Oan came and created, leaving four behind.

The four would grow to know what it meant to be divine.

Waas, the nimble, the greatest artist out of these.

Aurial the contented, strong and deep like her seas.

Torc the steadfast, enduring, and strong

Faust with passions that would lead him to do wrong.

-Children’s Poem

—

“Did you know she could do that?” Amara asked when they were outside the art-filled room.

At Zale’s insistence, they’d run out and she’d slammed the door behind them. The room they’d entered into was one familiar to Kole. It was the library he’d entered at Theral’s direction and he’d run into Zale’s mother. He looked to where the door he’d entered from should have been and saw it was there. Kole ran over to the door, and pulled it open, revealing a small kitchen, equipped in the manner of the dining hall kitchen he’d just battled in, only smaller in scale.

“Kole?”

“Oh, sorry,” Kole answered, remembering the question. “I was distracted. No, I didn’t know she could do that.”

“I don’t think Professor Shalia understood the gravity of what I used to disable Rakinar. Do you think I should clarify what I meant about being in trouble?”

Opening and closing the door to the kitchen, Kole absentmindedly said. “No,”

“Open to my room,” he whispered, and reopened the door, but still the kitchen remained

"Why is there a kitchen off a library?" Amara asked.

"Because Uncle Levar and Tal—len basically lived here," Zale answered from the open door to the gallery. She spoke quietly, still recovering from the embarrassment and her voice caught oddly when saying her uncle's name. "There's a dining hall on the other side. They moved it all to the same floor after a few incidents of falling down the stairs while reading."

Zale was out of her shift and dressed in a paint-speckled canvas outfit. She walked across the library towards a third door in the room.

"I'll be right back," she excused herself leaving the pair to explore.

Zale returned shortly later wearing a tunic in the style she typically wore to training, only this one was a pleasant sky blue with white embroidery, compared to those plain tan ones.

"So... Do you want a tour?"

Both agreed and Zale led them around.

“My room's in there,” Zale gestured to the door as she walked past.

Amara walked in, not aware that the pointing wasn’t an invitation to enter.

“No…” Zale said, but it was too late.

If Kole had been told a Kobold had lived in the room, he would have believed it and been worried it had smothered to death beneath a mound of clothes. The room was large, but clothing completely covered the floor. The only surface free of it was the desk and bed along the far wall. Wooden armoires, ornately engraved with flowers and leaves filled the left wall, and clothing spilled out of those as well. The wall on the right was instead covered in paintings, and an easel and stand of paints sat in a small clearing in the clutter. An armor stand stood next to the easel in its one little clearing, and Zale’s armor stood next to it, her sword and a few other weapons mounted on a rack behind it.

“Hmm,” Amara said, looking around. “Smells like flowers.”

Zale’s face had turned almost completely black in her odd manner of blushing, and Kole thought she would disappear again at any moment.

“That’s… kind of a disaster,” Kole said, not knowing any other way to put it.

“I know,” she admitted, her skin starting to return to its regular white. “I never have anyone over.”

“That’s not really an excuse to live like that,” Kole observed.

“I, uh…” the black returned, and Zale confessed. “I really like clothes. That and art are the only two things my mother and I really have in common. And I think I mentioned before that she apologizes with gifts.”

“Still…”

“I know! Moving on. Amara, please put that down.”

Amara almost dropped the dagger she was examining. It was made of black glass and seemed to glow with an inner light.

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“This is the library. Lots of books my mother and her friends gathered over the years. Most they put in the public sections, but they kept a collection.”

Zale’s ploy worked, and Kole completely forgot about the mess as his eyes roamed the shelves. He’d not had long to look the last time he’d been here. Shelves lined the walls of the circular room, and the illusory globe still sat in the middle. A smaller version of the massive crystalline stalactite from the grand foyer came down from the ceiling here, bathing the room in a gentle white light.

“That’s my mother’s suite,” Zale said, pointing to the fourth and final door. Hastily she added, “Don’t go in there.”

It wasn’t necessary though, for Amara’s gaze was transfixed on the illusion in the room’s center.

“That’s a scrying map of the world. It’s very out of date. Let’s go back to the gallery. We can go through to the dining room and get something to eat.

“Why do you live here?” Amara asked as they walked through the gallery.

“What do you mean? Lots of faculty live in the Dahn.”

Kole could tell she didn’t want to answer the question, but Amara definitely couldn’t.

“I’ve been to Professor Donglefore’s residence. This is much nicer and much larger. Your bedroom was as big as his and he only had three rooms total. We didn’t even see your mother’s suite.”

“My mother’s the headmistress of the art college,” Zale said, but it came out more like a question than as a convincing explanation.

“He’s the head of the crafting college.”

As Amara interrogated her, Zale began looking around the room nervously. Amara seemed offended that her mentor and idol didn’t have comparably sized accommodations. Kole followed her eyes thinking some danger might be at hand, but he realized she was looking at some paintings.

“Let’s go get some food!” Zale said cheerily, ignoring Amara’s question.

Kole was about to let her get away with it when he spotted a familiar face in one of the paintings. A portrait of an armored dark-skinned man with a bald head, face wrinkled with smile lines, riding a horse and bearing the mark of Illunia on his pauldrons.

He’d seen that face somewhere before.

“Did your mom paint all of these?” Kole asked.

“Umm, yes?”

“Did your mom know all these people?”

Zale was squirming now and was looking right at the same painting. She nodded.

“How exactly did your mother know Daulf Tutor, Chosen of Illunia, Dragonslayer, and founder of the Academy of Illunia?”

Zale winced, and then she seemed to deflate, all the nervous energy fleeing in defeat.

“He… was one of my uncles,” she said in a lower voice and then let out a groan. “Mom’s going to kill me.”

Now it was Kole’s turn to interrogate Zale

***

“So,” Kole said, after a thorough round of questioning, “not only is your mother secretly the mysteriously absent chancellor of the whole flooding academy, she’s also the inheritor of the Dahn’s Bond after Daulf passed, and controls the whole flooding place? And her name is actually Trish, as in Trishalia the Ice Queen? Hero of the Last Dragon War? Didn’t she murder a bunch of kings? How is she alive?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I kind of thought you might have figured it out when I let slip Levar’s name the other day. And she denies the king murdering.”

Amara was about to explode, wanting to ask more questions about Levar, but Kole had already convinced her to table that line of inquiry for later.

Kole sat in a chair, just trying to process it all, and stared at the other paintings.

“Wait,” he said after a moment’s thought. “If your mother traveled with Daulf, that means she also did with Tal of Storms. Right?”

Zale nodded.

“But, he hates that title, so don’t use it.”

“Don’t use it?” he asked, confused until it clicked into place.

Tallen is Tal. Tal Tal. Tal who he grew up idolizing. Who saved Illandrios from the outsiders controlling it. Whose father was one of the first Mirage Knights and escaped with one of the Champion’s blades.

“How in the realms is he still alive? He died, didn’t he?” Kole asked the biggest thing that came to mind, though many many thoughts banged at the door to be let out. “He must be over a hundred.”

“He has a peculiar relationship with death,” Zale gave as a very non-answer.

“That’s the opposite of an explanation.”

Zale shrugged. “You’ll need to ask him. It’s his secret to tell, not mine.”

A thought struck Kole. He’d never put much thought beyond frustration toward Zale’s uncle, but now he knew him to be as powerful as Zale proclaimed.

“Is he going to be mad I know? I assume it’s a secret.”

“It’s probably fine,” Zale said after thinking it over briefly “Just don’t tell anyone else. He’s trying to keep a low profile.”

“Why is that?”

“The magical affliction he suffers. He’s trying to learn to control or cure it. Until then, he doesn’t want people to know where he is and rely on him because he won’t always be around to help.”

Kole sat to digest the information, and Amara filled the void with more questions about Levar.

“Who’s that?” He asked once Amara’s line of inquiry died down, mostly at the insistence of Zale that Rakin had more knowledge of the man.

Kole pointed to one of a brown-haired man dressed in forest-tone leather with a wolf at his side.

While he’d recognized Daulf from the statue on campus, and some paintings throughout, this man was unfamiliar. But, the painting stood out from the amount of attention to detail that was put into it.

“That’s my dad,” she said proudly. “Roland.”

“Your dad? Are you adopted?” Amara asked.

Zale turned to Amara, who was beginning to try on even her patience, and firmly said “No.”

“But, he’s a human,” Amara said as if Zale could have possibly not known. “And your mother is a half-elf, and you are a half-voidling.”

“I am aware.”

Kole looked at Zale, and then the painting. They did look related if you discounted the whole voidling-human thing.

“Amara, I think you should drop—“ Kole began, but Zale interrupted.

“No, it’s fine. I can explain. I never met him, My dad. He died long before I was born. After he did, Mom moved around for a few years, doing odd jobs and helping out where needed. Eventually, she found herself living with the voidlings, and one day she found herself pregnant, and a few days later I was born.”

“That’s… I have a lot of questions.”

“Me too,” Amara added.

“Voidling’s aren’t really beings of our realm. They reproduce when they and their partner desire to have a child, and then one becomes pregnant and a baby voidling follows behind shortly. My mother and father had wanted children, they’d even picked out names, but quarter-elves are rare.”

She nodded at Amara at that.

“We don’t know how, but somehow the same thing happened to Mom. She gave birth to me alone in the night, and immediately knew I was Roland’s, despite him having been gone for decades…”

Zale had grown somber as she spoke but then smiled.

“She says I had his nose and ‘same respect for authority.’ Mom took me to the dwarves, and raised me with them for a while before coming back to the Dahn with me disguised as a quarter-elf.”

Kole had a lot more questions but held them back. Zale had shared far more than she needed to and he didn’t want to push her further.

“Thank you for sharing all of this,” he said, looking at Amara and holding his hand up telling her to drop whatever questions she had.