My body was feeling the effects of our impromptu ice skating the next morning, but I forced myself not to regret it. Tanis and I had a spontaneous bout of fun, and I wasn’t about to let a silly thing like all of my muscles aching put a damper on it. I switched into my warmer robes, bundled back up into a sitting position on the bed, and made sure to hide my fresh, blotchy, purple and brown bruises as I finally dug into the Grimoire de Magi e Mythe after what felt like an eternity away from it. Of course, eternity to the grimoire could often mean nothing; not the least tick upward in experience. I was pleasantly surprised to see I’d collected a total of thirteen Xp, and while that still wasn’t enough to increase my Charisma as planned, it felt like a substantial increase over the measly five I had some thirty-two hours prior. Two whole units of increase… I was really starting to consider the book was rewarding me for important events in some capacity, but I was having a devil of a time figuring out what exactly it counted as ‘important’. Meeting Grajo and… registering the team? Or was it the date? I immediately chastised myself for mentally referring to it as such, despite the fact that the term has no inherent romantic context save what society applies to it. People say ‘save the date’ for all manner of parties and events, after all and—I interrupted my own train of thought. I had casually applied the term with some sort of abstract romantic context even though that wasn’t the kind of relationship I was trying to pursue with Tanis.

… was it?

Things had been easier when I didn’t feel ready to accept romance into my life again, and especially so when I wasn’t suspicious of a hypothetical narrative trying to foist it upon me. I’d started a new job about a year prior; a seasonal gig that I ended up hired on for after Christmas ended. It was a new place with new people and having grown up in a small town with my heart on my sleeve that was something I hadn’t really experienced before without already being attached to someone. There was this freedom to be some version of young and irresponsible I’d denied myself, and perhaps with the pressure with my thirtieth birthday looming in the distance (only two more years, now…) I felt more comfortable flirting without intent. If someone was cute, I’d chat them up. It wasn’t about pursuing a date or getting someone’s phone number or whatever… just an opportunity to enjoy someone’s company and allow myself to be playful. There was a freedom to it, talking to people I’d normally consider well out of my league and being less reserved about what was in the pants of the person I was turning the charm on for. Well, not that much less reserved; it was still semi-rural Central Ohio and coming off as anything but heteronormative carried too much risk for what I was treating as a pleasant pastime. The net result was a more confident version of myself, and the few times someone returned service brought me to a mental state where I was once again considering finding a partner. Before my recent encounter with a semi-truck, I had in fact been considering downloading a dating app.

Now I was in a place that was even less familiar, with people that were even more unable to connect me to the person I was in high school or even my early twenties, though as much as I gave him shit, most versions of the old me weren’t bad guys, just not representative of the current model. It felt a little stupid to potentially waste the opportunity not to make all the same mistakes of my past on the first person to show me anything resembling romantic attention. I wasn’t even sure how I actually felt about her and couldn’t quite parse how to analyze the feelings I did have. She was my friend, that much was easy to arrive at, but I didn’t trust her enough to tell her about the grimoire and how I got here. This was in part because she’d introduced herself to me in an untrustworthy manner, but also because the book and my secrets felt like the easiest path to inviting danger and complication into my new life that was so satisfyingly devoid of it. I didn’t enjoy feeling as though I needed to cover things up, or lie, but these were circumstances a bit larger and more precarious than anything I’d ever encountered back home. Could I invite someone into my heart if I didn’t trust them with that secret? Was it fair to them for me to keep something that important at arm’s length from them? Did I even actually have feelings for Tanis beyond friendship, or was I just acting like the creep in a coffee shop who thinks the barista is in love with him just because they smile at him?

Red opened the door to our room, freeing me from having to analyze that question any further for the moment, and I was grateful. One of the things I absolutely didn’t like about past me was how much he lived up to a lot of sketchy stereotypes about singles, even if they were born of awkwardness or ignorance. I had accidentally been the creep at the coffee shop before and thinking about it too analytically sent abominable waves of cringe crashing upon me through time. Wysteria and Grajo followed close behind Red before he shut the door again, all three of them wearing patches of snow and looking bedraggled from whatever it was they’d spent their morning doing. The terramor toad lumbered wearily to her spot in front of the hearth and unceremoniously plopped down for a nap. Her snores were immediate, though unobtrusive.

“Busy morning?” I inquired.

“Eh,” Red shrugged. “We ain’t exactly runnin’ drills out there, but the cold takes it outta ya. Grajo’s in pretty good shape, predictably, but Wysteria spent most of her life at home or close to it, and that ain’t a place that gets much snow. Once it started comin’ down out there, she lost every ounce of vigor she had left.”

“You think we’ll do all right in a few days?” I was talking to Red, but my eyes were on poor Wysteria, somehow looking exhausted even while asleep, sunken into a puddle on the floor. Part of me wanted to get up and give her a reassuring pat, but having fallen asleep that fast I had no desire to wake her.

“I think so,” Red nodded. “Only one way to really find out, of course, but between Grajo’s experience, Wysteria’s tenacity, an’ you an’ me on the sidelines, I think we’ll manage.” I nodded somewhat absently in response, having nothing of merit to say and my eyes once again being drawn toward the grimoire. “Well, I need a hat,” he announced. “Tired of freezin’ my ears off. I got some other errands to run, yet. You gonna be here when I get back, chief?”

“Probably.” I pulled my eyes away from the same assortment of achievements and facts about myself I’d read dozens of times by this point. “Unless Tanis drags me off somewhere again, the most I’ll be doing is wandering downstairs to get something to eat.”

“I’ll keep the key, then. Take it easy, Glenn. You’re the navigator come Trojur, an’ we need your head clear.” ‘Trojur’ was basically Tuesday, which was when we’d scheduled our coliseum fight. Barbavia had established a seven-day week long before their months became a thing, and the names of the days were part of the initial crash course on the world Red gave me a few weeks ago. Starting with Sunday it was Ujur, Dujur, Trojur, Quatjur, Cinjur, Sijur and Dernieé. The first six days used a ‘zh’ for the ‘j’ sound (unlike the harsh Hispanic ‘hh’ for Grajo) and folk often skipped pronouncing the ‘t’ in ‘Quatjur’ if they weren’t too picky on enunciation. “You might not be in the fight, but there ain’t no way we’re gonna win without you at a hundred percent, all right?”

“Of course,” I offered him a small wave and a smile. “Stay safe out there.”

“Thanks.”

Red made his exit and quiet filled the room, save for the crackling fire, Wysteria’s snoring, and small clicking noises from Grajo preening while perched atop the back of a wooden chair. With a bit of surprise, I suddenly realized I hadn’t examined either his entry in my Esper Records or the one for nachtkrapp in the Esper Index. I flipped to the beginning, finding it between Grimalkin and the partial entry for Oeivolant. There was a beautiful illustration of both a male and female of the species, the latter lacking the long plumage Grajo had atop his head, and a brief entry that was predictably bird-like. They fed on small game, survived well in the cold thanks to their insulating feathers, and while few exhibited powers beyond a mundane animal, those who did were said to be incredibly deadly and could kill with a glance. Grajo’s own entry in the Esper Records was devoid of Traits, so I doubted his ability to murder anyone with his good eye, but the total of his Attributes was higher than Wysteria’s, with a larger increase to Athleticism and Accuracy, and a small bump to Aptitude. It told me he was a capable fighter, but unlike Wysteria I hadn’t gained an immediate grasp of his temperament yet. Being given a wealth of time to talk and little else to fill it with, I closed the grimoire and set it aside for the moment, clearing my throat to get his attention.

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“So, what is it exactly you guys do out there?” I asked in Esperlang.

“Excuse me?” he pulled his head out from beneath his extended wing and croaked with all the detached inflection of someone who had up until now been hopelessly lost in thought.

“When you and Red go training. I’ve never really thought to ask about it until now.”

“Ah! He runs a very curious regimen. My previous chainer had no such esper coach, and she bade me run something more like drills; repeat efforts at the same technique until I had approached something she accepted as mastery.” He looked studiously off into the middle-distance for a moment, or so I assumed when he turned his head away from me, showing me only his unmoving crystalline eye. “Red is more interested in general fitness. He asks me to fly, to loop the loop, or barrel roll. Sometimes he will throw rocks, and I will dodge them. He does not throw rocks at Wysteria. For her it is more about endurance, both in terms of stamina and durability. There is a portion of her training that I would hesitate to call ‘aerobics’, given the limitations of her stature, but it is perhaps as close as a terramor toad could manage.” Grajo had a very proper and showy way of speaking, with infrequent contractions and an almost performative amount of gesturing with his head and wings. The combination made him come off less academic and more grandiose, like a carnival barker or the impresario from last night’s play.

“Do you prefer one to the other?”

“Hm.” He considered this for a moment, tapping one of his talons against the oaken chair. “I am not sure. I grew very accustomed to my old chainer’s methods, and while they seemed repetitive when I first began them, I came to appreciate it during a fight. I have not fought since Red and I began working together, save for hunting a meal, and those are not fights so much as…” he paused again, turning his good eye toward me appraisingly, “let us say that I have been eating a lot of rabbit lately, without effort.”

“Understood,” I nodded. “Can I ask what happened between you and your old chainer?”

“We lost,” he shrugged, and I was taken by how easily that gesture translated from human shoulders to the avian equivalent. “The tournament at the end is single-elimination, and on that day the other team was better. I battered myself about it for a time, but there was little to be done after the fact. It is what it is.”

“And she just… de-linked you? Just for losing?”

“Oh! No, certainly not! We were friends. You kind of have to be on the road, especially if you’re going to remain with a team for that long. I was a later addition to her roster, but we had many tribulations over the course of four coliseums and the tournament itself. We became quite close, but she was traveling with her mate and was with child by the end of things. She retired from competition to raise her family and severed the link to all of her espers before doing so. I believe that was the plan even if we had been victorious, once knowledge of the impending little one came to light.”

“You say you ‘were’ friends—” I stopped myself, curiosity getting ahead of my politeness. “I don’t mean to pry, but did something ultimately happen between you?”

“Time,” he responded simply. “I remained in Barbavia for a few years, long enough to watch the little one grow happy, healthy, and very grabby for my plumage, but the creatures of the Commonwealth and espers can often live very different lives. Not all of us are as adapted to your ways as Red, for example. She preferred to purchase her meals rather than hunt them, knew little of the joys of flight, and we no longer shared our most solid common ground in the League, so conversation became forced and repetitive. ‘How is your little one?’ ‘Oh, quite well. They have learned the numbers and the letters.’ ‘Good. I have slain a marmot today. It was quite delicious.’ ‘Oh, good, good.’” He flicked his primaries dismissively. “Maintaining our friendship was becoming a token effort for us both, so I bade her farewell and returned to the Esperwild.”

“I can understand that, too. There are friends I had in my youth that just… stopped being worth the time it took to talk to them. You don’t always need to do new things with the ones you love, but at some point you need to move on from having the same six conversations.”

“One can grow tired of even rabbit,” he said with all the resplendence of a famous quote. “It is a turn of phrase among the nachtkrapp; even a good thing can become tiresome after an eternity of it.”

“That makes sense, and I agree.” Speaking with him was enchanting, nevermind the novelty of being so suddenly fluent in a language I’d lost grasp of since high school. He used such interesting turns of phrase that I’d never heard before in Spanish or from Red. I wondered if they were exclusive to nachtkrapp, or perhaps the region of the Esperwild he was from. Beside that, there was just a storyteller’s air about him, and I wanted to hear him talk more of even banal things I wouldn’t otherwise take interest in. “How long ago did you and your chainer last speak?”

“Many moons.” He titled his head to and fro, as though trying to rattle a marble of thought into the center hole in his brain. “I never became familiar with the Barbavian accounting of days and it is always cold in Astonia, so the seasons are imprecise.”

“You said the child grew up before you left, has it been longer than that?”

“Yes,” he said after a moment. “The little one shed much of its fat, and was ambulatory, though ungainly. It would’ve been a terrible hunter. I am not sure if it ever resolved these issues, perhaps instead it learned the pigments.”

“The pigments… you mean, like, art? Pictures?”

“Pictures, written words, yes. My people aren’t much for the pigments. Some will drop berries or other objects from a great height and enjoy the pattern of their splatter, a few have learned how to grip a pencil in their talons to make letters. Nothing compared to your kind. I dabbled in the pigments in my younger days, but I didn’t have the talent for it.”

“And how old are you, exactly?” Talk of his own age reminded me how impossibly old Red seemed, and it was another excuse to hear more words from Grajo’s beak.

“Many moons?” He shook his head in puzzlement. “Many seasons. I have seen snow and sun, harvest and rain many, many times. Mostly snow. I am long past my breeding years, not that I ever had interest in raising young.”

“Another thing we can agree on,” I scoffed.

“Unusual for a Barbavian,” he commented. “Unusual for a nachtkrapp as well, I suppose. In this, we are brothers. However, if I may ask a question of you now, if not procreation, what drives you? I enjoy the hunt, I enjoy the fight. Is that what the League holds for you?”

“Eh… that’s a tougher question than you might think. I’m mostly doing the League circuit because it seemed like a good use of my abilities, and maybe to understand more about the world. It would be cool to become the Grand Champion, certainly, but if I don’t quite hit that point… that’s okay.” It was my turn to consider and organize my thoughts for a moment, though I did so with considerably less head movement. “Maybe that’s a bad reason to get into this whole mess, I dunno. Maybe not being passionate or determined enough will cause me to lose at a critical moment or something, or maybe I’ll find the drive somewhere along the way.”

“Not everything one does needs to reflect the exultations of their soul.”

“Well said,” I chuckled. “I guess the only thing I’m really looking for is happiness, ultimately. I’ll work out which path I’m taking to get there along the way.”

“For what it is worth, do not let the fear of failure at the coliseums drown you. They are challenges, yes, but of lower caliber. They are to separate the weak and capricious from those with the skill and drive to succeed, to train esper and chainer alike for the real test of the tournament. Competition within the League may not be the focus of your passion in and of itself, but I sense determination within you. You will pass these challenges and more, one way or another, and perhaps in doing so find your fire.”

“Thanks, Grajo. That means a lot to me coming from a veteran like yourself.”

“Mhm,” he murmured, closing his eyes and settling into his feathers. “I am going to sleep now, because I am warm and my belly is full. If was nice speaking with you, Glenn Anura.”

“Nice speaking with you, too. Enjoy your nap.”

Chatting with Grajo had been a welcome distraction from the inside of my own skull, and those tangled, disorderly thoughts seemed a bit more organized when I was once again left alone with myself and the grimoire. I cracked the book open once more, checking upon an entry I’d spotted while racing through to learn more about my new companion; an entry in the spell index called Legerdemain. ‘Create minor, non-combat effects that are too simple or low-power to have any mechanical application. Examples might include making sounds or soft music, cleaning yourself of mundane dirt and filth, creating harmless motes and sparks of power, and other minor magical parlor tricks’. It sounded an awful lot like Prestidigitation from Dungeons and Dragons, a low-level spell I found very fun to play around with in an imaginary world where I couldn’t actually witness the results of its use firsthand. I couldn’t put my finger on where I might’ve witnessed it, though. Perhaps some of the practical effects during the play weren’t as practical as I initially believed, though I obviously hadn’t been studious of any finger movements or other typical hallmarks of magical instruction enough to pick it up the way I had so far with other spells. It only had a cost of one mana, making it even more tempting to purchase and play around with, but I had resolved to increase my Charisma and I was sticking to that plan no matter how convenient it would be to shower without a shower while we were on the road. I promised myself I’d pick it up before too long, reasoning that there would always be more Xp eventually, even if I still wasn’t sure exactly what prompted its arrival.