Do Not Vanish

Lantern Hall always felt different at night.

By day, it belonged to motion: footsteps, bowls, low voices, the occasional curse when stitches pulled. By evening, the noise thinned. Cots settled into uneven sleep. Lanterns burned low, and the altar kept its small dawn-colored glow.

Rishi stood just inside the door with Maeril at his side.

His cloak was damp at the hem from river mist. His staff rested in his right hand.

Maeril pushed back her hood but did not speak at first.

Her yellow eyes found Lathander’s holy symbol above the simple shrine, then dropped to what lay beneath it: cots, folded blankets, clean water, and a drain cut into the floor with practical ruthlessness.

“Beds first,” she murmured.

Rishi looked at her.

“Icons after,” she finished, voice low.

The comment landed more deeply than praise should have.

“That was Elisa,” he said. “She wanted the light to fall on the beds first.”

Maeril glanced at the drain. “And you wanted somewhere blood could go.”

“Yes.”

“Practical pair,” she said.

At the far end of the room, Elisa stood near the altar, turning down the last lantern. The small sunrise pendant at her throat glinted in the lanternlight. Her hair had been pinned up badly after a long day; a few strands had escaped and clung to her cheek.

She heard them before she turned.

Rishi saw the moment her face found him. Habit softened her first—relief, affection, the old counting of whether he had returned whole enough to stand.

Then her eyes moved to Maeril.

The softness closed.

“Morninglord preserve me,” Elisa said. “You bring guests at this hour now?”

Maeril bowed her head. Not deeply. Not falsely.

“Maeril Greenward,” she said. “Outer City witch. Soup-seller. Abjurer when the day is ambitious. I hope I am not too late for courtesy.”

Elisa came down from the altar step, bare feet silent on the floor.

“Elisa Duskwhisper,” she replied. “Priest of Lathander. One of this Hall’s keepers.”

Her gaze flicked to Rishi.

“And sometime witness to monks deciding that ten days is an appropriate amount of warning before changing their lives.”

“I should have spoken sooner,” he said.

“Yes,” Elisa answered.

Elisa did not raise her voice. That made it worse.

Maeril’s tail shifted once behind her cloak, but she did not speak over the wound. She only watched Elisa more carefully.

Rishi stepped farther into the Hall.

“I wanted you to meet her before she became a rumor here.”

Elisa’s mouth tightened.

“She already has.”

Maeril’s eyebrows lifted.

“Elisa,” Rishi said softly.

The priest held his gaze.

“Do you think a hawk on my doorframe makes no noise?” she asked. “Ink on your hands? The way you look toward the road every time you think no one sees you?”

Her gaze sharpened.

“This Hall hears things. So do I.”

A small silence followed.

When Elisa spoke again, her voice had lost the last of its humor.

“And when men start saying places like this stay open only because people allow it, I hear that too.”

Rishi lowered his eyes.

The room breathed around them: sleeping bodies, old wood, banked coals, the faint smell of salve, soup, and river damp.

Maeril stepped forward only enough to be part of the truth, not enough to claim the room.

“Then I am sorry,” she said.

Elisa looked at her sharply.

Maeril did not flinch.

“For becoming a shape in your Hall before you saw my face,” she added.

That caught Elisa off guard.

Maeril folded her hands behind her back, fingers clasped around one wrist. For once, she did not smile.

“I asked for his time,” she said. “His thoughts. His company, eventually, on a road.” Her eyes moved once over the cots. “I did not want you wondering whether I meant to become one more weight on a place already carrying too much.”

Elisa’s eyes narrowed.

“You read that, did you?”

“Yes,” Maeril said. “Unless I have badly misunderstood this place.”

The silence tightened.

Rishi drew breath, but Elisa spoke first.

“Are you leaving?”

There it was.

No accusation. No ornament. Just the question that had been waiting in the Hall longer than any of them.

Then Elisa added, quieter, “And before you answer like a monk, understand which question I am asking.”

Rishi held his staff a little more firmly.

“Whether I am leaving you,” he said. “Or whether I am leaving the Hall exposed.”

Elisa’s face did not change.

That was answer enough.

“I am going,” he said. “Not forever. Not tonight. Not before the book is ready. But yes. We intend to travel to Candlekeep.”

Candlekeep.

The word did not echo. The Hall was too full of sleeping bodies for that. But it moved through Elisa all the same.

Her hands folded around the sun symbol at her throat.

“You choose a long road.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Her eyes moved to the cots. “Roads do not only take people away. They leave work behind.”

Rishi looked down at his hands.

Maeril stayed quiet beside him, her restraint like heat held under a lid. She wanted to answer, to shield him, to make the room less cruel with a joke. She did not.

Elisa looked from one to the other.

Her eyes took in the distance between them, the way Rishi stood beside Maeril, the way she held herself ready without challenging the room. Not a trespasser. Not exactly a guest.

A threshold.

“I saw it happening,” Elisa said. “Before you named it. You came back from the bridge with your body here and the rest of you elsewhere. Then the papers. The ink. The way you looked at maps as if they had begun speaking.”

Rishi said nothing.

“You told me you did not know where the road led.”

“I didn’t.”

“And now?”

He looked at Maeril once.

Not for permission.

For honesty.

“Now I know the next step.”

Elisa closed her eyes briefly.

“That is not as comforting as you think.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” he answered.

A cot creaked. Someone murmured in sleep, turned, settled again. Elisa’s gaze went there automatically, checking. Even hurt, she counted the room.

Maeril saw it. Rishi saw Maeril see it.

Something shifted.

“This Hall is beautiful,” Maeril said quietly.

Elisa’s eyes came back to her.

“Not pretty,” Maeril continued. “Beautiful. There is a difference. Pretty places often lie. This one doesn’t.”

Elisa looked at her for a long moment, searching for flattery and not finding it.

“Beds first,” Maeril said again. “Clean paths. Water near the weak. Light where frightened people wake. Someone thought about bodies before doctrine. I respect that.”

Elisa’s mouth loosened a little, but the hurt did not leave.

“He helped me build it,” she said.

“I know.”

“No,” Elisa said. “You know he serves here. That is not the same.”

Maeril inclined her head. “Then tell me.”

Rishi turned toward Elisa.

She looked smaller suddenly, though she had not moved.

Her thumb passed over Lathander’s symbol.

“Before Baldur’s Gate, there was Waterdeep. Trollskull Manor. We called it the Beacon of Hope. It was supposed to be a sanctuary. A place for children. For the frightened. For anyone who needed a morning.”

“My friend Firemind was captured by the Zhentarim. Tortured. Murdered. They wanted something we had, and they wanted Rika punished for leaving them. She had been one of theirs once. We protected her. We thought that meant she was free.”

“Then they came for the Beacon. They attacked the place, and they burned it.”

Her hand closed around Lathander’s symbol.

“Places like this are not protected by being good,” Elisa said. “Sometimes being good is what makes them useful to threaten.”

“Rika bought me enough time to run. She didn’t make it.”

Grief came into her face, old and still sharp.

“So I fled to Baldur’s Gate with a cracked holy symbol and a sack of clothes. The Zhentarim were behind me. I had spent a year learning how not to sleep deeply, how not to trust kindness, how not to say my name in the wrong room.”

She looked across the Hall, her eyes gone somewhere else.

“I met him at a ruined shrine. I had made camp there because I was tired, and because the place still remembered dawn.”

Rishi remembered the pale morning, the dew on the stones, and Elisa kneeling as if prayer were the last structure still standing.

“This man,” Elisa said, nodding toward him without looking away from Maeril, “arrived and did not ask what was wrong. He did not offer salvation, or a sermon. He just sat there, where I could reach him if I wanted.”

Her mouth softened.

“He listened,” Elisa continued. “Then he led me here. This Hall was still a ruin then, but he said it could rise if enough hands trusted it.”

Rishi’s throat tightened.

Elisa looked around the Hall.

“We made this from broken furniture, old stone, borrowed coin, and stubbornness. We found candles, relics, beds, volunteers. He stood by the door the first day we opened, because I was afraid no one would come. Then too many came. He stayed.”

She finally looked at him.

“I thought,” she said, and the words cost her more now, “that perhaps Ilmater and Lathander had been kind enough to give me someone whose pain ran deep enough that he would never need to leave.”

Rishi closed his eyes.

The sentence struck like a hand placed gently on a bruise.

“That was not fair,” Elisa said before he could answer.

“Fear is rarely fair before it is spoken,” she added.

Maeril let out a slow breath.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

Elisa gave her a sharp, tired look. “You would know?”

Maeril’s smile came, small and edged. “Dawn-priest, I live in a doorless hut because I decided a door was a poor substitute for being ready. I know a thing or two about fear pretending to be architecture.”

For the first time, Elisa almost smiled.

Almost.

Rishi stepped closer to the altar. The light caught the red cord at his wrist.

“When I met you,” he said, “I had nowhere to stand. I knew battlefields, cells, roads, and rooms where suffering was either currency or punishment. You gave me a place where pain arrived and was not worshiped.”

Elisa’s eyes shone, though no tears fell.

“You gave me work that made sense,” he continued. “This Hall rooted me. I am not forgetting that.”

His thumb found the worn-smooth place on his staff.

“If I walk south, it is because this place taught me mercy can be built. Not only felt. Not only offered one wound at a time.”

Maeril looked down at that.

Rishi swallowed.

“The book is another kind of building. Ink instead of mortar. Road instead of wall. I am not leaving you behind, Elisa. I am carrying what we made here.”

He looked toward the cots.

“And before I go, I will not leave the Hall with a promise instead of a plan. Keys. Stores. Night watches. Who to send for. Which doors stick. Which volunteers know when to bar the door and when to open it.”

Elisa’s breath trembled once.

“You should have said that sooner.”

“Yes.”

“You are very bad at knowing when people need words.”

“I am.”

Maeril made a small sound.

Rishi glanced at her.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I am admiring your spiritual growth.”

Elisa huffed despite herself.

It broke the room a little. Not enough to end the pain. Enough to let air through.

Then Elisa sat down on the nearest bench as if her legs had finally decided the conversation was heavy.

“I have been afraid,” she said. “That if you step away, the Hall will discover it has only been standing because you leaned against it.”

Her mouth tightened.

“And that people who already know how to push will notice the lean is gone.”

Rishi stepped closer before he answered.

“It stands because you built it,” he said.

“With you.”

“Yes,” he said. “With me. But not only me.”

He looked toward the cots.

“You made others part of it. Volunteers. Patients. Neighbors. They know where the blankets are. They know how to help.”

He looked back at her.

“I belong to this Hall. I am not all of it.”

Elisa looked at him for a long while. Her expression changed. The fear had not left, but it had lost its right to rule.

“You will come back,” she said.

“Yes.”

He did not know the road ahead, but he truly intended to come back.

Maeril shifted, then spoke quietly.

“I will do my best to bring him back with all necessary pieces attached.”

Elisa looked at her.

“All?”

“Most,” Maeril amended. “Travel is unreasonable.”

Elisa’s lips twitched.

Maeril’s expression softened past the joke.

“I mean it,” she said. “I know he is not mine to take. I asked him for a road. I did not ask him to cut his roots.”

Her eyes moved to the cots, the altar, the clean path through the room.

“And if this Hall needs paper, keys, names, and practical arrangements before the road can have him, then the road can wait.”

The words settled.

Elisa stood.

“Good,” she said, voice rough. “Because if you had, I would have disliked you.”

“I assumed.”

“I may still dislike you slightly.”

“That seems healthy.”

Rishi let his head bow for one heartbeat, hiding the beginning of a smile.

Elisa saw it anyway.

“Oh, don’t look relieved yet,” she said. “I am still cross with you.”

“I know.”

“With both of you, potentially.”

Maeril nodded. “Reasonable.”

“And I want wine.”

Maeril blinked.

Elisa crossed to a cupboard near the altar and pulled out a small clay jug and three chipped cups.

“Pilgrim’s gift,” she said. “Rough, young, and probably better used for cleaning wounds.”

“Honest wine,” Maeril said.

Elisa poured.

The red wine looked nearly black in the low light.

They stood near one another. Three tired figures between beds and altar, the Hall breathing around them.

Elisa lifted her cup.

“To what?” she asked.

Maeril considered, all mischief gone from her face for once.

“To thresholds,” she said. “The ones we guard. The ones we cross. The ones we pretend we haven’t already stepped over.”

Elisa’s smile came properly this time, small but real.

“To thresholds.”

Rishi lifted his cup.

“To bonds carried,” he said.

They drank.

The wine was terrible.

Maeril coughed once, delicately, then stared into her cup as if it had personally betrayed her.

“Dawn-priest,” she said, “your god owes you better pilgrims.”

Elisa laughed.

It startled the nearest sleeper.

The laugh softened everything that followed.

They spoke briefly of practical things—not enough to bury the wound, but enough to make the future safer. The road south. Weather. Bad stretches of the Coast Way. Volunteers trusted with keys. Which neighbor would come if trouble came. Which supplies vanished first.

Elisa asked questions like a priest, a quartermaster, and a worried friend at once.

Maeril answered with more seriousness than Rishi expected. She named safe camps, bad wells, shrines that were truly tended and shrines that were not. She admitted what she did not know, and Elisa respected that.

At last, the priest set down her cup.

“Come here,” she said.

Rishi obeyed at once.

Maeril did not. She hesitated.

Elisa noticed. “What?”

“Will your god mind?”

“About what?”

Maeril gestured vaguely at herself: horns, tail, green skin, witchhood, the whole inconvenient assortment. “Blessing a woman who argues with priests and feeds alley children under the table.”

Elisa looked up toward the holy symbol.

“If he minds,” she said, “he can take it up with me in the morning. Come.”

Maeril did.

Elisa lifted both hands.

“Lord of the First Light, hear us,” she said softly.

The Hall seemed to quiet around the words.

“You watched this place rise,” Elisa said softly. “Beds before icons. Candles before certainty. Two stubborn fools pretending they were not afraid.”

Rishi closed his eyes.

Maeril’s shoulder brushed his.

“Now one of those fools walks a new road, and brings another with him: a woman with the good sense to feed people and the questionable sense to invite monks into her plans.”

Maeril whispered, “Accurate.”

Elisa ignored her with priestly dignity.

“Let the road meet them with more dawn than darkness. Let change bring renewal, not ruin. Let the work begun here—in bandage, bowl, ink, and stubborn mercy—take root where it can.”

Her voice lowered.

“Let those who remain not be made poorer by those who go. Remind them that bonds are not chains, and that departure is not betrayal.”

Rishi’s throat closed.

Elisa’s hands trembled once, then steadied.

“And if it would please you,” she added, much quieter, “send them back to me alive. Preferably with all necessary pieces attached.”

Maeril bowed her head.

“Aye.”

“Let dawn hear it,” Rishi said.

No light or thunder answered the blessing. It had only the Hall, the sleeping wounded, and three people choosing not to let fear become the final word.

Elisa lowered her hands.

For a heartbeat, none of them moved.

Then Maeril sniffed. “Well. That was dangerously sincere.”

Elisa wiped quickly at one eye. “I can ruin it if needed.”

“I was hoping you might.”

They moved apart, and the night loosened.

At the door, Elisa’s expression changed with dangerous suddenness. Rishi knew that look. It usually meant she had found a way to make truth useful and embarrassing at the same time.

“You know,” she said, far too casually, “I am empowered to bless unions as well. Weddings, handfastings. Rituals people use to justify sharing blankets.”

Rishi froze.

Maeril turned slowly.

“Oh?” she said.

“Elisa.”

The priest looked innocent. Badly.

“I only mention it because Candlekeep is a long road, and arrangements sometimes change on long roads.”

“Elisa.”

“And I would hate for anyone to lack proper ritual support.”

Maeril’s grin spread bright and wicked.

“As far as I know,” she said, “your monk has taken no vow of chastity.”

Rishi’s ears burned hot.

“I said that in confidence.”

Maeril blinked at him. “You said it to me over tea while trying very hard not to flirt.”

“I was not—”

Both women looked at him.

He stopped.

Elisa’s shoulders began to shake.

Maeril leaned toward her, solemn as a magistrate. “If I decide to marry your monk, Dawn-priest, I will send the request in writing. Triplicate. Proper seals. Candlekeep sounds fussy about documentation.”

Elisa laughed aloud.

Rishi covered his face with one hand.

“You are both impossible.”

“Yes,” Elisa said.

“Deeply,” Maeril agreed.

“And now,” Elisa said, still smiling, “one of you is leaving my Hall before I regret being hospitable, and the other is going to bed.”

Maeril pulled her hood up. At the threshold, she turned back.

The smile had softened.

“Thank you,” she said to Elisa. “For the blessing. For the Hall. For him, before I knew him.”

Elisa’s face gentled.

“Bring him back.”

“I will.”

She stepped into the night.

Rishi watched until the dark took the line of her cloak.

Then he closed the door quietly and turned back.

Elisa stood with her arms folded, the lanternlight warm on her tired face.

“Well,” she said. “She is not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. Someone softer. Or worse.”

Elisa looked toward the door. “She will keep you honest. And possibly alive through spite.”

“That seems likely.”

“And you will write.”

“Yes.”

“And return.”

“Yes.”

Elisa stepped forward and adjusted the edge of his cloak at his shoulder. Small. Familiar.

“Go to bed, Rishishura,” she said. “Dawn comes whether you are ready or not.”

He smiled.

“Yes, Elisa.”

As he walked toward his small room, staff touching the floor in soft, even beats, something inside him settled, though not into ease.

The road to Candlekeep was still long.

Leaving would still hurt.

But now the Hall had seen the hut.

The priest had seen the witch.

Elisa had blessed the road that would take him away for a while.

That did not make the leaving easy.

It made it honest.