The Stew at the Fog Gate
Coll had wanted, for six days now, to make one pot of stew that did not taste of nothing.
This was harder than it sounded. The nomadic life gave a man salt, hardtack, dried root, and whatever crawled or sprouted within limping distance of his cart. It did not give him the little grace-notes — the wild thyme, the crushed rowa, the smoked marrow — that turned a soldier's slop into a thing you sat back from and sighed over. But he had gathered them, patiently, at risk to his ankles and dignity, from three separate ruins, and today he had a fire that would not spit, a pot that did not leak, and an afternoon.
He also had a Tarnished.
The Tarnished had arrived a little after noon, at a dead run, screaming, on fire. This was not unusual. Coll's cart sat a few paces from a fog gate — one of those shimmering grey walls the golden order strung across its doorways like a spider that had given up on subtlety — and beyond the fog was something that killed people. Coll did not know what. He had never gone to look. His mother had raised no fools and only the one merchant.
The Tarnished put themselves out by rolling in the mud, stood, spat, checked the mud had not ruined a small vial at their belt, and walked back into the fog. There was a pause. There was a sound like a cathedral falling on a bell. The Tarnished came sprinting back out, no longer on fire, now merely dead — which, for a Tarnished, was a formality. They dissolved into golden motes at the lip of the gate. A moment later Coll heard the little chime up the road, at the Site of Grace where the gold touched the earth, that meant they had reassembled there and would shortly be back to try it again.
Coll tasted his broth. Still nothing. He needed the marrow to render longer. He added a splinter of bone and stirred.
The Tarnished died four more times before he skimmed the fat.
"You're pulling right," Coll said, on the fifth.
The Tarnished stopped mid-trudge. They were caked to the eyebrows, one pauldron hanging by a thread, and up close they were younger than the swearing had suggested and older than the dying had. "What?"
"You keep rolling right. Off the fire. I've watched you do it eleven times. Whatever's in there is throwing that fire to your right on purpose, because it's learned you go right, because you always go right." Coll shrugged and returned to his pot. "I'd go left. But I sell soup. What do I know."
The Tarnished stared at him. Then at the fog. Then went in and died going left.
"Different, though," Coll called, as the motes scattered. "You lasted longer."
He genuinely believed this to be encouraging, and was surprised to find, over the next hour, that he meant it. He had not intended to become interested. Interest was bad for business and worse for the heart; a merchant who grew fond of his customers ended up giving away his stock and starving in a ditch feeling wonderful about it. Coll had buried the whole rest of his caravan — the Great Caravan, they'd called it, forty carts and his uncles and the good singer — in a single afternoon of black knives years ago, and he had learned from it the one useful lesson a mortal can learn, which is that you do not get to try that day again. There was no chime up the road for Coll. When his fire went out it would go out the once.
So he had made himself small and useful and unattached, and he sold soup, and he did not go into fog gates.
And yet. The stew was coming good. The marrow had finally let go of itself into the broth, and the thyme had bloomed, and the whole clearing smelled, for the first time in six days, like somewhere a person might want to be. And the Tarnished kept dying, and getting up, and dying, and it was the getting up that got him. That endless, undignified, ferocious getting up. Coll had a whole philosophy about people like this, most of it uncharitable — the deathless ones, blessed back from the grave, throwing their afternoons into the fire because an afternoon cost them nothing, because there was always another chime up the road. Cheap deaths. Rich fools.
But this one had checked the vial before dying. Every time. Whatever was in the vial mattered more than the dying did, and a person who had something that mattered more than dying was not, whatever else they were, hollow.
On the fourteenth death Coll filled a bowl.
"Sit down," he said, when the Tarnished came trudging back. "You're no use to anyone dead and less use to me stewing my broth with your moping. Sit. Eat."
"I don't have any runes. I dropped them all in there. I have to go back for—"
"Did I ask you for runes." He pushed the bowl into their mud-black hands. "It's free. Once. Tell anyone and I'll deny it and they'll believe me, because look at me, do I look like a man who gives soup away."
The Tarnished sat on the cart's running-board and ate. They ate the way the truly spent eat, without ceremony, the bowl tipped to the mouth, and when they came up for air there was a long moment where they simply breathed, steam on their face, the fog gate glowing grey and patient at their back, and something in the set of their shoulders came unwound that all the dying had wound tight.
"That's the best thing I've had in the Lands Between," they said.
"It's the only good thing in the Lands Between," said Coll, "and I made it, and it took me six days and three ruins, and I'll not be making another for a while, so savour it." He was appalled to hear his voice go rough at the end and covered it by scowling into the pot.
The Tarnished finished the bowl. Set it down carefully on the board, the way you set down something borrowed. Checked the vial at their belt. Stood.
"Left," Coll said. "And when the fire comes, don't roll. Wait. Let it come. Then roll."
"That sounds like a good way to burn."
"It's a good way to win. You've tried the other fourteen. Try mine."
The Tarnished looked at him — a real look, the first one, the kind that lands — and then walked into the grey.
Coll stirred his stew. He did not watch the fog. He had made a rule about not watching the fog and he kept it, mostly, and he kept it now, mostly, and so he was looking down into the good brown broth when the sound came — not the cathedral-on-a-bell of the fire, but something else. A roar cut suddenly short. A silence with a shape to it. And then, at the edge of his sight, the fog gate thinned, and paled, and was simply gone, the way mist goes when the sun finds it, leaving an open doorway onto an ordinary grey road with nothing killing anyone on it at all.
The Tarnished did not come back out. They wouldn't, now. Forward was the only direction that mattered to them, and forward, at last, was open.
Coll had an empty bowl on his running-board and half a pot of the best stew he'd made in a year and nobody to sell it to. He looked at the vanished gate for a while. Then he ladled himself a bowl — a full one, he'd earned it — and sat down where the Tarnished had sat, and ate it slow, all of it, once.
Head-canon of [[elden-ring-the-shattering-and-the-stone]] — an ordinary afternoon at a merchant's fire beside a fog gate · warmth and dry comedy, the register the grimdark source refuses.