>>5793472Still, you couldn’t let it go. As summer approached, you discovered something else about your nature, and your ambition. It wasn’t enough to know that something strange existed in this world, not for you. You needed to UNDERSTAND it, in its entirety. Right now, your rival turned friend turned research subject was the very EMBODIMENT of the unknown and alien—the esoteric made material.
And you knew only one man who could help you seek the TRUTH!
“My boy!”
Your lips had formed a tight line a you sat across from your father in the Tumblin’ Lark for a second time. The venue was not lost on you. Had he even made an EFFORT to pick himself up and fix his wasted life?
“Come now,” he’s said with pleading eyes nd frowning, wrinkled face, “it’s not like I LIVE here anymore, ey wot?”
“No?”
He’d fidgeted, and looked away, and admitted: “I’m staying with my niece—your cousin—Fenna. A good girl, very tolerant and forgiving of… Late payments towards the rent.”
You’d narrowed your eyes, thinking this meeting a mistake in that moment… But you calmed yourself, and appraised the old human. Your father’s hair was tied back in a ponytail, his salt-and-pepper beard trimmed to a neat mustachio, and his clothes less brash and boisterous—a simple black tunic with striped trousers, still little out-of-fashion and loud, but respectable.
“I’ve even gotten myself a job, wot, over at the docks,” he bragged, flexing an admittedly-muscular sword-arm—though he no longer carried a blade. “Your father still has it! There’s even this rather fetching young lady there, who does the bookkeeping, and I’m beginning to think she has eyes for me…”
“That,” you interrupted, “is NOT what we’re here to talk about.”
“Then what IS on your mind, my child?” he asked, catching sight of your serious expression and leaning in. “You have a look in your eye—the van Houtzmann look! I’ve seen it in the mirror a hundred times if I’ve seen it once, ey wot! If I didn’t know better… I’d say you were in the very THICK of adventure!”
“You could say that,” you began.
Over a drink, and in low and quiet whispered, you told him what you had learned—about the Archmage, and her chimeric (?) child who might be weapon, or heir, or experimental prototype for an army of shapeshifting reptilian assassins, or…
