A few things ran through his mind as he registered Dora’s last words, many of which suggested this was a trap. Alex knew from her meeting earlier that she really did want her father out of the picture, so what she said was possibly true. The only issue was that Alex had already claimed to know about that meeting, it wouldn't take much of a leap in logic to guess he might also know what’d been spoken about. Still, he felt it was just too good of an opportunity to pass up, he had quests to complete and curiosity to sate. If she did turn out to be lying and the worst case scenario became reality, he had a new skill to make a quick escape with. This was a risk worth taking.

“I am not agreeing to anything now, but I am willing to hear you out.”

“Fine, if that’s the best I’m going to get,” Dora said, slumping into her plush chair some, “but there’s quite a lot going on, for it all to make sense, I’m going to need to start from the beginning.”

Alex nodded, and she took it as her cue to begin. It seemed, when she’d said the beginning, she’d meant it.

“Ok well my name isn’t Doreen, or Dora exactly, my name is Theodora Helen Salm. Doreen is what my mom wanted to name me, and Dora is just what she used to call me.” Seeing he was actually listening and not making jokes, not that he was in much of a mood to anyway, Theodora dove deeper into her tale.

“Pretty much everything starts with her. Before I was even a consideration, my mother was happily married to a man other than my father, a burgeoning alchemist from Oudel. The man was pretty much the definition of self-made; a prodigy who became so popular that even the King began ordering from him. Eventually, financially set from his new, more prosperous, clients, the couple were ready to truly start their family. After a time of trying the wife got pregnant, but before the baby could be born, my father met her. It had to be by chance, the King has never been one to regularly interact with the common people, even a talent like the alchemist, but that single outing ruined so many lives. I don’t know how it started, but he grew an obsession towards her, to the degree that he had the medical staff fake her death during childbirth.

You’d imagine that would have been hard to do, but not for the absolute authority of this city. The newborn was delivered to the father who eventually, heartbroken and wracked with grief, returned to his shop to raise his daughter alone. As he adjusted to his life as a single father, the king…” She paused, her prior statement trailing off. “No, I guess I should start by mentioning my father and I have the same eyes, or similar enough at least. It’ll be more relevant later, but after seeing how a short exposure to my own affected you, I’d assume it’s easy to guess what happens if the power gap was even larger. I was born about a year and a half later.”

Alex grimaced, the rapidity of her personality shift now a bit more understandable. If it truly had been an accident, having a power like that after knowing how it’d been used to take advantage of someone close to you must have been difficult. Risking another glance into her eyes, the action meant to be a gesture of piece, Dora didn’t even notice, her gaze far away and eyes glistening with unwept tears.

“You might think that would have led my mother to hate me. The unwanted child of a plan so heinous, so vile I’ve never been able to think of word sufficient enough to describe it, but that wasn’t the case, not even a little. For many of those early years, she was my entire life, and I hers, she loved me. She loved me so much. It was like she believed that concentrating all her affection on me could make up for what she’d lost, from what had been taken from her.

I wasn’t the first of my father’s kids that had been born in such a manner, though by some turn of fate I was the last. From what I learned he was different when it came to my mother. Some had been for triumph, others pride, a few were claimed to be consensual, if such a thing could exist with that monster. But for her his obsession ran deep, to the point he kept her locked away in a single section of the castle, only allowing her to be watched by guards unattracted to women. He treated her like some prized golem whose only use was to bed him and look pretty in its case.”

Towards the end the venom in her voice had become near palpable, but her tone evened out as she continued.

“She restricted to the point that most people, even those nearing the top of the hierarchy, didn’t know she existed. Only that a few years prior the king had brought another child into the house, a little light-gray skinned girl nobody paid much attention to, not then at least.

For all those years, the alchemist had no clue about any of this. He never remarried, eventually scaling his business back down to a small shop in Mendel. Thought of his wife had never left him once, even after so much time had passed, but him and his daughter managed to eke out a life of happiness with just the two of them. It didn’t last, however, the bubble that was their normal life eventually popping, though honestly the fallout was closer to an explosion.”

Alex found himself unable to look away as he listened. He was once again enraptured by the woman, though this time by nothing more than her words, the emotions she expressed so raw it was as if she was watching it happen as she spoke.

“Even further back, maybe forty years or so before my mother had been taken, my father had a very talented minister of intelligence. A strong woman who was an expert in spy craft, one that truly believed in her King. Some might say she was too good, however, as the woman eventually learned of some of his more disturbing perversions, the truth behind whom she served causing her to lose that faith.

In a rare show of unpossessive behavior, likely due to not wanting to exert the effort required to bend her to his will, she was allowed to resign from her position. Though only under the caveat that she was to never reveal any of the privileged information she’d learned. Well that ex-spymaster ended up having a niece who, in opposition to her aunts wishes, joined the king's guard.”

Dora was yet to mention any names besides herself, and her father, but Alex was starting to see how it was all connected. The pieces he’d been missing, becoming evident as she spoke.

“So, moving back to my time, this former agent would occasionally visit her niece at work. Now I don’t actually remember any of this, but from what I was told, the niece’s detail happened to be in the same wing as my mother that day, and the spymaster managed to catch something interesting. An eight-year-old girl roaming the halls of the castle with her mother, or, as the retired woman knew her, the claimed dead wife of her former apprentice.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

It didn’t take long after that for word to reach the alchemist, the woman’s agreement with the king not persisting to topics the woman learned after leaving. Initially, he was in disbelief, he didn’t necessarily love his liege, but in their few interactions the man had never seemed the type to do something so irredeemably evil. It had been nearly ten years. To not only take so much time from her, from all of them, but to then force her to bear his child. He didn’t want to believe it, but with the aid of his old master, it didn’t take long to verify.

He pretty much lost it for a while after that. Ended up closing down his shop and, after calming down some, started to form a plan to get his wife back. Enraged as he was, the man knew better than to immediately confront the full force of the city alone. Instead, he turned to his biggest advantage, alchemy. Using the substantial amount of wealth he’d earned over the years, the man started researching new forms of the discipline, eventually stumbling upon a method that allowed him to trade his own potential and life force for immediate power.

From there he started to build what could only be described as an army. He convinced and killed until all the dirtiest, darkest, most disgusting people Endor had to offer, were consolidated under his control. All but the one he viewed as most evil. It took almost two years before his plan was ready to implement, the man aging by at least thirty in the short time. For that entire span, no one other than him knew the full plan, most common criminals believing someone with the king's authority was moving to clean up the streets, it wouldn’t have been a first.

Ok so this is where the eyes come back in, well part of them at least. To say my father’s eyes are a much more powerful version of my own isn’t exactly correct, but it suits to get the point across. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve noticed in conversations most people pretty much go out of their way to avoid speaking of the King by either his title or name.”

Alex had noticed that, near instantly in fact. Besides those citywide announcements, Anise when the first time he met her, and Dora here, he’d never heard anyone mention him explicitly, it seemed her story was more than just an eventual new quest notification.

“Well it’s not because he will be able to hear them, it’s actually because he’d be able to see them.”

“Wait, he can see us now?” Alex asked, panic clear in his voice. Was this whole thing just an even more elaborate trap than he thought.

“No. No no no. Nothing like that. With his abilities, if he knew what to look for, he’d be able to see you anyway, saying a name or title is just like giving a direct line. However, one major limitation is that the ability doesn’t work on people with his same power, which is why I can speak of him the way I do.”

“What doesn’t?” Alex asked, not pleased with this revelation. “He can’t see you?”

“Yep, to his abilities it’s like I don’t even exist, but the same is true the other way around.”

“Then does that mean you can see me every time I say your name?”

“Not exactly, like I said, our eyes work differently, but I can explain that after.” Willing to accept her explanation for the moment, even if begrudgingly so, Dora returned to the prior topic.

“Ok, so that takes us back to the alchemist. Convincing even the worst this city had to offer to go after the strongest person around was no easy feat, but a show of power and wealth, and promising them some of their own, eventually brought them back to his side. Their attack launched the very night he told them he planned to do so.

I was locked in my room for the entirety of the conflict, but I heard and saw enough after to know how bad it was. Thousands launched an attack on the main gate and nearly half died before they stepped foot on castle grounds. Rather than help the people he sent to die, the alchemist pretty much ignored the event entirely. To him, it had all been an elaborate distraction to get to his wife, unfortunately, she’d had a visitor that night.

That fact alone was almost ironic, father’s trips to see her had become more and more infrequent over the years, but either by elaborate planning or happenstance he was there, and a fight, this one bigger than all the others combined, ensued. There’s one more thing I need to mention so you understand it all. You see my mother was half changeling and me a quarter so.”

She raised an arm and shifted it from her current caucasian skin to the gray color he was more familiar with, then back, the change moving across her skin slowly like a rippling wave. Not looking away from her hand, she continued to speak, the calm in her voice obviously forced.

“People with changeling blood have the ability to shapeshift. My mother was always much better at it than me, though she didn't like to use do it very much, even when I would beg. But she did that night, shifting to the form of one of the guards in the midst of all the chaos. Obviously, everyone knew of her ability, if no one saw her the normal protocol was to do a head count, but there was so much happening that when one of the guards fell, she was able to take their place rather quickly. Grabbing their weapon rather than use it to revolt against the man who’d raped her, who'd taken everything from her, she turned it on herself and took her own life.”

Towards the end she’d been basically spitting the words, but when it was over Theodora just let out a long sigh; and for that moment Alex could feel a fraction of the weight the woman not much older than him constantly carried.

“What comes next is of the most relevance to you, but you wanted me to explain it all.” She smiled weakly; her mix of emotions obvious behind the gesture. “A few other important things happened that night, one being the death of the spymaster’s niece, Anise’s mother. It didn’t take long for the battle to peter out after my mom died, though not before the alchemist, Ralph, managed to pierce one of the King’s eyes. I’ve never been able to get the full story, but he’s still missing the eye, and I’m almost certain Ralph having it is the only thing stopping father from outright killing him.

As you can guess, the spymaster, Janet, was rather unhappy with how things turned out, especially with the death of someone close to her, but she ended up acting as the interim mediator of the event.

Plenty happened to me after things settled down, though the biggest was that my father seemed to forget about me completely. I was allowed out on castle grounds, then as I got older, beyond. I ended up meeting Anise by chance and we bonded over our shared grief. She didn’t even know who I was at the time, truly my first friend. It didn’t take long until I was making routine visits to her house. Not the one she lives in now, but a much smaller place with just her aunt.

Over all the time I’ve known her Janet has been kind to me, but when we spoke it always felt like she was hiding something. I hadn’t known it at the time, but that was the first sign of my ocular ability developing. Eventually, I convinced Janet to tell me what she knew, though I’m certain she only told me because she wanted to. With a warning that neither might ever want to meet me, she told me where I could find Ralph and my half-sister.

As much as I felt I had to meet the people who meant so much to my mother, I was certain they would hate me, but they didn’t. They treated me like family, and when I finally mustered up the courage to ask Ralph why, he said to me something I’ll never forget. ‘How could I ever hate anything my wonderful Helen loved so much.’

I’ll never know what he truly thought of me then, but looking back, those few years, even with my mom gone, were probably the happiest of my life. Then, as the pattern goes, my father ruined it, this time with his very blood.”