Chapter Thirty #2
Serving bowls and clay pots crowded the table in a spread that left no visible tablecloth between them.
Chicken adobo in its dark, vinegar-bright sauce.
A platter of lumpia arranged in tight golden rows.
Garlic fried rice steaming from a ceramic dish.
Green beans glossed with oyster sauce. A bowl of pickled atsara that Cassian eyed with deep suspicion before Lysander spooned some onto his plate and told him to try it.
Dishes moved hand to hand around the table, Diwa passing the rice to Colin, Colin nudging the lumpia towards Cassian, Stephen reaching across Ryland for the adobo while Ryland attempted to intercept the platter so he could serve Stephen himself.
The babies had been dealt with: Max asleep in the Moses basket by the window, Tala in the bouncer beside Diwa’s chair, her koala hat still on because Colin had forbidden its removal.
Ryland had his kitchen scale on the table beside his plate. He picked up a lumpia, placed it on the scale, and studied the reading.
“Twenty-six grams,” he announced. “Consistent with the previous three. Diwa, your variance is remarkably low.”
“Thank you, Ryland.”
Ryland bit into the lumpia, chewed twice, and set the remainder back on his plate with the bitten end facing away from him. “The crispness-to-filling ratio is also objectively excellent.”
Colin leaned across and whispered to Lysander, “See? They’re getting along beautifully.”
Cassian had worked his way through four lumpia and was starting on a fifth, his cheeks full, his eyes half-closed in pleasure. He’d positioned himself between Colin and Hamish, and every few minutes his hand drifted to touch Tala’s foot through her tights, as if confirming she was still there.
“Hamish,” Ryland said, setting down his lumpia and adjusting his glasses.
“I watched your documentary on the Family of Light. It was rigorous. I appreciated your restraint in not editorialising, although I did note three instances where your framing could have been tighter.” He paused.
“I’ve emailed Lysander my notes. They’re timestamped. With citations.”
“Lovely,” Hamish said. Lysander pressed his knee against Hamish’s under the table. “I’ll give you my email later, so you can send them directly to me next time.”
“Speaking of Australian things,” Ryland continued, lifting his water glass, “given Tala’s koala ensemble, I feel it’s worth noting that approximately forty to eighty per cent of the wild koala population in certain regions of Queensland and New South Wales carry Chlamydia pecorum.
It’s a significant driver of population decline.
It leads to infertility, blindness, urinary tract disease.
” He took a sip of water. “I mention this because I think Hamish would find it interesting, as an Australian, and because Colin purchased the koala cardigan, which creates a natural conversational bridge.”
The table went quiet.
“No,” Cassian said. His spine had straightened. His shoulders, which had been soft and rounded over his plate, pulled back, and the dreamy half-lidded contentment vanished from his face.
“No, that isn’t — you can’t say that.” His voice climbed in urgency.
“Koalas are pure vessels of universal love. The Lumineer teaches that animals carry divine essence uncorrupted by human failing. They are untouched by the pollution of the fallen world.” His hands were flat on the table now, pressing down as though anchoring himself.
“To call a creature of the Light diseased is to speak contamination into existence. You are speaking darkness into a vessel of the Light, and that is a violation of the Third Universal Principle.”
Stephen’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline.
Ryland’s head tilted. “I wasn’t making a moral judgement,” he said. “Imposing moral categories on non-human species would be methodologically unsound. I was stating a prevalence rate for an ongoing epidemic.”
“A prevalence rate.” Cassian’s voice cracked upward.
“You’re reducing a sacred creature to a number.
You’re taking a being that carries the breath of the Universe in its body and you’re turning it into — into data.
” His chair scraped back from the table.
“The Light doesn’t operate in data, Ryland.
The Light operates in truth, and the truth is that every living creature is whole and clean and made in perfection, and if you can’t see that then the darkness has consumed you!
You’ve allowed it to win over the clarity of the Light! ”
Lysander ran down a mental checklist, the careful sequence Liz Colton, Cassian’s therapist, had walked him and Hamish through over three sessions in her Fitzroy office.
Don’t challenge the belief directly because you’ll only end up activating the fortress.
Validate the emotion underneath, not the doctrinal structure on top of it.
Ground him in the physical room, the physical present.
Calm touch, if he’ll take it. Meet him where he is, not where you want him to be.
He was still calculating his entry point, sorting which version of calm-and-measured would read as genuine rather than clinical, when his father got there first.
Colin simply turned in his chair and laid his hand on Cassian’s forearm, giving him contact first, then the words.
“You’re right,” Colin said. “They are beautiful animals, Cassian.”
Cassian’s mouth was still open around whatever the next volley of doctrine would have been. His chest heaved, the momentum of his outburst searching for somewhere to go now that nobody had pushed back against it.
“I —” Cassian looked down at Colin’s hand on his arm. “They carry the divine breath, Colin. Every creature does. It’s not — Ryland can’t just —”
“You really like animals, don’t you, Cass?” Colin asked.
Cassian blinked. The shift from the conflict was so complete that it seemed to disorient him. His shoulders dropped.
“I do,” Cassian said. “I always have. I’m a Calyx, a natural nurturer. Taking care of the animals was my responsibility. The goats, the chickens, the sheep during lambing season.”
“Which ones were your favourite?”
“The lambs,” Cassian answered quietly. “Though I wasn’t supposed to have favourites.
The Second Principle says all living things reflect the Light equally, and preference is a distortion of —” He stopped himself.
His fingers, which had been pressed flat against the table, curled inward.
“The lambs,” he said again, more decisively.
“They used to sleep on my chest. I’d lie in the straw and they’d come and find me. ”
Colin’s thumb moved once across the inside of Cassian’s forearm. “Tala’s cardigan,” he said. “The koala one. Do you know why I picked it?”
Cassian shook his head.
“Because it’s so soft.” Colin reached across to the bouncer where Tala was blinking up at them from beneath her knitted ears, and lifted the edge of the cardigan between two fingers. “Feel it, Cass. Go on.”
Cassian’s hand came off the table slowly and his fingertips found the knitted ear of the koala and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The quick, shallow pulls of his breath slowed.
“I want her to have soft things,” Colin said. “Things that’ll make her feel like she’s being hugged all the time.”
Cassian’s lip trembled. His gaze dropped from the koala ear to Tala’s face beneath it, her round, uncomprehending eyes tracking the movement of his fingers on the fabric.
“She does look very nice in it,” Cassian managed.
“She looks ridiculous,” Colin said fondly. “That’s the whole point.”
The table exhaled. Lysander caught Stephen’s eye across the adobo, and his twin gave him a look that said He’s still got it. Hamish’s hand found Lysander’s knee and squeezed.
Ryland had remained perfectly still throughout. He opened his mouth, and Stephen’s hand landed on his thigh.
“Not now,” Stephen murmured. “Leave him to daddy.”