All seems to be going well. The prisoner is eating and healing. Knight has his arms back. Vanth largely falls back into his regular routine of caring for Castle Garden and its numerous enchantments. Everything is chugging along so smoothly, that he’s completely unprepared for the chaos when he pops into the kitchen for a light snack.

The dishes are all out of their cupboards, shoving each other to death off the table, creating a ceramic graveyard several feet wide. The knives duel each other, the shrill scrapes rising over the cacophony of the spoons drowning each other in soup and the forks sticking each other with their tines. The trays, like sinking refugee boats, tremble with the weight of every dining implement not caught up in the battle. And in the corner, the stove roars with an overworked fire, scorching the ceiling with its wild flames.

“Stop!” he shouts.

They do not stop.

With a sharp snap, every piece of sentient furniture freezes. He eyes them all with displeasure.

“This is not appropriate behavior for castle cookware. What is the meaning of this?”

He unfreezes a gravy dish, glaring down at it in expectation. The dish trembles, hops off the counter, and hides underneath a cabinet. Fine.

“Knight!”

Knight comes scuttling down the hallway, his sabatons scritch-scratching against the floor as he scrambles to heed the sharp summons. He teeter-totters into the kitchen, nearly overturning.

“My lord?”

Vanth gestures to the morbid scene of cutlery carnage.

“Can you explain this?”

“Oh! Oh my,” Knight wrings his gauntlets together with a truly ear-splitting screech, “I knew everyone was excited, but I didn’t realize it had gone so far!”

“Excited about what?”

“The visitor. He rates each dish according to its taste, texture, and presentation. The kitchen is quite aflutter with all the feedback. Last third-meal, the dishes were fighting one another for the chance to deliver his food. I calmed them down but apparently they’ve started squabbling again.”

Vanth grunts and tiptoes over the mess of crockery and over to the stove; the flames are frozen in their wild tangle and the steam sits like a heavy cloud. Vanth waves the flames and smoke away and inspects the food frenzy on the revealed stovetop. There are four large pots overflowing with stew, a rabbit roast, pasta, and batter perhaps meant for a tart. Several smaller dishes sit cramped next to the large ones, full of sauces, toppings, and steamed vegetables. Off to the side, practically a full course menu sits in wait.

“The stove had an emotional breakdown,” Vanth says in disbelief.

“The pressure must have got to it, poor dear.”

Poor dear indeed! Vanth loads a tray with a bowl of stew, a roll of bread, and a jug of wine. Honestly, it’s not like the man needs much to live.

“Right,” Vanth says to the frozen ensemble, “by the time I come back, I want this place sparkling clean. And from now on, no more fighting! Any dish caught roughhousing will be repurposed into a gardening tool immediately. Now, pull yourselves together and tidy this mess.”

He snaps his fingers and the kitchens descend into madness, plates rolling to-and-fro, buckets hopping in with water, and the stove sagging in the corner, possibly weeping.

“Supervise them,” he tells Knight, and then leaves to deliver the tray of food to their guest.