Why Immortal Warriors Own Buffets (And Why I Completely Understand)
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I am 5'4". My husband is 6'4". My kids landed closer to him than to me — including my daughter, who was practically full-grown by middle school, and my son, who grew nearly ten inches and almost a hundred pounds between 8th grade and freshman year.
And it doesn't start when they're teenagers, either. Both of my children weighed around 30 pounds at one year old. Once they could walk, they walked — or they were in a stroller, or on a leash, much to the disapproval of every judgmental stranger in a ten-foot radius. The car seats in the 90s weren't designed for children this size. I'm just going to leave that there.
Feeding that boy was a part-time job.
I used to joke that I could set a clock by the moment someone would notice my kids' height and ask me — with that particular look — "is your husband tall?" One. Two. Three. Every. Single. Time. Nobody ever asked my husband if his wife was short. I'm still bitter.
For years, I was the one showing up at school. My husband was working, so the secretary there had only ever seen me with these two very tall children. Then I took a teaching job out of town, and he started picking them up. One day I walked back in, and she looked at me with this expression of dawning revelation and said, "I understand it now."
I stared at her. "You understand what?"
"The height thing."
It's a good thing my children look like me. Otherwise nobody would think I was even involved.
But here's what I learned from raising two people who needed approximately four meals between breakfast and lunch: large bodies are expensive to maintain. Muscle, bone, healing, growth — it all costs calories. A lot of them. And if you've ever watched a teenage boy in a growth spurt decimate a dinner table and still ask what's for dessert, you have a small window into what it's like to feed an immortal warrior.
Now multiply that by an entire office building full of them.
The Brethren aren't just big — they're maintaining. Healing properties, peak physical condition, centuries of hard use on bodies that refuse to quit. Their metabolism doesn't slow down. It never gets to. And these aren't men who came from abundance — most of them knew hunger before they knew immortality. Some of them went without for long stretches even after, stuck somewhere, cut off, no supply lines.
You think immortal warriors get possessive about women?
Don't get between them and the food table.
So when Vin quietly started acquiring buffet chains, it wasn't a vanity project. It was logistics. You can't have an army of immortals getting hangry in the middle of Las Vegas. The property damage alone would be catastrophic.
Anyone who has ever kept a very large teenage boy fed during a growth spurt completely understands.
Now imagine that. But forever.