Fondour

Chapter 35 - Family History

“What?”

Archie’s heart and stomach met somewhere in the middle. The twig walls of the nest became dizzying, seeming to swirl behind Sutton.

“I…you really didn’t know?”

“No. He—no. My dad would—I would know.” Archie’s eyes fluttered a thousand times per minute. His hands drifted through the air as if they could find something that would make it all make sense.

Then they froze. They found something. Everything became very clear to Archie.

�...

Chapter 34 - Crashout

“Archie. Archie, you need to calm down. Breathe. Just breathe.”

Archie turned from Nori’s touch. He had balled up in the corner of the railing overlooking the pond. He had barely managed to stop sobbing, but he still shook like a frightened dog.

“I don’t—what’s—I don’t know what’s happening to—to me.”

Nori crouched over him, desperate to help. 

“Archie. Archie. Look at me. Look at me.”

Tears blurred Archie’s vision, turning Nori...

Chapter 33 - Speak Sweetly

“Out!” Julienne yelled.

Prince Waldorf recoiled. “How dare you—”

“Out!” Julienne’s voice resonated through the kitchen, causing everyone to flinch. He slammed his palm on the counter. In this kitchen, no one outranked a Julienne. Not even a petulant prince. “Out!”

Yarrow and Mindy looked between the two in horror. Nori kneeled and fussed over the fallen Archie, who groaned as he rubbed his head.

Prince Waldorf’s shoulders went up, transforming his...

Chapter 32 - First Courses

Julienne was two steps into Cafe Julienne and his plan had already gone wrong.

Mindy had taken it upon herself to serve the previous night’s leftover bread to the Gluttons, whose numbers made up half of the sixteen guests. Julienne had hoped there would have been only two, but he underestimated Price Waldorf’s ability to get his friends on the invite list. 

Grand King Flambé took up only ten percent of a fully occupied table, the other guests being his wife...

Chapter 31 - Arrival of the Guests

Julienne waited at the steps of Cafe Julienne, finding it difficult to focus on his posture and not on the possibility that his team was back in the kitchen burning things. He had been slaving away in the kitchen for hours and now found it difficult to transition from Chef to entertainer.

Uncle Julienne stood one step higher than Julienne, whispering instructions and introductions. One way or another, Uncle Julienne was always breathing down his neck.

The first carriage a...

Chapter 30 - Feeling Julienned

Sleep didn’t come easy for Julienne. And when it did, it was a fickle, fleeting thing. His first nightmare was a particularly cruel one. He dreamt that he had slept through the entire day, missing the fated dinner. In his dream, he scrambled across the Crown of Ambrosia City in the golden red of sunset. By the time he arrived at Cafe Julienne, the sun had gone and he was Julienne no more.

The panic and despair of the nightmare clung to him when he woke up. He snapped up and t...

Chapter 29 - Cafe Julienne

To call Cafe Julienne a restaurant would be to call the world’s greatest painting a doodle.

Nicknamed “The Grand Restaurant,” Cafe Julienne was nestled in the northwestern most corner of Ambrosia City in a little walled off alcove known as Labruscella. Meaning “Little Labrusca,” Labruscella contained the Labruscan embassy, the city’s largest botanical garden, a few manors and lawns of note, and most significantly of them all, the pride of Labrusca...

Chapter 28 - And Up Again

All eyes fell on Archie as he set up his stove in Pomona’s kitchen. They had seen all sorts of magic in their first semester at the Academy, but Archie’s rotten stink bomb was a first. He tried to ignore them, crouching down to adjust the damper and sliding it back and forth so that he wouldn’t have to stand up and be seen again. If anyone stared too long, Nori shot them the evil eye.

“New partners, everyone!” Pomona called out as she entered the kitchen. “No repeats!”

Chapter 27 - Back Down

What goes up must come down.

And Archie came down.

Hard.

A discordant, pulsing beat filled his ears, giving him a crashing headache as he threw up his second helping of The Groove. Kaleidoscopic liquid filled the toilet’s basin, lazily rolling from one color to the next.

The sight of it made Archie throw up again.

His eyes stayed glued to the floor as he stumbled out of the bathroom, catching a glimpse of a black jacket before bumping into its wearer. Archie bo...