>>5805525A part of your soul yearned for the comforts you’d forsaken to come here—for your boarding room in the Initiates’ Village, your bed, your friends, even for your comparatively safe and calm classwork…
But it wasn’t the BETTER part of you.
You thought of the shirin-vision, of your feverish readings on the history of Henzler and of Hawksong, and of your startling conclusions. You shuddered to think of battle, of death and dismemberment, of Muffins red in tooth and claw and Pearce laying pale and pallid on the rough, sandy turf… But you wondered to recall the night beneath five false suns, practicing foreign Feycraft with a strange and beautiful genasi, and of falling asleep with her fingers in your hair and her esoetric knowledge swirling in your brain, embraced in velvet-smooth, summer-warm golden sand.
The yearnings passed. It was here that you belonged, you realized then: out in the thick of it, learning things forgotten, hidden, and suppressed. Secrets great or terrible, they were what you wanted.
“We need to find those goblins,” you said.
Your father nodded. Perce grimaced. Terzo took another swig, and regarded you with indifferent eyes. Muffins goat-head munched on some hardy-looking, shrub-like grasses that grew in between the rocks.
“We could barely handle a dozen of the little bastards,” Pearce lamented. “What if there’s more now? If they regrouped?”
“They caught us by surprise is all!” Rudolfo declared.
“WE caught THEM by surprise,” Pearce corrected him.
Rudolfo made a face and wobbled a hand, as if to imply the two situations were more or less equivalent.
“Anyway,” your father told your friend, “that’s where my DARING BALDE comes in. You know, I could always give you lessons, if you’d like…”
“You’re right,” you admitted to Pearce, “and there MAY be more where that came from… But that’s good.”
All eyes were on you then, in varying shades of incredulity.
“More goblins means we’re more likely to find the one who knows what I NEED to know,” you explained, “and anyway, we’re not going to fight. We come in peace… To trade.”
[Beginning Thread 2 ASAP! Thanks for playing, and please feel free to share you input below on the characters, story, pace, mechaniss, and anything else you'd like to weigh in on. I appreciate you all.]
