My dad looks at my mom, who nods, then he looks back at me. Fleetingly, his face—illuminated as it is by the dying, dancing flames in the fireplace—shifts, youthens and darkens, and I see him not as he is, the settled village mycoherbalist I know and have always known, but as the adventurer he once was, handsome and brave and eager for experience.

“Very well,” he says, taking out his favourite pipe, which signifies he has something serious to impart. He pulls out also a pouch of dried, powdered mushrooms, knocks some into the bowl of his pipe, tamps the powder with his thumb and holds the pipe briefly over the fireplace flames until it heats, then pulls it out, brings the pipestem to his lips, takes several long, audible puffs and exhales their fragrant vapours into the room. “I have always known I would need to tell you this someday, for my own sake as much as yours. You, my dear Grom, understand me as a certain kind of person, but I wasn't always this person. My alignment was not always lawful good. I am not proud of it, but there was a period in my life, years before I met your mother, during which I was decidedly chaotic. And, in terms of ethics and morality, approaching something akin to neutrality. Never evil, mind you—but flexible, opportunistic.”

It is strange, but not entirely unexciting, to picture my dad as a rogue.

He goes on, “It was for this reason I found myself one day sentenced to ten years in a pit prison in faraway Daag. I had accepted, you see, a quest from a merchant of questionable reputation to procure for him a certain necklace of gems, and because this necklace belonged to the wife of a local nobleman—corrupt to the marrow of his bones, but nonetheless of sound legal right to ownership and possession of the said necklace—my procuring was, in truth, a lifting, and I was caught in that act by the very lady herself.”

By now, although he is speaking to me, my dad is staring at the flames in the fireplace, trying to see through them into a past he appears both to regret and yearn for. The mixed feelings are evident in his eyes.

“I had no defense, and pretended to none, although given who the victim’s husband was I would have been sentenced all the same had I the strongest alibi. Judgment and sentence were pronounced on the same day, and I was cast into one of the city’s many penal pits. Hundreds of feet deep, they are, and dark and cold. And I found myself in one in the company of a crew of pirates. It is from them, Grom, I first learned of the wonders of herbs and mushrooms, for one of them had sewn into his shirt several vials of the most potent and rakishly useful potions.

“We began conversing, they about their sordid but colourful pasts, and I about my mine, and when I began recounting my skill at disarming traps and picking locks, their interest was piqued sufficiently for them to offer me a deal. They, being pirates and having found themselves confined in much worse places, did not intend to remain for long at the bottom of the pit, and proposed to take me to freedom with them if I agreed to join their company for a single job. ‘What is it?’ I asked, as it is always wise to ask. ‘We wish to enter a goblin subterrain,’ they said, ‘where a green-skin warlord has allegedly stashed a trove of spoils from raids into the Kingdom of Kofnay.’ Even I knew how famous was the Kingdom of Kofnay for its riches and its splendour. If these goblin raiders had robbed but a single Kofnayan merchant, the amount of loot one could find there”—His eyes flashed at the thought even now, so many years later—“was tempting beyond reason.”

“You agreed?” I ask.

“I did.”

“But how did you and the pirates get out of the pit?”

“Ah, that was clever, a combination of two of the potions I mentioned. The first could make of any encounter a battle, and so, at night, just after the change of guard at the rim of the pit, one of the pirates consumed the contents of the vial and cursed the new and unready guards. They replied—and battle ensued. When it was done, and the guards defeated, we all took sips of another potion, one of levitation, and rose from the bottom of the pit to the lip, then climbed over it and escaped into the city streets. From streets to alleys. An alarm was ringed on the city’s bells but the pirates were agile and silent, and they knew which way to go to reach the docks, where their vessel was. I scampered as best as I could after them. When we reached the docks, we boarded the ship and sailed for open seas, albeit not for long, just long enough to be free of any pursuit from Daag. When morning came I spied the coast, and along it we sailed for a week or more until making landfall in a most wild and untamed environment.”

The pipe no longer gives enough vapour, so my dad replenishes the bowl with another spill of dried mushrooms. Usually, my mom won’t let him smoke more than one per night, but tonight she says nothing, and when the second spill is tamped and heated and the plumes of vapour are as fragrant as before, my dad continues where he left off:

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“It was a land unlike any I had seen. The pirates, perhaps, the same, but they had with them a crudely drawn map, which they followed from the distinctive rock formation at which we’d made landfall, through dense forest to the hidden entrance of a cave. The entrance was unguarded, at least by goblins, and here is where I made myself useful, because protecting the entrance was a series of traps, rather primitive, but well made for what they were, and I disabled them.”

“Were you scared?” I interrupt.

“Of course, Grom. One doesn’t adventure without fear.”

“And once you’d disabled the traps, you…”

“We walked along the cave’s only corridor until we arrived at an iron gate blocking our way. Here is where I made myself useful a second time, for I picked the gate’s lock. Quite easily, if my memory serves. Then we continued for a time until arriving at a natural fork in the cave. One led left, from which I could hear faint growls and laughter, and another to the right, where was silence and absolute darkness. ‘The treasure lies surely left,’ one of the pirates said. ‘Aye, and goblins too,’ said another.

“And here is where they betrayed me, because before I realized what had happened, one of them had set off a firecracker—loud and bright—and from the corridor on the left goblins began pouring forth, toward me. I had on me a dagger, and I drew it, but when I looked behind to see what support I might expect, the pirates were gone, disappeared into the gloom of the other corridor, and I was left alone to face the onslaught.

“There were three options open to me: to head left, head-on into the marauding goblins; right, likely toward the pirates who’d betrayed me and, now that my use to them had expired, who would have no qualms about slitting my throat”—

“Language!” my mom says.

My dad shrugs, gesticulates with his pipe. “It’s the truth of the world. There’s no use pretending otherwise. The boy’s old enough to know.”

And I’m an adventurer too, I think. Soon to meet goblins of my own.

“So I chose the third option: retreat,” my dad says. “I turned and ran down the corridor along which we had advanced. Somewhere along the way I lost my dagger, but I managed to pass the open iron gate, then soon saw daylight and reached the cave entrance before the goblins had snatched me. I continued swiftly toward where the pirate ship had been moored, but turned before reaching it and climbed a tree. From it, I saw the goblins sprint past, each wearing various old pieces of mismatched armor and carrying weapons—swords, axes, maces, clubs—that all made a horrible, knockabout racket as they went. But go they did, no doubt taking a keen interest in the pirate ship.

“I doubled back into the woods. I did not re-enter the cave, although to this day it boils my blood that those double-crossing pirates probably waited until the cave was emptied of goblins and walked down the left corridor unchallenged to the very spoils they craved.” He sighs. “But loot is a young man’s passion, and once a man gets on in years he realizes the existence of treasures of a different kind. Ones earned and worked-for, spiritual and transcendent. Loved and loving-back.”

“What about the sword?”

“Well, that’s the queerness of it. You asked me to tell you everything I knew about the sword, and when I started I was sure I knew something, yet having told all that tale, I realize I know almost nothing about it at all. The truth is, I was afraid in those woods. Lost. When night came, I huddled under tree roots and couldn’t sleep. I hungered and thirsted. And I remember—I remember having the short sword with me, but not how I had come into its possession. Holding it gave me comfort, reassured me. I spoke before about the dagger with which I had started the adventure with the goblins, and that dagger did not give me the same feelings. It was a mere sharpened shape of steel. The short sword, however: it was like a friend to me. Perhaps that’s why I never gave it up, even after I gave up adventuring.”

“Maybe one of the goblins dropped it, and you picked it up when you were going back into the forest,” I say.

“Maybe,” my father says. “You think well, Grom.”

He takes a final puff of his pipe and sets it down. The fire in the fireplace is weak. From outside, the world looks darkly into our home through the windows, and all I can think about is that somewhere out there is dad’s short sword.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of greater help, son. I honestly believed I remembered more about the sword than I do.”

“I’m happy you told me about your adventure anyway,” I say (honestly,) “but now I want to know more, like how you survived in the forest and got back home, and how many years you kept on adventuring after that.”

“Many more years. As for my survival and return to parts known: that is an interesting tale as well—but one for another night. In the meantime, I hope you don’t think any less of me because of what you’ve learned. These details of my past, they’re shameful to me, but all the same the past is mine and I would not be the man I am without it. Had I been a paladin or a knight, I would be a different husband and a different father.”

“I love you the way you are, dad,” I say.

“And I love you too,” my mom says (to him, not me.) “But”—and this bit she says to me—“the lesson to be learned is that equipment is important. When you find a good piece, guard it with your life. Tomorrow will be your first full day of having an active quest. Your first step will be to find the best equipment you can. You can count on our help, Gromi.”

With that we say goodnight, and I spend the following hours mostly tossing and turning in bed, both with excitement and anxiety, and once or twice with the feeling that in the corner of my room a corridor has opened, and goblins are spilling out of it.

Am I truly ready?