I stood outside the door of my father's forge and rehearsed what I'd tell him.

I'd gotten a job, I'd say, a real one. I'd be going away for a while, and that's where I was if he didn't hear from me.

It was important to me I didn't vanish without a trace. That'd already happened once in our family, and I couldn't live with the thought of it happening again.

Mom had skipped town a handful of years back, and no one had seen hide nor hair of her since. She'd just stopped showing up for work at the local boardinghouse one day. Unable to afford housing on my father's income, it wasn't long after that I ended up on the streets. That was a decade ago.

I had a strained relationship with Father at the best of times. At the worst of times, we'd go months without speaking or crossing paths. It was currently the worst of times. We'd had a large fight a few months back, and I hadn't darkened his doorstep since.

I kept a stubborn desire to be separate from him. He'd done me no favors, and there was no love lost between us.

Tyrghul Ironsetter was a blacksmith whose love of the forge was matched only by his love of the drink. That's not to say Tyrghul was a drunkard, just a rather lousy parent. Still, he was the only one I had.

His hovel was a brief step above destitute. The roof sagged in multiple places. If you tried hard enough, you could peer through the long cracks in the planks of the walls and into the interior. It was a neat trick to find out if Father was inside, but today I didn't need it. The soft orange glow of molten coals spilled out from beneath the doorframe. The fire was hot, the forge manned.

I knocked hard three times against the wood and waited. There wasn't any response from within. That's annoying, I thought. I know that he's in there.

I tried again. This time I drew on my strength and banged my newly powerful fist flat against the door until I counted to ten in my mind. It made quite a racket; the door shook.

"Ay! No need to make such a fuss!" A grumpy sounding voice called from within. "I'm coming, I'm coming!"

After a few seconds, the door swung open and revealed my father, the only man who could ever hope to match me for size. I might've been large, but Tyrghul was a true behemoth. His blood ran true in my veins.

He stood above two meters tall with a wicked beer belly. His arms were both hairless and toned with visible chords of muscle from a life spent working the forge. He was stronger than he looked, and he already looked strong.

"Charon's third oar, boy," he exclaimed. "What happened to you? You look like someone fed you an ox or three."

There were no pleasantries exchanged, no warm welcome. That was typical of Father. When he swore, he invoked gods you'd never heard of, and he didn't care for the manners of polite society. He had a way with words.

"Can I come in? It's best if we talk away from the street."

He blinked and looked around the alley. "Sure. Don't mind the mess, y'know how it is. Didn't know I'd be havin' guests."

I didn't 'know how it was,' but I tried to humor him. The place was exactly how I remembered it: it looked like something had just exploded. Scraps of various metal castings were strewn about the floor. Debris of all kinds covered various work stations and made it impossible to find any specific tool. To an outsider looking in, the place was a wreck. I'd bet Tyrghul knew where everything was.

He pulled an undersized stool off a nearby bench and sat down on it. He made a half-hearted attempt at tidying a table space.

"So, what happened to 'never coming back here if Zeus himself commanded it'?"

I shrugged as an answer. He wasn't pulling any punches. That wasn't a question I could answer yet, so I asked one of my own.

"How old were you when the System first blessed you?"

He bit his thumb before answering, considering the question.

"It would've been a handful of months past my eighteenth birthday when I advanced for the first time. It was a big deal. People usually wait years for their first."

That put in perspective how far in front of the curve I was. If my System was active already with me so young, who knew what I'd be able to become by the time I was eighteen?

"Pa, I need you to trust me now," I said.

He nodded, concern written across his face. Calling him 'Pa' was a manipulation. The nickname was a callback to better days, ones where I'd lived with him and we'd tried to make it work. I felt bad for doing it, and even worse when it succeeded.

"I need you to show me your [Status]."

"You'll have to tell me what this is about," Tyrghul said, and then ordered the System to display his attributes. "Chrysalis, project [Status]."

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I didn't know a verbal command was possible. I watched the green light come out from his eye and take the shape of letters in the air between us.

Tyrghul

Vestige: The Behemoth (Active)

Might: V

Arcana: I

Intellect: II

Dexterity: III

Supplication: V

Traits: Flesh of the Forge, Nimble

There it was. The entirety of my father's raw capabilities summarized onto a few short lines of text. It's strange to think about how the System turns people into numbers.

My father was the strongest man I'd ever met. I knew from experience that he could bend cold steel with his bare hands. To see that ability simplified down to a might value of five was unsettling.

"Seeing an attribute as high as my might is uncommon outside of a city," he said. "And even more uncommon is to see it in blood such as ours."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Our blood was fine, neither of us were sickly.

"We have no connection to the patrician class of New Rome. My father's father sailed here on a great ship across The Endless Sea."

"And what's that got to do with our attributes?" I asked. "You seem plenty strong enough."

The Endless Sea was a massive body of water that separated the world's major landmasses. It'd been named Endless because it seemed to go on forever. People said titanic beasts the size of buildings lurked within the depths, though I doubted they were real. I thought they were stories meant to scare children.

"We don't know who he was or where he came from," Father explained. "He died before he could tell anyone."

"But we couldn't be further from the stock of the divine of the Imperium, yet it is from them we draw our strength."

He tapped his temple with a gloved hand. "Some food for thought. Now, why do you ask?"

His theologizing confused me. I didn't understand what it was he hinted at.

"Sorry," I said. "I've got one more question first. Can you explain how Supplication works?"

"Supplication is how much of your potential you give to Zeus in exchange for access to the System. You might've heard it referred to as a person's 'mortal limit.' With a supplication value of five, I can expect none of my attributes to surpass that rank unless a god intervenes. No matter how hard I work."

I feared as much. The realization hit me hard - my System was broken. It had granted me the strength I needed, but not the limitation. I felt like some kind of freak. My loose devotion to Zeus weighed on my soul. No one could know, I decided.

"And what about traits? Vestiges? What are they?"

My father seemed to be in a talkative mood, so I thought it best to milk him for as much information as I could get.

He looked at me like I'd asked something stupid. He was my father, I thought. It was his job to be annoyed.

"One thing at a time. Traits are simple, vestiges aren't. Traits are the permanent changes the System has made within your body. For example, my skin has gained some resistance to extreme heat. Flesh of the Forge means I can hold a live coal for a handful of seconds without being burned. It's a useful trait that took me years to develop."

That made sense. His answer was also intuitive, one I felt like I could've figured out on my own.

"And a vestige? What's that?"

"That's your last question," He said. "Then I'd like to know why you're interrogating me about the System."

He took a deep breath. "A vestige is some sort of inheritable power passed from generation to generation. My father also had The Behemoth, and hopefully, so will you on your eighteenth. You sure already look the part."

"What does The Behemoth do?"

"No." He shook his head. "You'll find out when you're older. Now's the time for you to tell me why you're here."

I couldn't avoid the question any longer. So, I went for it.

"I've got no choice but to join the Legion," I blurted out. It was painful, like pulling a splinter from an open wound.

"I'll be away for a while, five years at least. I'm not sure when I'll be back." Tyrghul did a double take at that. Seeing his look of disbelief, I explained. "I got caught doing a criminal piece of mischief when I saved the life of a girl. I'm mostly innocent, I promise. But I'm not innocent enough to get away with it."

Tyrghul leaned hard onto a workbench, clenching the edges of it with his palm. His knuckles had turned white.

"How does saving the life of a girl lead to you joining the Legion?"

"It's because I got caught, Pa," I said. "You know that no good deed goes unpunished."

I waved my hand. "Besides, it's not all bad. An assemblyman owes me a favor 'cause I saved her. He invited me to join up with him as a personal guard, but he wants me capable of doing some guarding. He says a term with the Legion under his blessing will put dirt under my fingernails and me out of reach of the law."

If I didn't know him well, I'd say my father was calm. He'd not done anything yet that betrayed his anger. Still, I guessed at how mad he must've been.

The relationship my father and I had was complicated. It was distant, and often messier than the building he lived in. But we'd developed a mutual understanding between the two of us, our own private definition of the words 'family' and 'love.'

He let out a gasp. My father's armor broke.

"You've got no other choice?" He asked. His words were unsteady and his usual gruffness was absent.

"As far as I can tell, none."

"That's a damn shame."

Then, for the first time since I was a little boy, for the first time since I'd been cast out onto the streets, my father wrapped his arms around me. He pulled me into the tightest, most spine-crushing hug I'd ever experienced and held me there for a long minute.

Tyrghul knew the dangers of the Legion better than most. He'd spent his life making them weapons of war and he couldn't help but realize that not all his metalwork was going to make it home. Each blade was a person, he'd told me once, and if it took as much time to kill a person as it did to make a blade, then there'd be no war.

He put his hand on my shoulder and tucked my hair behind my ear. "You come back when you're all grown and adult, Ghullie, and I'll teach you how to work the flames. Nothing dangerous like that Legion work."

I wasn't sure if I'd ever take him up on that offer. Only time would tell if I'd be coming back at all.