Once home I got down in the basement and threw some more coal in the furnace. A low, deep whistle filled the room as the draft pulled on the bright red tongues of fire, twisting and snapping while fed by the new coal. I closed the lid and went in the storeroom, using aether to light the place up a bit.

  I moved between the sacks and the new shelves, picking dried fruits, jam jars and nuts. I gathered them all close to the exit, ready to be used. Oat-like grains completed my list. With these prepared I moved on to the acquisition of additional ingredients.

  As I reached the main gate of the Academy grounds, I was welcomed by shifting pink light intertwined with the dancing flakes of snow. A thin barely visible curtain glowing pink towered above the walls of the academy. Any snowflakes touching it vanished with a low indistinct hiss into twirling mist that rose to greet the incoming flakes, keeping the Academy grounds dry and snowless.

  I stepped through the gate and was greeted by colder air, making my skin tighten and my hair stand on end. Sharper wind drew tears from my exposed eyes. A low hum was audible from outside the barrier, a murmur of the wind rushing between the houses, singing for the dance of snow and leading it through the narrowest of streets.

  I bought more milk; the batch at home was left to separate so I could harvest the heavy cream I needed this heavy, fat cream to make whipped cream. Among my other purchases numbered a big, fresh, red leg, twenty eggs, a jar of honey and a small barrel of watery, brown sweet sap that tasted like watered down maple syrup.

  They all had inflated prices due to the winter. I brought everything back to the tower and started processing the ingredients. First off were the oat grains. I used two solid planks, sandwiching a layer of grains between them and hammered them into flakes on the anvil, like the billet for a sword, muffled clangs of metal on wood mixed with the yielding crunch of the grains.

  “What insanity are you making today?” Vex came from behind the tower.

  “Oat flakes.” I spat out between hammer strikes to maintain the rhythm.

  “Oat flakes? Isn’t that horse food? And an expensive one to boot.”

  “Do you think horses like it because it’s bad? Do you know how nutritious and dense in calories it is?” I asked without looking at him. I used a clean sack to collect all the resulting flakes and flour, then spread a new layer of grains and started hammering again.

  “What are you going to use them for, then?” Vex continued his inquiry, his eyes not leaving the two boards of wood I was beating.

  “To make cookies… Why do I have to explain myself to you? Stop interrogating me over groceries! You’ll get your share of ‘horse food’ in a few days anyway.” I brought my hammer down, punctuating the end of my sentence.

  “Easy, there! I’m going, I’m going.” He raised his hands above his head and left, slowly shaking his head.

  I continued my hammering until all the grains I brought upstairs were flattened, then hauled them inside and transferred the yield into a bowl along with some milk, that slowly thickened into a beige cream as the flakes swelled.

  I placed the sap in a pot and started reducing it. It soon bubbled, turning from a liquid that slipped right off the spoon into a viscous, amber substance that coating the back of the spoon and saturating the air with heavy notes of caramel.

  I shaved a wafer-thin sample off the raw leg and sprinkled just a bit of salt on it, then skewered it and placed it on the hot pottery pan. It sizzled, changing its color. I took it off the skewer and chewed. It responded with a slightly crispy, crumbly texture and crunching sounds, its fat coated my tongue with an aroma of lamb.

  With the test done, I could now choose the best course of action. I made a mix of condiments that would complement the slightly sweet aroma of the meat and worked the rub into the grain, scoring the fascia in a precise grid, so that the meat wouldn’t tighten.

  I hung the leg in the smoker to simultaneously dry-brine and cold-smoke it. With the roast’s preparations over, I continued with the cookies.

  Separating egg whites was an exercise in precision and patience. The slippery yolk only needed one wrong move to burst open and spread through the egg white, while the stubborn, gelatinous albumen required a lot of maneuvering between the eggshell halves to get sheared away.

  I kept them in two separate bowls. I started whipping the whites, using aether to drive my hand in a blur of high-speed oscillation as fast as an electric mixer — the albumen erupting into stiff, glossy peaks. In my previous life I never managed to whisk fast enough to obtain the aerated mass I needed.

  Soon my bowl was filled with small, dense bubbles forming a pearlescent foam, the result of six egg whites being well whipped. Putting them aside, I strained the saturated oats from the milk, the grains now swollen and heavy, clinging together in a dense, starch-laden mass that slumped into the bowl.

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  I incorporated the starch-heavy oats into the foam, along with some flour and crushed nuts. I did my best to maintain its aerated texture. Setting aside some of the reduced syrup, I cooled it with aether, then added it into the batter and started whipping everything again.

  As soon as I obtained a tacky, aerated suspension, I stopped and started cutting the dried fruits, chopping them in small pieces.

  Once the mixture reached a state of homogenization, I had the finished result. Using a self-made iron tray and waxed paper I got ready to bake my cookies. I placed them in the stove over the fire and waited. I was still reducing the remaining syrup, so the temperature was a tad too high for this kind of batter.

  I took them out a bit later. They were a bit paler than intended, so I completed the bake with a burst of penetrative aetheric heat. I took the cookies off the tray and paper and portioned out the next batch of batter, sliding the tray into the oven’s mouth.

  I repeated the process until I finished all the batter. I had obtained a bunch of sweet, crumbly biscuits that were best eaten cold, with caramelized fruits and a nutty flavor. I staged the yield in the cold storage.

  Over the course of the next two days, the air in the tower grew heavy with lingering aromas of sweet jam, porridge and the sharp vinegar notes of the pickles cutting through the heavy, cloying sweetness of the syrup.

  I baked the layers from a cake and used fatty, thick enough for the spoon to stand upright, natural cream to make whipped cream. I had a multi-layered cake with mellis jam as filling and whipped cream as frosting.

  I decorated the tower a bit, using blue and yellow cloth I dyed myself and prepared pillows for the wooden chairs, smoothing everything out carefully. On the second day, I had to rush out of the tower, hearing the gate open.

  “Cato! Come out for a… Ah, you’re already here… That was fast.”

  “I’m sorry Cassia, but not today. Come back for my birthday tomorrow instead.”

  “Can’t I come inside to chat for a bit since I’m already here?” She pouted.

  “No. I already started decorating.”

  “Oh? A mysterious project? Now you’ve made it impossible for me to stay outside!” She craned her neck to peer behind me, towards the doorway.

  “You can see tomorrow.” I replied, planting my feet to act as a living barrier against her attempts to slip past.

  She smirked mischievously. “But I demand an early viewing!” She jumped, aether pushing her above me. I grabbed her ankle and threw her down as if her heel was a spear tip. The ground shuddered beneath my boots as she landed with a thud and took several steps back to find her balance.

  “Speaking fancy won’t help you this time. Just wait until tomorrow please… I haven’t even finished, and a lot of stuff is still left lying around to be placed. It’s still a mess. Just wait to see it when it’s all finished.”

  “I don’t really have a choice, anyway, do I?”

  “You don’t…” Her sudden compliance was a red flag that put my instincts on high alert.

  “Then I’ll be going. See you tomorrow!” She turned on her heels and started walking away, leaving through the gate.

  “Tomorrow…” Her attitude changed too fast, I didn’t, I couldn’t trust her when she acted like this… She changed her tune too fast. I kept looking at her going.

  She turned her head soon, probably expecting me to be gone. Instead, I was waiting there, leaning on the gate, watching her. She quickly turned around again and started walking away rapidly. Her neck tilted sharply forward, allowing her golden hair to cascade over her shoulders and curtain her face as she retreated in a hurried, stiff-legged march.

  If there was one thing I knew about her, it was that she wouldn’t easily give up even if embarrassed. Her figure disappeared from my sight. There was no point for me to wait there, she wouldn’t try a frontal approach anymore.

  I went back inside, continuing with the decorations. The cake was ready, and I was using dry fruit to add some details to it. Mainly I carefully guided the viscous jam to write my name and new age on the cake. ‘Now no one can say my name ain’t sweet…’

  I kept my ears pricked throughout the process, and as expected, I caught a muffled thud. I rushed out and circled the tower. Cassia was quietly approaching the tower after having jumped the fence. We locked eyes. Without saying anything, she started backstepping.

  We kept looking at each other soundlessly, our gazes locked, until she jumped the fence getting out of the courtyard again. I shook my head and waited, looking at where she jumped out. Her head slowly rose above the fence.

  As soon as our eyes met, she lowered herself again. This time I heard the thud of her fall, her muttered protests and her steps as she left. I returned inside. Out of dried, opaque Corri fruit jam, I constructed a scale model and added a roof out of translucent, bright orange mellis jam, a simple imitation of my new home.

  I placed it in the middle of the cake. Above my name and below the number nine. I was half proud of how it looked, half disgruntled. In the end I removed the age and name. I scraped off the tacky jam forming the letters and number, smoothing the whipped cream.

  I left just the scale replica of the tower, a lone guardian over the white expanse, a symbol of a new life. I wasn’t shameless enough to call myself nine.

  By now, considering my age before my death, I was thirty-one, an irreconcilable discrepancy between my accumulated experience and this nine-year-old body. I shook my head. ‘I am one year closer to being an adult. Ha… One year closer to a possible war in which I’ll have to fight.

  ‘Everything has a way to be dealt with.’ I took the cake down in the basement and returned upstairs to finish arranging the place. Napkins and tablecloth were the last details I had to deal with. I made sure the white silky cloths were smoothed out and stainless then entered my study and sat down.

  I leaned back, letting my head rest on the chair as I looked up at the ceiling. The silence of the tower gained a frigid weight under the memory of my dreams. If I hadn’t cultivated my shen so much I’d have waved the two visions of visceral scenes of slaughter as nightmares, yet I couldn’t afford to do that now.

  The inevitable was fixed, only the way I moved towards it could change the outcome. My stomach tightened as I thought of the giant arm. That was a level of strength I couldn’t even imagine. My mind was made up, preparations were underway, only one question remained, how much time did I have left?