I. 5:47 AM — The Baker#
The void whispers first.
Wake up. The butter needs to be exactly negative two degrees. You overslept by three minutes. The shortbread will suffer.
Zyneese opens her eyes. The tent is dark. Cold. Her breath would mist if she were somewhere less magically insulated, but she keeps a subtle frost ward on the canvas—temperature control, not vanity. (Mostly not vanity.)
She reaches left. Glasses. Half-rim gold wire, delicate, intellectual. She puts them on. The world sharpens from soft blur to crisp detail. Fifteen feet of clear vision becomes the full spectrum. Tent pole. Traveling desk. The makeup case. The row of books she hasn’t finished.
She doesn’t need the glasses to bake. She knows the recipe by touch. But putting them on first is the ritual, and the ritual matters.
You’re stalling.
“I’m preparing. There’s a difference.”
She pulls the ingredients from her satchel. Flour—mundane, bought from a Stormwind mill. Sugar—also mundane, because conjured sugar crystallizes wrong. Vanilla—she portalled to Pandaria for this three days ago, bought it from a halfhill farmer who knows her by now, paid too much, doesn’t care.
The butter is conjured. This is the secret. Frost-mage conjuration at precisely negative two degrees produces butter with a crystalline structure that melts differently on the tongue—slower, smoother, with a faint arcane shimmer that most people don’t notice and Zyneese notices obsessively.
She works in silence. Measures by feel. The flour sifts through frost-touched fingers. The sugar folds in. The butter, conjured with a whisper of frost magic, is cut into the mixture with a small enchanted blade she tells people is “for letter-opening.”
This is the fourth time this week.
“I bake when I want to bake.”
You bake every morning. At dawn. Before anyone wakes. You leave the tray by the fire and pretend you didn’t.
“Applied transmutation theory.”
You love them.
“I tolerate them. The baking is—”
You love them and you express it through butter and sugar because saying it out loud would require vulnerability, and vulnerability is—
“If you finish that sentence I’m conjuring a silence ward on my own skull.”
The void goes quiet. It does that sometimes—retreats when it’s won an argument it knows she won’t acknowledge.
She rolls the dough. Cuts precise circles. Lays them on the conjured frost-sheet that serves as a baking tray. The trick is temperature: frost magic below, arcane heat above, the cookies baking in a gradient that produces shortbread that melts on the tongue and faintly sparkles.
Frost-crystal shortbread. Her signature. She’ll never call it that.
Twenty minutes. She sits cross-legged and reads while they bake—a Dalaran history journal she’s read twice before, glasses perched on her nose, the faint glow of magelight making the tent a pocket of warm amber.
The void provides literary criticism.
That chapter on the Kirin Tor’s fiscal policy is inaccurate. The author conflates two separate treasury reforms.
“Noted.”
Also the prose is pedestrian.
“Also noted.”
The cookies finish. She inspects each one. Removes one that’s slightly too dark on the edge. Eats it herself. Evidence destroyed.
She carries the tray outside. The camp is dark. Fire pit cold. She rebuilds the fire—frost mage building flames, the irony is a morning ritual at this point—and sets the tray on the flat stone near the warmth.
Then she puts Reyneese’s kettle on. Then she walks back to her tent.
Nobody saw.
That’s the point.
II. 5:51 AM — The Knight#
Avelreese has been awake since 5:30.
She lies on her back on the bedroll, staring at the tent canvas, and counts to one hundred. Not a meditation—a preparation. One hundred counts to organize the mind before the body takes over.
At one hundred, she rolls out of the bedroll. Strips the sleep shirt. Pulls on the fitted linen training top and leggings. Ties her hair back—chestnut waves controlled into a high tail, practical, out of the way.
The morning air hits her skin and she’s present in a way the armor never allows. The plate makes her a knight. The training gear makes her a body. She prefers the body.
She steps outside. Finds her spot: a flat patch of ground between her tent and the supply crates, measured and claimed on the first day of camp. Her training ground. Non-negotiable.
Push-ups first. Wide-grip. Thirty.
The first ten are mechanical. The second ten are focused. The last ten burn—the good burn, the one that says the muscle is working, tearing, rebuilding. She holds at the bottom of thirty for three seconds. Feels the chest engage. Feels the definition she’s built rep by rep, morning by morning, refusing to let the armor do the work her body should do.
Incline push-ups next. Hands elevated on the supply crate. Twenty. These target the upper chest specifically. She knows this. She’s studied calisthenics with the same precision she applies to battle plans—meticulous, documented, color-coded. (She has a training journal. It’s calligraphed. She will deny this.)
Then dips. Using two crates positioned shoulder-width apart. Fifteen. The chest burn deepens. Her arms shake on the last three. She pushes through. Form matters. Always.
Pull-ups. She’s rigged a bar between two tent poles—reinforced with blessed cord because the first version collapsed during week two. Wide grip. Twelve. Her shoulders protest. Her lats engage. She feels the muscles of her back working in concert with her chest, the full upper-body architecture she’s built through thousands of mornings exactly like this one.
Between sets, she rests. Hands on knees. Breathing hard. Sweat beginning despite the cool air. Her training top clings. Her hair escapes the tail in small wisps. She’s flushed—the sun-kissed skin turning warm pink, the golden undertones glowing.
Post-workout Avelreese is a different creature from Armored Avelreese. The plate hides everything—the definition, the strength, the physical reality of a woman who uses her body. In training gear, with sweat on her collarbones and her chest heaving from the last set, she looks alive. Naturally athletic. Effortlessly strong. The kind of beauty that comes from function, not decoration.
She doesn’t think about this. She thinks about the next set.
Planks. Core. Two minutes. She counts in her head. Sixty… ninety… one-twenty. Done.
She stands. Stretches. Catches her breath. Feels the morning settle into her muscles like earned weight.
And then she smells it.
Cookies.
III. 6:23 AM — The Convergence#
The tray sits on the flat stone by the fire. Twelve frost-crystal shortbreads, still warm, faintly sparkling. The fire is lit—someone rebuilt it. The kettle is on—someone filled it.
Avelreese stands there, breathing hard, sweat cooling on her skin, and stares at the cookies.
She knows who made them. Everyone knows. Nobody says it.
She takes one. Bites. The shortbread dissolves on her tongue—sweet, buttery, the faintest shimmer of arcane frost that makes the flavor echo. She closes her eyes. Chews slowly.
Takes a second one. Doesn’t close her eyes this time but might as well—her face does the thing it does when she eats Zyneese’s cookies, the expression that’s half reverence and half the particular joy of someone who cannot cook finding food made by someone who can.
Third cookie. She should stop. She won’t.
“That’s three.”
Avel freezes. Turns.
Zyneese stands at the entrance of her tent. Fully assembled. Eyeliner perfect. Earrings on—the medium gold hoops, the “neutral morning” set. Glasses glinting. Arms crossed. One eyebrow raised.
The Ice Queen, up and armored in every way that matters, watching the knight eat her cookies.
Avel (mouth full, mortified): “I wasn’t—”
Zyneese: “You were. You always are. Every morning.”
Avel (swallows): “The cookies were just… sitting there.”
Zyneese: “They’re always just sitting there. That’s the arrangement.”
Avel: “What arrangement?”
Zyneese (adjusts glasses): “I bake. You eat. Neither of us talks about it. You’ve just broken the third rule.”
Avel: “There are rules?”
Zyneese: “There are always rules. You of all people should appreciate that.”
Avel looks at the tray. At Zyneese. At the fire—lit, warm, built by frost-mage hands before dawn. At the kettle—filled, heating, for tea that Zyneese doesn’t drink.
Something shifts. Not in the moment—in Avel’s seeing of the moment.
Avel: “You built the fire.”
Zyneese: “Someone had to.”
Avel: “You build the fire every morning.”
Zyneese: “Practical.”
Avel: “You put the kettle on.”
Zyneese: “Caffeinated people are less insufferable.”
Avel: “You bake cookies every morning and leave them by the fire and never say anything.”
Zyneese (pause, very slight): “Applied transmutation theory.”
Avel: “You rebuilt Reyneese’s kettle after it cracked in the Chariot evacuation. You didn’t tell her. You fixed Vyrneese’s armor strap with frost-welding when it broke during sparring. You didn’t tell her either. You leave lavender where you think Lulureese will find it because Lulu puts it in her herbal concoctions. You alphabetized Brass’s supply ledger when she wasn’t looking.”
Silence.
Zyneese (dangerous calm): “You’ve been watching me.”
Avel: “I’ve been noticing.”
Zyneese: “Same thing.”
Avel: “No. Watching is active. Noticing is—” She stops. Thinks. “Noticing is what happens when you finally see what was always there.”
Zyneese says nothing. Her face is composed—it’s always composed—but something behind the lavender eyes is less controlled. A micro-expression. The ghost of being seen.
The void whispers: She sees you.
Zyneese ignores it.
Avel (quieter): “Why don’t you want anyone to know?”
Zyneese: “Know what?”
Avel: “That you care.”
IV. The Glasses Come Off#
The fire crackles. Dawn is breaking proper now—the sky shifting from grey to gold. The warband is still asleep. It’s just them. The knight in her training gear, sweat-damp and flushed. The mage in her armor of eyeliner and precision.
Zyneese: “I don’t ‘care.’ I maintain efficiency. A warband that falls apart from neglect is a warband that dies. These are logistics.”
Avel: “Cookies aren’t logistics.”
Zyneese: “Applied transmutation—”
Avel: “Stop. Please.”
Zyneese stops. Not because Avel asked. Because the word please came out soft, and honest, and without the noble-speak Avel usually hides behind.
Avel sits down by the fire. Not in her armored posture—the ramrod spine, the commanding presence. She sits with her knees up, arms resting on them, the way she does when she’s tired of being the knight.
Avel: “I grew up in a noble house. Everything was… transactional. You give service, you receive standing. You protect, you earn honor. You’re good, you get rewarded. Everything had a price.”
Zyneese (doesn’t sit, but doesn’t leave): “And?”
Avel: “And I never learned what it looks like when someone does something kind for no reason. When there’s no transaction. No duty. No exchange.”
Zyneese: “I told you—it’s not kindness. It’s—”
Avel: “It’s kindness, Zy. You bake cookies at dawn and leave them for us. You build the fire so we wake up warm. You fix things and don’t tell anyone. That’s kindness. And I’ve been eating your cookies every morning for weeks and I never once said thank you.”
Zyneese is very still.
The void whispers something. She doesn’t hear it. Or she hears it and it doesn’t matter because Avelreese is looking at her with those deep brown eyes, golden amber flecks catching the firelight, and there’s no performance in them. No duty. No noble posture.
Just a woman who’s learning what gratitude looks like when it’s not a transaction.
Avel: “Thank you. For the cookies. For the fire. For the kettle. For all of it.”
Zyneese removes her glasses. Slowly. Folds them. Holds them.
Without them, the world past fifteen feet goes soft. Avel becomes slightly blurred at the edges—warm tones, the flush of workout, the loose hair. But she’s close enough to be sharp. Close enough to be real.
Zyneese (voice very controlled, which means it almost isn’t): “Don’t make it weird.”
Avel: “Too late.”
Zyneese: “…”
Avel: “Is it okay? That I said it?”
Zyneese puts the glasses back on. The world sharpens. Avel’s face returns to full resolution—earnest, open, waiting.
Zyneese (adjusts glasses, which is what she does when she doesn’t trust her voice): “It’s… tolerable.”
Avel (small smile): “High praise from the Ice Queen.”
Zyneese: “Don’t push it.”
But she sits down. Not next to Avel—across the fire, at her usual distance. Back straight. Earrings catching the light. Every inch the Ice Queen.
Except she pulled one more cookie from beneath her robe—the slightly-too-dark one she would have eaten herself—and slides it across the flat stone toward Avel.
Zyneese: “It’s overcooked. Don’t get excited.”
Avel takes it. Bites. It’s perfect.
They sit. The fire burns. The sun rises. The warband sleeps.
Two women who express care in opposite directions—one through ice and denial, one through duty and plans—sitting in the quiet dawn, learning that gratitude doesn’t have to be a performance.
It can be a cookie slid across a stone.
It can be a thank you said once and not repeated.
It can be two rituals—baking and training—that happen in parallel every morning because both women need the other to be there, even if neither will say so.
V. The Morning Moves#
Lulureese finds them forty minutes later, bursting from her tent with Cinder the cat on her shoulder and a flower crown she wove in her sleep (she claims she sleep-weaves; nobody can disprove this).
Lulureese: “MORNING! Are those cookies? COOKIES!” (grabs two) “Cinder, look! Zy made—”
Zyneese: “I made nothing. Those appeared spontaneously. Arcane phenomenon.”
Lulureese: “They taste like LOVE!”
Zyneese: “They taste like butter and sugar. Don’t project.”
Vyrneese emerges next, hair in its bouncy crimson ponytail, looking confused by the concept of morning.
Vyrneese: “Is that food? Can I have food?”
Avel: “There are cookies.”
Vyrneese (takes one, bites, goes very still): “This is the best thing that has happened today.”
Zyneese: “It’s 6:30 AM.”
Vyrneese: “Yes.”
Brasskeese appears last, short and green and carrying a ledger.
Brass: “Who made coffee?”
Zyneese: “The kettle is on.”
Brass (looks at Zyneese): “You did the fire again.”
Zyneese: “Practical.”
Brass: “Uh-huh.” (takes a cookie, writes something in the ledger)
Avel: “Did you just log the cookie?”
Brass: “Tracking caloric expenditure across the warband. Yours is high. Stop eating four.”
Avel: “I only had three.”
Brass: “This morning.”
The warband settles into its rhythm. Lulureese braids Vyrneese’s hair by the fire. Brass runs numbers. Zyneese reads. Avel eats her (fourth) cookie and doesn’t apologize.
And Reyneese—
Reyneese emerges from her tent looking like ten thousand years of not-enough-sleep. Silver hair unwashed. Robes wrinkled. She shuffles to the fire. Finds the kettle hot. Finds a cup set out for her—Zyneese doesn’t look up from her book—and pours tea.
She sits. Drinks. Closes her eyes.
Reyneese: “Someone built the fire.”
Zyneese (turning a page): “It built itself.”
Reyneese: “And made cookies.”
Zyneese: “Spontaneous arcane—”
Reyneese: “And put the kettle on.”
Zyneese: “…”
Reyneese (quiet, knowing, the voice of ten thousand years): “Thank you, Zy.”
Zyneese turns another page.
The void whispers: They all see you now.
She turns another page.
Was that so terrible?
She doesn’t answer. But she doesn’t tell the void to shut up.
And across the fire, Avelreese catches her eye. Holds it for one second. Then looks away.
A transaction? No. A thank you that was already said and doesn’t need repeating.
Just two women, knowing.
The ice holds. But it’s thinner than yesterday.
Author’s Note#
The second Chronicle shifts from Giselleese’s world to the warband’s quiet mornings—the space between crises where people reveal themselves through routine. Zyneese and Avelreese are a study in contrasts: ice and earnestness, sarcasm and sincerity, hiding care and performing it. What they share is harder to name: the fear that being seen means being vulnerable, and the slow discovery that being seen by the right people is the opposite of danger.
Avelreese’s gratitude arc isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about noticing. Nobles learn to transact—service for honor, protection for standing. Avel is learning something different: that kindness without expectation exists, and the right response isn’t to repay it but to acknowledge it.
Zyneese won’t change overnight. The ice queen doesn’t melt in a morning. But she slid a cookie across a stone, and for Zyneese, that’s a confession.
Continues in: Chronicles of Six #3 — The Girl Who Said No
Content Warning: This story contains themes of emotional vulnerability, found family dynamics, and a concerning number of cookies.