Mist settled over Amoz. It wasn’t the eerie kind of mist. Its white tendrils didn’t twist through alleyways, and dark shapes weren’t just barely visible. That would imply that the mist was trying to set a certain mood, but it didn’t really feel like it tonight. It more or less dragged its proverbial slippers across the ground, sat itself comfortably between buildings, and put on its stories. One such story was happening in Amoz’s tax revenue building.

Orbital Nightwarren let out a sigh as he worked on some farmer’s ledgers. Apparently his business took a mild hit recently as some baker had suddenly stopped purchasing his flower. It would be another late night.

It’s not that Orbital didn’t enjoy late nights, he liked being alone. The office was always quiet, as no tax office anywhere was bubbling with energy. But there was something about being completely alone that made Orbital feel more alive. It’s just that tonight, he could see the signs of recession. Accounting wasn’t exactly divination, but once you saw all the numbers laid out, you started to notice patterns. Like a seismograph, Orbital could detect small financial waves that were growing. Inflation was rising faster, Amoz and the rest of the Counties were borrowing more, and small businesses were disappearing left and right. Economics did come from the same root word as ecosystem, ‘oikos, pertaining to the management of one’s living space’. And like an ecosystem, one falling domino could collapse the whole house of cards…or, house of dominoes? Orbital rubbed his eyes, he was so tired.

He sat back in his leather chair and picked up a request form. He would need more information from this farmer. He spun his chair to the towering wall of mailboxes behind him. The letter danced in his fingers. How far could he send the letter, he mused to himself. His hand spun, and the letter vanished. It fluttered back into existence in its proper mailbox, nearly forty feet above his head. He smiled to himself, he was getting better at it.

“Neat trick,” said a voice.

Orbital spun around and clutched his chest. A dwarf in a tailcoat and tophat sat just on the other side of his desk.

“Who?! Wha-?! Who are you doing here?!” The words fumbled out of his mouth. The dwarf was looking at his ledger. Orbital snatched it away. “That is confidential information! And we closed over an hour ago, you know!”

The dwarf calmly looked at him. “Actually I have an appointment,” he said, casually tapping at Orbital’s day planner. He looked where the dwarf was pointing, he had no appointments for- written in sparkling ink was ‘Harmkimus Turpenwile 8:30’.

“Wha- that wasn’t there- oh,” realization dawned on Orbital. He sat back in his chair, glouring at the wizard. “You know you can make an appointment like everyone else!” he snapped at Turpenwile.

“Where’s the fun in that?” asked the dwarf with a sly smile.

Orbital was more than familiar with how wizards operated. They had to make a show of everything. Where the taxman was punctual, the wizard arrived at the time he meant to, which was fine for magic shows, but was unprofessional. Wizards had to pay their taxes like everyone else, but a special division was specially created to handle them. They liked to hide their money in off-dimensional accounts and run through three-shell corporations. Orbital’s superiors had become so adept as spotting lead-turned-gold that wizards had to switch chocolate for their fake currency.

Orbital rolled his eyes and asked, in his customer service voice “How may I help you Mr. Turpenwile.”

Turpenwile smiled at him, tossed some files onto his desk, leaned back, and put his feet on the desk. The top files were marked with the symbol of Aethowix Academy, and they belonged to his sister and himself. Isotope Nightwarren and Orbital Nightwarren.

“I keep telling your offices that I haven’t spoken to my sister in year, I don’t know where my sister, and I won’t be making payments to her student loans!” Orbital stressed. Ever since she left the city, collections had been hounding him.

“Oh, I’m not asking about that,” said Turpenwile. He leaned forward and moved the files over to reveal two more, much older files. Scrawled onto each was Clover of Cobpleton and Thistle of Cobpleton. “I’m more interested in your family as a whole. I was in Cobpleton a little while back and met your mother. Terrific woman, best coffee I’ve had in a long time. But something about her, uh, your last name piqued my interest. So I dug these up. Were you aware that your parents each applied to Aethowix when they were teenagers?”

Orbital looked down at the files confused. “No, they didn’t,” he mumbled.

“That’s what I find interesting,” mused Turpenwile. “Your parents apply and don’t get in. You apply, get in, and drop out after a semester. Your sister applies and graduates with top marks! Isn’t that something?”

He was stumped until childhood memories slid into place. Of course his parents applied, they loved everything magic and magical. And while Orbital could appreciate magic, he was more interested in numbers. He hadn’t had the heart to tell his mother he dropped out after one semester, which, come to think of it, was something he shared with his whole family.

The Nightwarrens disliked bad news, and liked delivering bad news even less. Orbital didn’t know how sick his father was until a few months before his death. He didn’t begrudge his mother for that, as he knew he would’ve done the same. He realized his own letters to home were getting less frequent. He cursed himself as he hadn’t checked up on his mother for more than a month now. Had he really been that busy lately?

“Also,” said Turpenwile suddenly as Orbital was shaken out of his reverie. “Neither of your parents’ files have surnames. Do you know why that is?”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Orbital shrugged. “Grandma Honey used to say that they couldn’t afford last names back them. So my parents picked one when they got married.”

Turpenwile scratched his chin. “Why Nightwarren? Why that name in particular?”

“I don’t know, I guess they liked it? It’s not the name I would’ve picked,” Orbital answered. He had long made peace with the fact that he was the family stick in the mud, so even a name like Nightwarren was a bit too theatrical for him. “Look Mr. Turpenwile, if you’re not hiring me to file your taxes, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Oh I’m just a little nosy. Just asking a few questions about a new friend you know? No personal questions, just want to get to know your mother. Strictly platonically of course!” said Turpenwile, casually waving away his dismissal.

“I must-,” he started, but the dwarf interrupted him.

“So why did you drop out?” he asked casually.

Orbital set his jaw. “Now that is too personal,” he grimaced.

The dwarf raised his hands. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll ask something different.”

Unwanted memories of Orbital’s first and only semester were called up. He tempered passing the entrance exam by purifying trace amounts of salt out of the air. He recalled sitting on the campus bench alone, while his peers mumbled ‘so boring even the air around him is plain’. He remembered his counselor comparing him to his sister and chastising him for his ‘lack of creative spell work’. He saw his fellow students having mental breakdowns on final exam day, and questioned if this was something he really wanted.

“It’s not something I like to talk about,” he said finally.

Turpenwile nodded. “I understand, water under the bridge and all that,” he said as he reached into his coat. “Last question, do either of these names sound familiar?” The dwarf set a book and piece of paper on the desk. The book’s title was ‘The Book of Mice by Eliza Nightwarren’ while the paper seemed to be a newspaper clipping that read ‘Local Girl Stops Zombie Apocalypse’. The clipping was dated to a decade before his parents were born. The local girl in question was named Harbinger Nightwarren.

Orbital shook his head. “No, maybe they’re distant relations, or it’s probably where my parents got the Nightwarren name. Or it’s just a coincidence.” Orbital picked up the book and started flipping through it.

“Yeah…” Turpenwile whispered. “Coincidence.” The dwarf’s gaze fixed on something in the middle distance, deep in thought. It would be here where the old, wise magical character didn’t say anything. Valuable information would have to be kept in order for the plot to move. You couldn’t have a surprising revelation with good communication skills. Turpenwile took exception to that.

“You know, that book is one of the oldest, if not oldest books in our library?” he said, not taking his eyes off whatever he was staring at.

Orbital scanned the book. It was small, bound in sleek leather. It had lined paper that looked fresh out of the press. He looked up at the dwarf incredulously. “It looks pretty new to me.”

“That’s what scares me…” he mumbled.

Orbital glanced at the first few pages. It seemed to just be Eliza’s personal journal. She was apparently a simple farm girl who thought she could talk to field mice. He shut the book and lightly dropped it back onto the desk. “It’s just a diary,” he declared.

“Yes, and yet…” Turpenwile turned and looked Orbital right in the eye. “That leather cover is made from the skin of an aurochs, an animal that went extinct thousands of years ago, tens of thousands of years ago. We have fossils younger than that book.”

Orbital looked at the book and felt his stomach sink, now painfully aware at how much he was touching it. He didn’t believe in ghosts and ghoulish or haunted objects, but something deep in his psyche told him that a frightened wizard was never a good thing.

Orbital tapped his hands nervously and asked “So… what exactly does this all mean?”

Turpenwile looked at him, looked at the book, and looked at the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said casually. Orbital was taken aback. Logically, he knew that no one knew everything, but surely wizards had some ideas.

“You mean my family name turns up on a cursed book that’s older than time immemorial? And you don’t know what it means?”

“Yeah, real head scratcher here,”

“So what are you going to do?! I just got done with tax season! Now I’m supposed to deal with this… eldritch…thing?! What, is that newspaper cursed too?”

Turpenwile folded his hands and leveled a stare at him. “Well first, what you are going to do is write to your mother. She’s lonely and would it really hurt to write every once in a while? And second, what I am going to do, is nothing.”

“Nothing?! Y-you can’t just drop all this on me unannounced and not do anything!” Orbital was starting to break into a sweat. He was logicap to a fault and had no time for ghost stories, but no one in their right mind would mess with ancient curses.

“Not my surname, not my problem,” the dwarf shrugged, he stood up. He neatly slid his chair back into place and turned. Orbital was dumbstruck.

“Are you serious?” he shouted after the dwarf.

“Yep.”

“You did all this research and now you’re just…leaving?”

“Yep.”

“B-but what about my family? My mother?! She could be some mystic danger or something! And you’re just going to leave her?”

“Three for three.”

“I-, y-you, I-!” Orbital just flopped back into his chair. The audacity of this dwarf! Showing up after closing, interrogating him, and oh, just casually dropping that his family might be cursed. He took his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead when his eyes fell on the books and files on his desk.

“Hey! You forgot your- “ his voice caught. Turpenwile was halfway out the door when turned.

“Yes?”

Orbital looked at him, and back to the dwarf’s belongings. “You know what, never mind. Have a good evening sir,” he said with a smile. Well if he wasn’t going to do anything, Orbital would. And it started with everything on this desk.

The dwarf nodded at him and disappeared out the door. Orbital waited a few moments, to make sure he was gone. He pushed the farmer’s ledger to the side and started to pour through his family’s files. It dawned on him that there may be other Nightwarrens out there. He grabbed his keys and made for the filing room.

Turpenwile stood outside for an hour. He had observed a candlelight had been moving back and forth inside the tax office.

He felt bad, and hoped Orbital’s work wouldn’t suffer. A wizard’s hands were perpetually full of mysterious threads and world ending threats, he had to delegate. And what he said to the young man seemed to work. Number crunchers were rarely satisfied with mysteries. Orbital could find a single taxable coin in a dragon’s hoard with nothing but a mountain of misfiled bureaucracy. According to his sister, he apparently did this twice. If there was anyone who could find a single name in an archive, it was Orbital.

Turpenwile turned up his collar to block the cold wind. As he left Orbital to his task, he found himself starting to like this family a bit more.