.
III. Gratitude #
Avel sat on the log by the fire, sweat cooling on her skin, shoulders loose in the rare posture of someone not performing competence for the rest of the room.
“I mean it,” she said. “The fire. The tea. The cookies. The repairs. The things you do so none of us has to notice how hard yesterday still is.”
Zyneese hated several things at once: sincerity, directness, and the way Avel had managed to sound earnest without sounding clumsy.
“You are being very intense over shortbread.”
“I’m trying not to be worse at this.”
“At gratitude?”
“At seeing people when they’re trying not to be seen.”
That landed too.
Zyneese folded her arms. “You should stop doing that.”
“No.”
“Avelreese.”
“No.”
There was a long pause in which the fire cracked, the kettle hissed, and both women pretended not to notice that the world had narrowed to a small warm circle between them.
Then Zyneese reached for the third cookie, broke it neatly in half, and handed one piece over.
“If you insist on making this emotional,” she said, “at least do it with proper portion control.”
Avel laughed, quiet and startled, like she had found sunlight somewhere she had expected only frost.
That was the emotional peak of the morning: half a cookie and no retreat.
By the time the others woke, the moment had already been buried beneath sarcasm.
But not fully.
When Lulureese vanished after breakfast with Cinder tucked under one arm and a satchel of herbs bouncing at her hip, Avel noticed Zyneese track the direction automatically.
“Where’s she going?”
Zyneese looked toward the tree line. “Into the forest. To fix whatever small wounded thing has recruited her today.”
Three miles away, in a basement that still smelled of wet stone and new purpose, a death knight would soon hear singing and follow it.