The breakfast table had been laid out properly for the first time in a week, not the quick, functional spread that showed up most mornings, but something closer to a small feast, the kind of thing the palace kitchen only bothered with when someone worth impressing had come back home.
Alex slid into his seat and looked at it with genuine, undisguised appreciation, his eyes moving slowly across every dish like he was cataloguing them for later, which, in a small way, he was.
There was braised lamb shoulder at the center of the table, dark and glossy, the meat falling apart at the barest touch of a fork, sitting in a reduction thick with rosemary and something faintly sweet that he suspected was fig, the whole dish still releasing thin curls of steam into the air.
Beside it, a tureen of soft, buttery mashed root vegetables studded with roasted garlic, the lid coming off to release a smell rich enough that Alex’s stomach gave an audible, undignified growl before he’d even reached for a spoon.
Warm bread sat torn rather than sliced at the center of the table, the crust cracking apart to reveal something dense and slightly sweet inside, clearly baked that very morning, still faintly warm to the touch when he broke off a piece.
A bowl of glazed carrots caught the light where they sat, cooked slow enough that they’d gone almost translucent at the edges, the glaze pooling thick and amber around them.
And, because it was Eclipse’s homecoming, a small stack of honey-drizzled pastries sat at the corner of the table like a reward nobody had technically earned yet, the honey still glistening, not yet soaked fully into the pastry beneath it.
"You know, this is a lot of food," Alex said, already reaching for the bread, tearing off a piece and pressing it against the edge of the lamb’s reduction before taking a bite.
"It’s a homecoming," Eclipse said, like that explained everything, which, in this household, it apparently did, and she said it while already piling a truly alarming amount of lamb onto her own plate without a trace of shame.
They ate.
The lamb was rich enough that Alex found himself slowing down halfway through just to properly taste it, savoring the way the meat gave way almost before his fork had finished pressing into it, and the root vegetables had been seasoned with a heavy enough hand that even Zara, who rarely commented on food unless she was teasing him about it, made a low, appreciative sound over her second helping, closing her eyes for half a second in a way that made Eclipse laugh out loud across the table.
"See," Eclipse said, gesturing at her with a fork still half-loaded with carrots, "she gets it. This is what real food looks like. You two have clearly been living on rations while I was gone."
"We have not been living on rations," Alex said.
"The kitchen has been feeding us extremely well every single day. This is simply better than every single day."
"That’s what I said. Rations, compared to this."
They talked while they ate, easy, overlapping conversation, the kind that didn’t need much steering, Eclipse recounting some minor disaster involving a shipment of grain that had gotten routed to the wrong storehouse and the three furious letters that had followed it, Zara adding commentary that made the whole story sound considerably worse than it probably had actually been, Alex mostly listening and eating and feeling, for a stretch of several minutes, like nothing in the world was particularly urgent, like the whole palace could simply exist in this one warm, well-fed moment for as long as they let it.
It was somewhere between the lamb and the pastries that Alex set his fork down properly and looked across the table at Zara, his expression shifting into something more deliberate.
"I am going to change some things in my weapons training today," he said.
"I need to learn other things if I want to actually go up against those recruits who have already started leveling. Watching them isn’t enough anymore. Winning against Scott isn’t enough either, honestly. I need to actually start catching up to where the stronger ones already stand, and I can’t do that by drilling the same forms over and over without pushing into new ground."
It was Eclipse who answered first, her own fork pausing mid-air, the teasing energy from a moment ago draining out of her voice as she set it back down against her plate.
"I did get the news that you’d started sparring with some of the newer recruits," she said.
"It was hard to believe when they said you won. Like, you might not know this yet, since you’ve apparently been buried in training all week without once looking up from it, but the whole continent is talking about the Abyss household right now. Especially about you. The magic miracle of Abyss, some of them are calling you, and when you do things like this in the training hall, word gets out, and people twist it in ways that stop being anywhere close to the truth by the time it’s traveled three towns over."
"I even heard someone claiming you defeated a master rank fighter right after your awakening," she went on, shaking her head slowly, half exasperated and half genuinely worried.
"Of course he got thrown out of the tavern immediately, turns out he was just trying to sell fake awakening pills and needed a story with enough shine on it to move product to gullible customers."
"He-he-hahaha!" Zara burst out laughing, nearly choking on her tea, one hand slapping flat against the table while Alex’s expression settled into something dry and faintly pained.
"Well," Alex said, once Zara had recovered enough to breathe properly again, wiping at her eyes, "attention is good, but you say the whole continent? That’s starting to sound like dangerous territory to be standing in."