Chapter 4 The Feast

The seam opened beneath a café table where steam had fogged the glass, and someone had left a chipped cup. Calder felt the world loosen the way an old coat yields at the cuff. He set his palm to the tabletop and the room folded; clatter thinned to a single breath, lamps lowered, curtains thickened into velvet. The café became a dining hall hung with low lights and heavy drapes, the air undercut with iron and spices.

Long communal tables ran like spines through the room. Candles guttered in holders shaped like bone. Servers moved with discreet speed, lifting silver domes and setting them down with the reverence of men who knew the price behind a course. Conversations were murmured as if the words themselves might be spent; forks tapped porcelain like the tick of a ledger.

The moth rode at Calder’s throat—his courier of stains—and its small pulse matched the hall’s dim heartbeat. He had eaten in other worlds and learned that food carried the grammar of a place: the harbor’s salt, the mirror-city’s cool. Here, every mouthful asked for an accounting.

At the head table, a host smiled from beneath soft lamplight—anonymity made handsome—and spoke in tones that might be blessing or menu. Guests arrived with pockets of tokens and faces smudged by travel. Some came to repay grief; some to steal a joy they could not otherwise afford. Calder sat without invitation and watched the first course arrive.

They set before him a circle of opalescent shells. When the dome lifted, the scent hit like a small confession: sweet gone rotten, sea and iron, the ghost of a mother’s forbidden pantry. He ate one out of habit and curiosity. Salt and copper unfurled on his tongue, and, with the aftertaste, the world took its due. He found, with the animal clarity of something breaking, that he could not remember the exact blue of his sister’s eyes as a child; he could shape the memory’s edges but not the color that made it whole.

Around him, other people paid in small, precise blanks. A woman beside him ate fruit that tasted of a first lover’s hands, and then watched the face she’d kissed dissolve from her mind. A man at the next place swallowed a broth that felt like a father’s reprimand and afterward could not summon the expression his father wore the day a small triumph went unnoticed. Each loss was surgical, recorded like an entry in a drawer.

Calder had always prized appetite as proof of being alive. The talismans in his pockets—the bird-matchbox, the knotted ribbon, the blunt coin—were anchors against that economy of absence. At the table, the ledger of himself felt thinner, like paper left in the sun.

Between courses a performer moved the length of the hall offering folded-paper tales. He unfurled one for Calder: a child who traded her voice for a map and never found the shore she wanted. As Calder listened, the name of the street where he had first learned to hide from rain blurred at the edges in his mind until only an outline remained.

The host leaned close and laid a cool palm on Calder’s shoulder. “We take where there is a hinge,” he said. “We do not take at random. You will not be emptied of what cannot be spared, only of what can.”

Calder thought of jars, mirrors, and the ledger-room’s shelves and felt the seams stitch together: trade, balance, an economy that required erasure. He tried to imagine what the hall might accept from him—scar for laugh, name for warmth—and the questions felt foolish in a room that treated loss like currency.

Liora sat across the table and watched him as if counting breaths. Her scar ran pale across her palm and, when she watched someone open a jar or a page, she folded her fingers as if weighing invisible coins. Tonight, she ate nothing. She reached out and brushed the moth at his throat with the tip of a finger; it flinched and then stilled, as if remembering a wrong touch.

“You keep signing for paltry things,” she said so softly only he could hear. “You think memory is a keepsake to trade. Some trades braid people together in ways a ledger can’t measure.”

He wanted to argue—that he collected to feel, not to harm—but watching the hall’s quiet fallout unstitched that vanity. The feast hummed with a careful grief; sorrow was served and sampled like spice.

Dessert made the ledger’s exactness brutal. A woman at the far end lifted a glass dome to reveal a small loaf, crust black as char, and threaded inside with something that glowed like a wound. She ate; midway through, she clutched her throat and went still. When she spoke again, her voice was intact, but the name it called no longer found a mouth. The hole was clean and final.

Calder rose before the host could notice and slipped into a corridor hung with tapestries. The moth folded at the hollow of his neck like a pressed note. He struck a match to the bird-box and watched the tiny flame spit; in its brief light the moth’s wings showed new stains—not soot from travel but the faint colors of other people’s losses, footnotes pressed into tissue.

He understood, with a slow, bruising clarity, that his appetite carried a ledger beyond his own taking: others had been made lighter so he could feel heavier. The thought itself felt like a wound.

When he stepped back into the hall, the ritual continued as though no man had left. Servants cleared plates with mechanical tenderness; the host murmured as if closing a book. Calder walked among the tables with the weight of names settling into his chest.

Outside, the seam closed beneath the table leg and the street snapped back to rain and frying oil. The moth at his throat trembled once and then settled. Calder pressed his palm to his chest and felt, for the first time, the hollow where something that had once been his had been taken and kept.

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