She bit her lip to smother a laugh.
I dragged myself out of the bed, grabbed the nearest shirt, and cracked open the door just as Joren nearly fell through it like a man escaping hell.
He barreled inside, dripping water across the stone floor, one boot missing, hair plastered to his skull, holding… was that a basket of fish? He turned, setting the basket down with the gravitas of a man delivering evidence at a murder trial.
“ATLAS,” he said, voice dropping to a low, haunted register, “I need you to look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t accidentally summon an extinction-level weather event because you finally got laid.”
Caelira made a strangled noise.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Joren kept going.
“I have spent the last TWO HOURS wading through the aftermath of whatever… ritualistic natural-disaster situation you two conjured last night.”
He pointed outside. “Do you know what I found? DO YOU?”
No one answered.
“Good. I’ll tell you.” He lifted one finger.
“One: A tree. Split clean down the middle. Still smoldering.”
He didn’t even breathe before the second finger went up.
“Two: a section of the western wall that LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE PUNCHED IT WITH A GOD.”
Caelira’s hand flew to her mouth.
Joren threw up a third finger.
“Three: Twenty-seven”, he held up the number like it personally offended him, “TWENTY-SEVEN dead fish scattered across the courtyard as if the Storm Court had a god-damned seafood festival and forgot to invite me.”
Caelira choked. “Twenty-seven?”
“TWENTY. SEVEN.”
His eyes went wide and feral.
“That’s not rainfall. That’s not lightning. That’s a sign from the gods that someone in this castle had an orgasm strong enough to ALTER LOCAL ECOLOGY.”
My jaw tightened trying to refrain from laughing.
Caelira turned scarlet.
Joren pressed a shaking hand to his heart.
“And finally, my personal favorite… there is a goat. A literal goat. From Embercourt. On the roof. It is screaming. CONSTANTLY. It’s been up there for hours, Atlas.”
He swallowed.
“I think it saw things.”
I closed my eyes. “Joren?—”
He whirled on me, outraged.
“NO. You do NOT ‘Joren’ me right now. I would LIKE to have been told. I didn’t put ‘HANDLE MAGICAL ORGASMIC FALLOUT’ in my job description.”
