I have started and stopped this entry three times because it keeps turning into one of Anna’s field reports. Old habits. I default to a method where I list conditions first, then actions, then results. Food does not care about that kind of order. It arrives when it is ready, you eat it while it is warm, and whatever it does to you shows up later.
So this is not a log. It is just me trying to make sense of the meals that stayed in my head after everything that happened, and why the memory of them is welded to the people I was sitting with at the time.
The first bowl worth mentioning is back in East Bay, long before we knew the lock on the mount was more than worn brass and stubborn bearings. Mel calls it “the soup,” which tells you everything about how fancy she wants it to sound. It is thick without being gluey, pale without being gray, and better on days when the fog sits low over the harbor and the regulars come in with damp cuffs and sea salt on their sleeves.
If I were forced to describe it like a menu, I would say it is a cream-based chowder with potatoes, clams, onion, and pepper, built on stock that has been coaxed all morning instead of rushed. But it never shows up on a menu. It arrives in chipped white bowls that have probably outlived three sets of plates. The surface is always just shy of boiling, with a slick of butter and a scatter of something green that might be dried parsley if you are feeling optimistic. You learn to wait for it to cool because burning your mouth on the first spoonful is a rookie mistake and Mel has no sympathy for rookies.
The first time I had it with Anna and Todd, we had just come off a long morning at Dockside Salvage buying lamps and rope. Todd inhaled his in five minutes, complained that Mel never gives enough bread, and then spent the next ten minutes raiding the cracker basket and dropping most of the crumbs on the table. Anna ate in a steady, methodical way, like she was running a test and wanted clean data on whether the soup improved her mood. I took longer because I was still getting used to the idea that I had people to eat with.
Looking back, that bowl marks the point where the observatory stopped being my private problem and started becoming our shared project. We planned wiring runs and label schemes over the rims of those bowls. Todd talked with his hands and nearly flipped his spoon once when the conversation turned to whether the mount was more likely to seize from rust or from misalignment. Anna wiped a smear of soup off a page in my notebook when I got careless with the spoon and never commented on it. That small act of rescue says more about her than any prophecy I heard later.
There were other bowls after that. On cold nights when the hum under the floor felt closer than usual and we had been listening to static for hours, we would drive back down to town and let Mel feed us. The soup never had a name, but it worked on us the same way every time. Salt, heat, and starch, delivered in a form that gave your body something to do while your brain tried to sort out what it had seen. I think that is where I began to understand that food is a kind of grounding. It is hard to drift into abstraction when you have to chase the last piece of potato around the bottom of a bowl.
Skelderheim had its own version of that, though it took me a while to recognize it. The tavern by the well in the Market Ward served a stew that fell somewhere between soup and porridge. It arrived in deep clay bowls with a heel of bread set right on the rim. Barley, root vegetables, shreds of something that might have been fish or might have been a kind of game, all simmered into a single flavor that said, in plain terms, you are not going to be hungry after this.
We ate it our first night in the city, sitting at a table near the wall where we could see the door and most of the room. The air smelled like yeast, smoke, and damp wool. My nerves were still vibrating from the crossing, from the way people on the quay had looked at Anna’s braid, from the way the sky held light without warmth. The stew helped. It was one of the first pieces of evidence my body trusted that this world ran on the same chemistry as ours. Calories are calories, no matter which side of the aperture you are on.
I have tried to reconstruct the exact ingredients since we came back. Nothing quite matches. The closest I can manage is to take the thickest chowder from Mel’s, strip out the clams, swap in barley and whatever root vegetables we have, and let it go until it starts to blur at the edges. Even then it is only a memory echo. The missing piece is the room.
Because that is the thing: the stew was good, but it was better because of who I was with. Todd made a joke about mystery meat that did not land, then apologized when he saw Anna’s expression and shifted to talking about rope instead. Anna kept glancing at the door, then at the window, then at the mural in the lane we had just walked through, as if trying to triangulate the safest exit path in case the room turned on us. I concentrated on eating slowly enough that I would notice if the taste changed, which is what you do when you distrust the water supply in a new place.
We finished all the broth. We watched everyone else do the same. No one tried to throw us out or light a signal. The bowl went back onto the table empty, and I realized I could breathe again.
If the tavern stew was Skelderheim’s way of saying “you are safe for the next hour,” then Klebbers felt like an invitation to stay longer.
Klebbers sits on a side street near the edge of the Market Ward, close enough to smell the fish stalls but far enough that you do not have to sit in their runoff. The sign is a carved wooden bun with steam lines scratched into the top. Inside, the place is narrow, with a counter that runs almost the length of the wall and a few small tables pushed up against the other side. The heat hits you as soon as the door closes, along with the smell of yeast and something that Anna calls “fire meat”. I guess her family eats the same thing back home.
The buns come in a wooden tray, six at a time, each one about the size of a fist. The dough is soft and slightly sweet, with a browned top that cracks when you bite into it. Inside is a pocket of finely sliced meat that has been marinated in something dark and salty, then cooked with onions until the edges catch just enough to taste like the grill. There is a heat to it, but it does not hit right away. First you get the fat and salt, then the smoke, and only later does the spice appear.
Todd loved them instantly. This is not surprising. He has a theory that any food you can eat with one hand while your other hand is fixing something is superior by design. Buns fit that rule. He could talk, gesture, and argue about generator load while still clearing three in a sitting.
Anna approached them like she was at home. First she split one open to see how it was built. Then she reassembled it and ate it properly. After the second, she declared them “good,” but not as good as her mom’s and went quiet for a while.
For me, the important part was not the taste, although that was excellent. It was the fact that we were sitting at a table in a foreign ward, eating food together. Anna’s hair was down, loose around her shoulders in a way I was still not used to.
We went back to Klebbers enough times that I started to associate the place with a very specific kind of relief. If we had managed a difficult conversation with Myles, or made it through a library visit without triggering old fears, or handled a Veil briefing without anyone drawing steel, Klebbers was where we went afterward. We would sit, let the steam from the coffee rise in silence for the first few minutes. After that, talk would come on its own.
Sometimes it was logistics: timing the next crossing, adjusting our safety rules, figuring out how to carry rope, notes, and respect for two worlds in the same packs. Sometimes it drifted into nonsense: Todd speculating about whether anyone at home would believe a word of this, Anna ranking the various versions of soup we had encountered on both sides of the portal. Either way, the buns made room for the conversation. Hands and mouths were busy; defenses dropped a notch.
Coffee deserves its own section. In East Bay, coffee is background radiation. It is what keeps Mel functional during the breakfast rush and what fills the air in the annex late at night when I have the radio open and the rest of the town is asleep. It is strong, slightly bitter, and tastes faintly of whatever was in the pot before it.
Coffee
One time was in a small shop just off the Scholar’s Ward, a place Myles claimed was the only one that did it “properly.” The room was quiet, almost library-level, with narrow tables and tall windows that let in the weak light from the black disc. The cups were small and heavy, designed to hold heat. The drink itself was dark enough that you could not see the bottom of the cup, with a layer of foam that smelled faintly of spice.
The taste hit in stages. First came the bitterness, cleaner than the diner coffee back home, like someone had stripped out the burnt notes and left only the core. Then there was a sweetness that did not come from sugar, more like the memory of something roasted alongside the beans. Underneath all of it was a heat that spread slower than the temperature alone could explain, a kind of wakefulness that seemed to start behind the eyes and move outward.
We sat there with our hands around the cups, absorbing warmth through our fingers while Myles talked about resonance and alignment in a voice that never quite lost its edge of apology. He sketched waveforms on a scrap of paper, turned the cup in his hand to illustrate phases, and every so often paused to let us catch up. The coffee kept me present when the math wanted to pull me under.
Later, after harder days, we would go back to that shop or one like it and let the cups anchor us. Coffee in Skelderheim is not a drink you take to go. You sit, you stay, you listen to whoever is across from you. The time it takes for the cup to cool is also the time it takes to say the things you have been avoiding.
One of the clearest memories I have is from our first days in Skelderheim. It was the same day that we went to Klebber’s for the first time. It was of Anna staring out the window over the rim of her cup while Todd traced nodes on the tabletop with his finger. None of us spoke for a long stretch. The city noise came through the glass as a low, steady murmur. At some point, Anna said, very quietly, that she was tired of being a symbol. Todd answered by bumping her cup with his own, not hard, just enough to clink. I did not have a good line to follow that with, so I did the only thing I could think to do and poured the last of the pot into her cup instead of mine.
It was a small act, but it felt like the right scale. You cannot fix the weight of prophecy in one conversation, but you can make sure your friend does not face it on an empty stomach or with an empty cup.
That might be the closest I can get to explaining what food has meant in all of this. The portal, the array, the black disc sky, the Veil, the old books in the Scholar’s Ward, all of that is big and abstract. You can drown in it if you are not careful. Food is small and concrete. It shows up in bowls and trays and cups. You pass it across a table. You divide it into thirds. You complain about the temperature and then eat it anyway.
When I think about the observatory now, I do not just remember the hum and the needles and the way the ring looked when it first opened. I also remember the sound of Mel setting down a tray, the way Todd always tried to grab the largest bun and usually failed, the way Anna would slide the last piece of bread to whoever looked like they needed it most.
If the array is about alignment between worlds, then food is about alignment between people. You cannot sit across from someone, share something warm, and remain entirely theoretical to each other. Hunger is real. So is the relief when it eases. Somewhere between the first bite and the last scrap, the person on the other side of the table stops being just a role in your plan and becomes the reason you are making plans at all.
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