>>5811066You found suddenly that you regretted this whole endeavor. Izirina’s gaze fixed you, confusion hidden behind the affected stoicism, and you were at a loss. This girl—your friend-has been living a lie under an evil mother for as long as she has been alive, or nearly. How does one explain all that without breaking someone’s heart… Or worse, making ti feel like an attack, an accusation of complicity?
“Hear me out,” you pleaded, with a dry tongue. “I have been to the Goblin Wastes—”
“Hence me,” Zith-Zi interjected, earning a glare.
“—and I have learned… Much.”
Izirina Henzler slowly nodded, a silent signal to continue… And so you did. You reiterated all that you had uncovered in the libraries of the Twoer and the city. You told Izirina of your journey to the barren realms to the southeast of Hawksong. With Zith-Zi supplying confirmation and affirmation, and in fact butting in to seize the narrative herself a few times when she evidently thought you were ‘telling it wrong’ in some unspecified way, you told her of what had transpired in Goblintown.
“And anyway, that’s when your twink here started asking me if Mom’d ever seen any CHIDLREN,a nd I—”
“Zith-Zi!”
Both the goblin and the human girl looked to you in surprise at your outburst. You froze, just shaking your head. Perhaps it was too late, but you remembered well the hysteria which had gripped Izirina when last you’d expressed your… Suspicions… About her true nature, as an only partially-human subject of the Archmage’s experiments.
“I’m not saying that you were directly involved,” you say carefully. “This all happened when you were… Before you were born, maybe, even. But…”
“You still think I’m a chimera,” Izirina Henzler said quietly.
You stared, unsure how to reply. Luckily, Zith-Zi was happy enough to do so in your stead.
“Or a lizardman wearing a skinsuit, maybe,” she said.
You gave her a dirty look, but the goblin just rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.
“I don’t think that,” you told Izirina, looking back to her with pleading eyes. “As I said in the letter—”
“Letters,” Izirina corrected you.
“Right, in ALL the letters,” you continued, at least happy to know she’d received and read them, “you’re my friend. I only want to—”
“To what?”
That question from your estranged friend stopped you.
“What?”
“So what?” she asked you, bluntly, face showing signs of frustration for the first time. “I was… Uspet… When you first brought this to my attention, so caught up in what it might mean for me, and then I did not WISH to face it. But now… It’s been a year. A year of my thinking about what you said, and what it meant or might mean for me or the city, and I realized that it didn’t MATTER.”
You stared blankly, and repeated dumbly: “What?”