I mostly loaf when I’m not working, it’s what I did in my old world, hell it’s even what I did in the bad place.

(If you count hiding, or going into healing comas as loafing).

Here in Novem, those sort of days generally start with me sleeping in past noon,  because even though I’m technically self-employed I’ve learned to be strict with the hours I keep.

On the days that I don’t have to be so strict, I wake up, I look around, I use my powers to reaffirm that again this semi-mundane reality I’m in, isn’t someone’s idea of a trick.

Then I go back to sleep, continuing to slumber till my bladder or stomach forces me to leave the warm, womb-like comfort of my mattress and blanket. From there I bathe,(because I’m lazy not an animal), and spend the rest of the day plopped in front of the television. Watching a mixture of cartoons, sitcoms and reality-tv.

I found a marathon on hunters that seemed half-way decent and decided that would be what I took in for the day. I wasn’t sure how close to reality anything I was seeing was.

If this world was anything like my world, then the show’s accuracy and relation to how things go in the real world would be next to nothing, but I thought it’d be worth watching anyway. (Who knows I might actually learn something?)

I actually got into it, this guy with what, to me, sounded like Aussie accent was rappelling down the side of a building. The camera panned up and we could see something like hulking green skinned gorilla glaring down at him, because he’d just  ransacked its nest and stolen some goodies.

He was going on and on, about what kind of canned goods seemed to gather food preserving magics and how to tell if the food was safe to eat or not.

Then suddenly there was a creak from the couch and someone said,

“Hey…”

Absentminded, my eyes glued to the screen I said “hey…” back.

Then I realized that I was apparently talking to someone now and gave them my full attention, or at least a little more of it.(More than no attention, anyway.)

My eyes drifted to the other side of the couch and if I hadn’t slowly grown used to and then enamored with Agnes, I might have been spooked a little.

It took me a second to realize who I was staring at but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Corny’s memories were pretty spot on about the girl being  a perfect miniature of her mother. The remembered age was off  for some reason, and she was eleven turning twelve soon, instead of eight turning nine, but whatever. I did lose a year coming back to life after all. In any case, apparently my daughter was here.

Her name was Innes Amelia Douglas, if you’re wondering where she’d been been all this time, the answer is boarding school. A very nice, very expensive establishment, whose tuition fees were the one responsible thing that old Corny ever spent money on.

I frowned as I stared at her, gazing at one of the few untainted relations that poor asshole ever had. Dark hair, pale skin, a face that was cute enough to throw down a well and then have crab crawl out of your tv screen.

She was her mother’s child for sure, except her eyes which were as yellow as mine and Corny’s were. Curiosity got the better of me  and I took a look, appraising her, perceiving her in her totality. Learning about her by peeking at the background data that described everything that she was.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

What I got was a flash of old-timey film. A vision of a girl who looked just like Innes except slightly older, or like Agnes, except slightly younger. Wearing a bright blue dress, while being chased by ‘something’ through a forest. A forest that lay a few hundred miles from where we were.

A forest in the outer-wastes. The film fast forwarded and now I was staring at a skeleton the lay curled beneath the roots of a giant tree. Its bleached white bones, wrapped in the folds of a bright blue dress.

I got a vision of something old, something angry, and hungry and foul. A creature born of magic and chaos and fear. A creature strikingly like what I’d been before I got pulled into Corny, was like. It was angry about something, looking for something, or maybe ‘some’-one, roaring in fury. Then my vision returned to the girl herself. My eyes meeting hers because I’d been staring for a just a hair too long.

“Uh...hey, dad. How’ve you been?” said Innes.

“Hey…” said I.

I felt a pang of sympathy, and felt whatever was left of Cornelius’s heart break a little as I knew. Then I felt something else, a bit of inner-questioning, a bit curious familiarity.

“So how’s school been?” I asked.

“...Same old, same old.” she said. Tensing in that way kids tense when they really kind of don’t want to talk about something anymore.

It turns out Innes was not Cornelius’ daughter, never mind her not sharing any of my genes, I was pretty sure we weren’t even the same species. But I didn’t really care about any of that, because in the end I didn’t really care about Corny.

Sure, he and I were close to being the same person, sharing the same feelings and memories to a certain extent, but in the end he was him and I was me. And most important ‘he’ was dead.

His soul had been crushed like a mosquito against the metaphorical windshield of my inner being.  

While Corny would have been reeling over the fact that one good thing he’d brought to this world wasn’t his after all. I was reeling over the fact that the girl I was sitting next to, felt almost unmistakably like one of the ‘things’ I’d thought I’d left behind.

One of the creatures  that called that place of madness and cold and fear, home. She wasn’t, not quite, but she felt like it.

I felt my heart beating out of my chest, cold sweat rose on my brow and on my palms. My mouth went dry, suddenly I didn’t give a shit what my ‘Aussie’ friend on the tv was saying. I just faked a yawn, got up and locked myself in my room.