Days piled up and Tristan started falling into a routine, run an indeterminate distance in the morning. Get breakfast, and if no one needed him to locate metal, he would do the slow motion dance that Luke called martial arts, and Tristan called torture. After that Luke would beat him, well slap him around. And there was progress, and slowly Tristan improved, he could run longer and his injured lung bothered him less and less.

Tristan had seen Luke do some crazy things during this time. One time on one of their morning runs Tristan was surprised to see him choke out a twenty foot boa constrictor. After that event he suspected Luke of having a tier three kern. It would be ridiculous, but there was no other way to explain it.

That was a bad day, Luke refused to leave the hundred pound snake behind. So he took the head and Tristan took the tale and they started running. Once they got back Grace cooked up the snake into some kind of patty, which was only decent. Luke had told Tristan to keep up the his training regime without him before disappearing for three days. He then returned with two sets of snake skin gloves.

They were a little on the big side for Tristan, as they were made for full grown man Gloves might have also been the wrong term as there were metal plates stitched into them going from the knuckles to the end, which would be mid forearm on an adult. It was cool but Tristan did not understand the purpose until Luke used them to slap him around the next day. He hated that snake.

Tristan did improve dramatically, but he was only vaguely aware of it. Sure he could do more push ups and he could run farther, but his only point of comparison was the other miners, and Luke. He had no idea if he was any better than his peers, because he had no desire to meet them. Several years passed in this manner when two things happened. The first was a letter, the second was an infestation. The letter came right after Tristan’s sixteenth birthday, it was from his parents.

Grace handed it to him after serving lunch to all the new miners. Most of the new people did there best to stay away from the silver blooded devil, however Tristan did not care. All of them would get over it when they got tired of digging up dirt instead of metal. It allowed a weird group to form on that side of the table, Chase, Sun Set, and Jones who were the only members Tristan’s first survey who stuck around for the last three years, and an older fire kern warrior named Kale, and of course Luke.

Despite the massive age gap between the youngest, Tristan, and the oldest, Kale, they were all slightly off. Luke, Kale, and Tristan were more focused on violence while the mining team was focused on wealth, and there was a surprising amount of overlap in the accumulation of both. Tristan was fine with receiving the weird label, in his opinion, if you weren’t weird you weren’t worth remembering.

The letter had been delivered by one of the new miners. A middle aged man with a tier zero dark kern. Tristan felt bad for the guy, his kern was way worse than his despite being at the same tier. It simply gave him a gloomy aura and increased the effort he needed to use to get noticed. The letter was in a leaf envelope, the paper inside was surprising as the Caldera did not have the land area needed to harvest trees for something as transient as a letter.

The Caldera was large, around a hundred square miles, however that was their whole world. The rim had been repurposed into a rampart and reinforced over the generations, in order to keep out the monstrous beasts that lurked outside. No one wanted a basilisk or behemoth to wipe out their entire civilization similarly to the ancients they were benefiting from in the mine.

Tristan opened the envelope and was greeted by to different types of hand writing. One was refined, that would be Helen’s, she was one of Elder Forests siblings, and was taught reading and writing from an early age. The other was blocky and used double the ink necessary, making it look sloppy in comparison. That would be Shadow Fist, Tristan looked a Sun Set, the two had similar names both being the the end of days, they were even very comparable in their personality. Both viewed him like a resource that had some emotional importance to them. Where they differed was in how much they needed Tristan.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

The letter had two tones. His mother said she missed him and told him how he now had a little sister. A little sister who was now two, they did not feel it necessary to let him know before. That meant that Helen was most likely in the early stages of pregnancy the last time he was at their home. Tristan growled a little, they sure did not take their time replacing him. The calligraphy ended with a sentence saying that despite everything Shadow Fist still love him and he should listen to him.

At that Tristan almost threw the letter into the still glowing ashes of Grace’s cooking fire. However, Luke unintentionally stopped him. Luke was now eighteen, and he had stayed skinny and grown tall, currently he was looking over Tristan’s shoulder reading along with him.

“I didn’t know you had a little sister, she can probably talk now” He said.

Every one around the table grinned, and before they could start congratulating him for his parents ability to reproduce, he said, “Neither did I, this is the first I’ve heard of it, her name isn’t even in here.”

He flipped the paper over and started reading his father’s handwriting. He did not bother explaining anything to the miners around the table. His fathers first sentence solved the naming issue, “Her name is Tristan.” Followed by Shadow Fist disowning him. He claimed that it was for the future of his sister, that he was not going to sacrifice the future of the second child for the happiness of another, who had no real potential.

It hurt more than he thought it would, but he gritted his teeth and kept reading. The second half had a warning, a mystical beast had managed to breach the fortifications. The specifics were not known, aside from its outward appearance. The adults had a black carapace a pair of scythe like fore legs and a tail with a stinger attached. The sketch Shadow Fist made was poor, but got the image across. It looked like a large crab, but the eyes were inset into the shell and the seam between the top and belly plate was a mouth filled with teeth, in place of pincers were scythes and a scorpion tail arched over its head.

The oversized bug looked stupid in Tristan’s opinion. Unfortunately, looks meant little when it came to mystical beasts. As an example, basilisks looked like building sized horned lizards, but they could breath fire and turn living beings to stone with a glance. No one had any ideas what this specific creature did, but a mine would be an excellent place to set up a nest.

Tristan sighed, he could not hide this information. It could be a potential threat to the mine int the future, so he handed the paper over to Kale to read. There was a chance he had seen it before. Shadow Fist was a tier two manager, it was not hard to believe that some one like him would not be informed to avoid a panic.

Kale was a forty year old warrior with almost twenty years on the wall. He had probably killed one of these if they were even remotely common. Tristan did not expect his response to reading the letter.

“Oh that bastard!” Kale yelled.

“What, I mean yes, but what are you talking about?” Tristan asked.

Kale gave Tristan a pitying look, “So he basically disowned you in a way that he does not bear any of the dishonor. Because the family tree is not dated, he removed you and placed a another Tristan in its place. Because of how the records are kept, Shadow Fist is no longer your father legally and never was. He had a child named Tristan and only one, it allows him to become a city manager again as the only stain to his honor has been removed and covered.”

“What am I then, I had to come from somewhere?” Tristan was sure that the Forest Caldera registry still had him in it.

As if reading his mind Kale said, “Your sister took your place in the registry, you might as well have come from outside the Caldera.”

Tristan frowned, he was not sure how to react. He knew his father was ambitious, that was partly why he married Hellen. Shadow Fist would never be chief, but being married to the chiefs niece came with a lot of perks. One of which was evidently bending some rules to remove Tristan from history. It really did not change anything, Tristan would stay at the mines and then when he was old enough, he would leave the Caldera. There was not much left for him here, he suspected it would be easy to convince Luke to leave as well.

“So what about the bug monster,” Luke asked, “It looks kinda tasty.”