Harlan pulled the dagger out of his chest and realized he might’ve made a mistake.

“Darrath, give me and grandma some time alone. Head to the sparring ring and practice your drills.”

“Ok.”

Dawn had rolled off of the bed and was shivering on the floor, and not from the cold water.

“I’m sorry.”

She was just muttering, balled up in her blankets.

Harlan reached for her and his touch was met by a pillar of flames striking him in the chest.

His skin was naturally defended against fire, and his clothes and armor were both powerful, if anyone else was hit by the attack they would’ve instantly died.

She seemed to gain lucidity when she saw him writhing on the ground and smelled his burning flesh.

“HARLAN, HARLAN, WHAT HAPPENED?”

He took in raspy breaths as his charred lungs were healed.

“HARLAN, HEY, STAY AWAKE, DON’T FALL ASLEEP.”

He looked worse than he was, he was fully aware and in pain, and he knew that she should’ve known that.

After a few minutes he was back up like nothing had happened.

“I’m fine. It’s not like I’ve never charred myself like this.”

“Shit shit, SHIT.”

“Dawn. Hey, it’s fine. I should’ve known better than to do something petty like that.”

“What happened? Did you get attacked?”

“No you… you don’t remember?”

“Remember what? I woke up on the floor and saw you hurt.”

“I splashed you with cold water because you told Darrath to call me his father and then you rolled up in your blankets on the ground and I touched you.”

“And then what?”

“You hit me with a firespell.”

“What? No, I wouldn’t…”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“The Fomorians, they would wake me up at all hours, they didn’t care how much sleep I got unless I was pregnant. That was the only time they didn’t… gods. What if Darrath had done that? What if I killed him because-”

“I’ll clear my schedule, you and I are going camping so you can clear your mind.”

“No, I’ve heard everything you’ve heard, I know how to handle this and playing in the woods isn’t what I need.”

“Then what is the solution? How can I help?”

“Honey, this isn’t something you can help with.”

“Alright. Then for right now, is there anything I can do? Breakfast in bed? Handle paperwork.”

“You’d flee from the sight of my work. I can get used to that kind of tediousness, you can’t. Just, bring me some breakfast, two eggs sunny side up and two pieces of toast. I just want something easy on the stomach.”

Harlan returned with Darrath latched on his back.

“Is grandma alright?”

“I’m just fine honey.”

He crawled around to Harlan’s front, nearly knocking the plate from his hands, and reached his wires towards her but she pulled her hand back.

“Not right now. Grandma is tired.”

“Ok.”

He crawled round to Harlan’s back again and peaked over his shoulder.

“Have a good breakfast, feel better.”

“Thank you.”

Harlan decided to take Darrath around the town to meet people, the last time he let him out of the house he bit somebody, so he wanted to keep a closer eye on him and how he interacts with people.

“Good morning appleman.”

“Greetings, you must be Sir Darrath.”

He cocked his head to the side.

“I’m Darrath. I’m not Sir Darrath.”

“Uh, yes, of course, my apologies.”

“I want an apple?”

When he reached for it Harlan took it with telekinesis and moved it just out of reach.

“What should you say when asking for things?”

Darrath rubbed his temples for a little while.

“Can I please have an apple?”

“Good. But you should also remember that this isn’t free.”

Harlan handed the man a few copper coins.

“For the king I can’t imagine taking your money.”

“I must lead by example, and if I accepted this apple for free he would grow up believing he has a right to take things just because he is… my ward.”

“Why does Harlan wait before saying that word? Why does he feel unwell when he thinks before saying it?”

“That is a talk for another time.”

“Ok. I want to see blue people.”

“To the Dague quarter we go then.”

It was somewhat awkward for Darrath to play with other children, in no small part because they grew to 7’0 on average, making the 3’6 child in a mature body smaller than most of the other children.

Harlan made himself invisible after pushing him to a mixed group of children.

He never directly stated it, but from comments he made during his walks people came to understand that he disliked separation between his people; he wanted them to not ignore, but look past the history between the peoples.

So instead of them playing with only children of their own race in their own areas, they came together hoping to live up to his ideals. It made him a little uncomfortable to be idolized in such a way, but he didn’t push back on it as much as he could because it got him what he wanted.

It did help that there were very few children in the town anyway and nobody wanted to play hide and seek with just a handful of others.

Darrath slowly moved towards the children once he saw that Harlan wasn’t there anymore, he twiddled his thumbs for a time and shuffled back and forth until one of the older children saw that he was standing there and came up to him.

“Can I play?”

“What are you?”

“I’m Darrath.”

“What are you?”

“Oh, Darrath is a Pixie.”

“Alright.”

Harlan thought it nice to listen to the children and watch them play.

And it found it funny that they continued to add rules as they played. Darrath wasn’t allowed to fly, he wasn’t allowed to crawl up the walls or hide on ceilings. There were very few places that Darrath couldn’t slip into.

Then eventually as all children do, there was an argument about someone cheating, someone slapped someone else, and parents stopped gossiping or trading homemaking tips long enough to pull them off of one another.

Except Harlan.

Darrath didn’t join in the brawl, he got hit once when someone was pushed into him and then he got on all fours and quickly crawled under a stall.

Then when he realized that Harlan wasn’t coming to get him he started shaking and his wings made a terrible cry as they rubbed together.

Harlan went to get him, but another woman ducked down and looked under the stall.

“Are you alright?”

“They’re fighting, I shouldn’t fight. Papa doesn’t like when I fight.”

“Well that’s good. How about you come out from there?”

He crawled out and onto the side of the stall.

“Did your mother leave you here?”

“Papa did.”

“Is he coming back? Do you know where he lives?”

Darrath pointed towards the center of town.

“Is he a craftsman?”

“Harlan is Harlan.”

“Ah, I see.”

The woman thought he was an orphan who claimed himself the child of the king, it wouldn’t be the first time.

And it wasn’t entirely wrong, for the orphans Harlan had done quite a bit, setting up homes for them, finding work for them, and ensuring that gangs of them didn’t think that crime would be their only option.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Technically it was work that he delegated to those under him, but he did keep a close eye on it and had met with some of the children personally.

“Well, why don’t we wait here for him then. You can keep playing with the children once they get back.”

Harlan turned visible again.

“Thank you, but that won’t be needed.”

“You need to be more responsible for your-”

When the woman stood and turned as she spoke suddenly her words caught in her throat and she kneeled.

“Your majesty, I didn’t-”

“No, it’s fine. If I had abandoned him here while I was elsewhere I would deserve a tongue lashing or two.”

The entire courtyard had gone silent and the woman didn’t know how to respond.

“They’re scared.”

“I know, but they shouldn’t be.”

Darrath crawled on Harlan’s back again and when his wings rubbed together they played a nice sound.

Harlan offered her his hand.

“Please, stand up.”

One of the other women brought her son, the one who had knocked into Darrath, and forced him to kneel while fearfully whispering.

“There is no need for that either, children play, they fight, it isn’t a problem and I wouldn’t want Darrath to grow up without being allowed to be a child.”

“Thank you, your majesty.”

“Darrath, do you want to keep playing with them?”

“They were fighting, you said I shouldn’t fight.”

“You didn’t fight though, and that is what I taught you.”

“Ok, I want to keep playing then.”

Harlan sat with the women who were watching their children, which was as awkward as one might expect.

“So, Darrath, is he…?”

“I did not sleep with a woman who gave birth to him. There is a long story involving me dying three times, two Fae, and a tree.”

“Ah huh. Alright then.”

“I want the opinion of people who I don’t know, am I wrong that I feel odd about calling him my child? Technically he is, and I am not related to the man I call my father. So I know how it feels to call someone who isn’t technically your parent by that title.”

A Plest spoke up.

“When one of the colony is killed, the child will move to a new parent and they will be mother and father. Where is the boy’s father?”

“I’m not… I don’t know if he has one, for all I know he was either born from a magical tree, or just popped into existence. But part of the magic that would’ve done either thing came from me.”

“Then he is yours.”

Harlan waved Darrath over and took a drop of blood from him and then one from himself.

The blood did not react, despite anything else, Harlan was not his flesh and blood father, very likely nobody was.

“Alright, you can go back to playing.”

The Plest continued to speak.

“What was that?”

“I wanted to see if we were related by blood.”

“You can do that so easily?”

“Just finding out if someone is related is a small thing.”

“Magic has never been something I’ve been capable of. It is a shame to miss such wonders.”

Harlan leaned back on the bench.

“I’ve been meaning to, but it’s never happened, I want to set up classes, free for everyone. But I need to first solve our food issues. Mages burn more energy and they need to eat more.

When the time comes, you are free to join.”

One of the children fell, scraping their knee, Harlan skipped over, and with one touch it healed before their eyes.

“That would be nice. But I was tested once, I can’t-”

“Everyone is capable of being taught, if one knows the right rituals. I can do more than just find out who is related, I am well versed in true and false blood magic.”

Harlan had realized something some time ago, if one wanted word to spread in noble circles, one let themselves be overheard by the maids and butlers. If one wanted word to spread in peasant circles, they spoke with housewives. These women spoke to other wifes, they spoke to the people they buy from in the markets, they spoke with their husbands, and their children, and before one knew it, they spread gossip faster than any propaganda officer D’if could ever train.

Though he did wish there was also a port here, fishermen spoke more stories than anyone else he knew, and they could exaggerate in ways that made people believe the bullshit and they actually traveled between nations.

For now Harlan just had to hope that the spies he pretended that he didn’t know were in the town would spread it back to their nations.

When the children all had to go back to their homes, Harlan picked up Darrath, not that he needed to be carried; he might not have Harlan’s endurance, but he wasn’t going to be crashing like these children.

It got him thinking about how he evaluated people, perhaps his standards had once again been skewed enough that he needed to recenter himself.

Once he set Darrath down in his room and told him to play with toys until he got back, Harlan went to Dawn’s room.

He hesitated to knock on the door, but she called him in without him needing to.

“How did you know?”

“That odd little connection that we have.”

“Are you alright?”

“No, and honestly, that week after I got my body when I was sleeping with men now makes me want to take a knife to my gut, I feel disgusted with myself.”

“There is nothing wrong with you-”

“No, I’m not worrying about being called a whore or whatever else. I just remember what happened before, how you were conceived, and it’s thrown what happened back at me.

All of those memories where I felt good, just getting rid of that pent up feeling, they are poison in my mind now. Every last feeling isn’t fun, isn’t enjoyable, now I just see them as Fomorians having their way with me, again and again.

I’m trapped 20 years in the past now and I’m just doing my best to cope with that. Eventually, I might get past it, but when I thought that I was before, it was bullshit. Having a body again just brings everything back, it’s fresh in my mind every time I feel someone touch me.”

Harlan sat by the doorway and made faces, balled his fists, and tried not to punch anything.

“I know you are angry, and you don’t have anywhere to put it. But-”

“Don’t feel bad, it isn’t your fault. Darrath has better fucking control over himself than I do, I’m just an idiot.”

“You are a boy going through his teenage years, if you had perfect control over yourself and made every right choice you would be an impossible being. Just… give me time to deal with this, and you can focus on fixing the entire rest of the world.”

“Don’t do that, don’t worry about how I am reacting to something happening to you, you shouldn’t put how I feel above you.”

“I don’t want to argue in circles about how we are both worried about the other worrying. I think I’m going to bed early today, lock the door on the way out.”

Harlan made his way back to Darrath’s room just across the hall to tell him that he didn’t feel like training with him today.

The moment the door opened, Darrath tried to wrap his wires around Harlan’s hand, but he jerked his hand away.

“Is Harlan tired like grandma?”

“Yeah, I’m tired.”

“Is Harlan going to rest like grandma?”

He opened his mouth, but couldn’t get the words out.

“No, is there anything else that you want to do?”

“The others talked about picking berries. Can we do that?”

“Sure, why don’t we go out in the woods and I can show you which ones are safe. Maybe we can make grandma a pie.”

“The cook said I wasn’t allowed in there anymore.”

“I am the king, and that means sometimes I can do things even when people tell me no. You are my son, and that makes you a prince, and that means sometimes you can do that too.”

“So I can take cookies from the jar without asking?”

“No, you still can’t do that, because it was grandma who told you not to do that.”

“So I can do things that I want and nobody but grandma can tell me to stop?”

“Nope, you also need to listen to Joan, and Mercedes, and when someone else tells you no, you need to ask one of us for permission.”

Darrath seemed far less happy with this arrangement compared to the one he just made up in his head.

“Nothing changed?”

“Nothing changed, but now you know the rules better. And, you can call me papa instead of Harlan.”

“Ok.”

It didn’t make him feel any better, despite his thinking believing doing bullshit, Harlan still felt like he was failing Dawn. Even if every other part of his being was telling him there was nothing to be done, there was that nagging voice that both sounded nothing like him and sounded like the only part that was ever really him. That voice told him that he was a failure who would keep failing everyone, that one day it would be his time to fail Darrath, and another body would be put in the ground.

He faked a smile as Darrath found every single poisonous berry in the area before finding a single good one, and he did it again when Darrath got flour everywhere by fluttering his wings happily as they made the crust, and he did it a final time as they took the pie to Dawn as a gift.

Harlan remembered another time when he felt this way, it was after Jet. He had all that anger and nowhere to put it, the logical part of himself fought the illogical and both sides were angry, they were just… angry.

Dusk was here, so Harlan tucked Darrath into bed instead of Dawn, not that he would remain there, he liked sleeping in small dark places, under his dresser was the most common place to find him in the morning.

When Harlan gated north and north and north again, he wasn’t sure where he was. But it took one visit to the markets to know that he was in the right place, and the one place he shouldn’t be doing the one thing that he shouldn’t be doing. If there was another voice in his head, it would tell him not to do it, Lugh would appeal to his better side, that these people weren’t involved, that he shouldn’t take his anger out on them.

Dawn would make a tactical choice, he was in a city where he had no idea what the defenses were like and it wasn’t worth it to do something as stupid as letting out his anger.

Instead, he was alone.

Harlan walked the streets more, he wanted to rampage, but that wasn’t the right call.

He had to control himself, and right now that meant walking away.

But first he walked the city and marked every warehouse, then when it reached three in the morning, which he found was the time people were most lax, he bypassed arrays and wards and killed guards and cleared every single one of them. Some were just full of random merchant wares, but it didn’t matter.

The people needed more than food, they needed blankets and furniture and clothes and everything else that made people happy to have.

When dawn arrived, Dawn was waiting in his room.

“Did whatever you did make you feel better?”

“No, and you need to sleep. I’m sorry I made you wait up all night for me.”

“I couldn’t sleep anyway. So, what did you do?”

“I stole a dozen warehouses worth of stuff. I killed a few dozen guards along the way. I don’t even know what city I was in. When everyone else gets up it needs to be sorted, cataloged, and then I need to break down some of it. The rest I’ll sell to the people at cut rates or donate to the orphans. I… I left the slaves, I just took items.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Which part?”

“Why didn’t you save them?”

“I didn’t want my anger to control me. So I let it go.”

“Is that what you think I would want you to do? Or your father? Or Amber? What if Adina heard that you let women and children be abused?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You already showed that you can make a choice without being blinded by anger. So let’s both go back there and do what should be done.”

“You can’t-”

“Harlan, I was a ranger, now I’ve got a body that can shatter rocks. So let me grab my sword, open a gate, and let’s see how many of them we can take out before anyone notices what’s happening. We’ll cut down most of their forces before they know what’s happened, and while we’re at it, we might as well kill the mayor and the military commander in the area, raid the vaults, and burn the-”

“We’ll kill anyone who gets in our way and grab all of the slaves we can. Might as well bring D’if and his guys. I want us in and out.”

They moved into the city and dozens of soldiers were dead before anyone had any ideas about what was happening. Luckily the city only had one slave market, which made it easier to usher the slaves through the gates that Harlan opened.

When the alarm was finally raised, Harlan took on an inhuman form.

It didn’t matter what stood in his way, though things did become very uncomfortable when a vampire arrived and tried to pull Harlan’s blood out. Luckily Dawn stuck by his side and took the man’s head off from the shadows.

“And you said I shouldn’t have come.”

“I would’ve turned my blood into daggers inside of his body, I was luring him into a false sense of victory.”

“Whatever you say.”

Arrows flew at both of them, Harlan used gate to pelt the soldiers with their own arrows while Dawn dodged them.

“Show off.”

“Hey, I’m a mage first, warrior second. But if you want, I could do this instead.”

He closed the gate and pulled his armored plates together and then just bounced off as he rushed into the group of soldiers.

When he lifted his large bear-like frame to smash them from above they tried to stab his seemingly soft underside, only to find that it was a bundle of tentacles underneath that broke the mundane wooden hafts of their spears and dragged them into the giant maw.

Once they were dead Harlan could almost immediately use their bodies as fuel for magic or just to add a layer of defensive blubber that let him rush into more and more soldiers without worry.

D’if sat on a nearby roof and decided then and there that any plans he had to steal from Harlan were not worth the cost of making him an enemy, and that he might have a genuine chance to win the war if he could be that kind of monster.