The game may have been afoot, but it had also given Aaron and Katrina the slip.

After two hours of going through albums, folios, and catalogues of artwork the last Primus Draconis, Oliver Milton, had ever owned, they had failed to find anything resembling Aaron’s vision of a large manor house on a bluff.

Convincing Kiara to let them have the extra hour had taken some cajoling on the part of the Archivist, who seemed to take their inability to solve the mystery of the manor as an affront either to her research skills or the archive itself.

She’d remained peppy and optimistic as they’d veered into records that were increasingly obscure or had a less meaningful relationship to Milton. However, it had been a manic kind of energy as the time passed. When Kiara — backed up by Griffin (and a reluctant Albert) — had drawn the line at pushing the search into a third hour, Aaron was actually a bit grateful.

Enigmatic as the vision of the house had been, Aaron had felt a small sense of pride at experiencing any kind of flashback or inherited memory so quickly. That faint high had started to dull and fade in the face of Katrina’s contagious frustration, despite her efforts to remain superficially positive as they struggled to make headway.

As they were leaving the archive, Katrina followed them to the door, research materials piled in her arms.

“Nothing to fret over,” she reassured them. “It wouldn’t be a Tribulation if it weren’t troublesome, after all. I’ll keep searching the archive and put together anything I find that looks promising.”

After a round of thanks for her efforts, they departed and continued on their way through the bowels of the Long Lines Building. Griffin stopped them at an intersection of hallways. It was no different from any other as far as Aaron could tell, but it was his first time in the building.

“Hey, why don’t you guys go make sure the room is ready for us?” he suggested. “Aaron and I can go grab some drinks from the cantina. Should make up at least a couple minutes of lost time to kill two birds.”

There was no objection to the big man’s plan, so the group split at the intersection. Before they’d gone more than a hundred feet, Griffin stopped again and pulled Aaron into a small room that was definitely not the cantina. It looked like a server room of some kind, with racks of computers filling the chilly space.

Aaron was immediately on edge. Was this some kind of surprise betrayal? It did nothing to calm his nerves when Griffin did a quick sweep to make sure the room was empty. An all-too familiar icy tingle began to stir in Aaron’s stomach. Whether it was fear or something worse, Aaron wasn’t sure.

You’re just being paranoid, he told himself, even as he failed to shake off the spectre of disappointment and hurt welling up inside. Any one of the delvers has had much better opportunities to take a shot at you. Quit being stupid!

He didn’t know the layout of the Drakon’s strange subterranean headquarters, but he knew it would be filled with people who were expecting him to be the reincarnation of their long lost leader. It was a small comfort to know he could probably find allies fairly quickly if Griffin turned on him. All he’d need to do is get away and raise some hell.

Despite his attempts to be rational about the very low likelihood Griffin had lured him into a trap, when the big man came back to the door Aaron was mentally preparing himself to throw down. He’d hit the drakus with a jolt of lightning from his wand and bail as fast as he could.

It wasn’t easy to get in that frame of mind; he liked Griffin and the other delvers and was hoping to become friends with them. That wishful thinking was causing a certain degree of reluctance accepting what he might have to do if this turned out to be an assassination attempt.

“This is a little awkward,” Griffin said, his voice low and conspiratorial, “but we’re short on time and I wanted to talk with you about this in private.”

The larger drakus paused and took a deep breath. Aaron was starting to think this wasn’t going to be an ambush, which was great, but he tightened his grip on the wand in his pocket, just in case.

“Do you have… problems with your anger?” Griffin asked.

Aaron stood, mute, taken completely by surprise. For a moment, he was simply stunned by the question. Probing, deeply personal questions were about the last thing he’d expected from this strange, semi-clandestine meeting.

Then, he closed off. There wasn’t a conscious thought behind it, exactly, but more like alarm bells ringing in the back of his mind.

Danger! it screeched. Intruder detected!

The idea of someone else knowing how Aaron was in his worst moments — what he was capable of, what his instincts were — was untenable, a shameful truth even he had trouble accepting about himself. Another part of him, maybe even the same part that ugliness had its roots in, warned him it was a vulnerability others could exploit, a way to hurt him.

His body was tense, his jaw set, and his brow lowered. The impulse to project strength and confidence was nearly overwhelming. He needed to make it clear that whatever anger he might have was controlled; it was a weapon he could wield, not one that could be turned against him.

But Griffin spoke again before Aaron could muster a sufficiently scathing response. Something in the tone softened the edges of Aaron’s reaction, causing him to hesitate.

“Albert was a combat medic, I don’t know if you knew that,” Griffin said. “He probably would’ve spotted it, too, back in the garage if he hadn’t been so busy keeping that cat lady tied up so she couldn’t disengage from Kiara and take a potshot at you.”

Aaron hadn’t known that about Albert. It seemed totally out of character with the sleazy rogue archetype the smaller man seemed to lean into so heavily.

Griffin went on. “I don’t have the kind of training or expertise he does on the psychology of combat or however you’d put it, but I grew up around enough broken down, piss drunk white trash to know that rage is insidious. Sometimes it pushes a person without fully taking the wheel, but those other times — when it does take over — it can look all different kinds of ways. Sometimes it doesn’t look like much of anything at all and you might think it was just who that person is… but you can see it if you know what to look for. It’s behind their eyes, maybe, or in their aura. I dunno.”

Aaron swallowed hard. He didn’t know how to respond to that and, honestly, he’d never heard anyone talk about anger in that way. Dealing with your anger was like sports, cars, shaving with a razor, or how you behaved to treat women respectfully — it was the kind of thing men were supposed to teach boys.

Aaron’s father was pretty much absent from his life. His grandfather had been in his sixties when Aaron was born and moved away when Aaron was barely in elementary school. He had tried to learn those things, and so many others, largely on his own and hadn’t always had the best results.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“The thing is: anger makes you stupid,” Griffin said. “There’s power in rage, a strength born of spite, but it’s reckless. Fury can pound down the Walls of Jericho, but it’ll leave you to find shattered stumps where your fists were or to discover you’d ignored the archers manning the heights.”

With an effort, Griffin turned his face so he was making direct eye contact with Aaron. “The kind of anger that grabs the wheel is like a shotgun; you have to learn to manage the kick on it or you’ll wind up hurting yourself or your friends. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

It was too heartfelt, too earnest and well thought out for Aaron to completely blow Griffin off. Besides, it was obvious Griffin had at least some idea what he was talking about, so he probably wasn’t just making wild guesses. That meant he was coming into this conversation without judgment.

Or at least that he’s considerate enough to keep it hidden, Aaron thought. Either way, he’s not wrong that my life and the lives of others could depend on me getting a handle on this… this… whatever this thing with me is.

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that I have some idea what you’re talking about,” Aaron said. “How would someone like that manage the recoil, or however you put it?”

Griffin smirked. “Someone like that could probably use a good deal of therapy if they wanted to address the underlying issues for long-term improvement, but there are other things they could do that could be helpful. The thing is: they’re not the kind of things you can do alone and they certainly can’t be done in the dark.”

“It’s not exactly the kind of thing that’s easy to just drag into the light of day, either.”

Griffin gently placed a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “When you’re down in a hole, it can be hard to see that there’s people right nearby, some of them in their own holes and some who’ve climbed out. It doesn’t make them dumb, blind, or ignorant; it just means they’re not in position to have a wider perspective.”

“Alright, so tell me about these other things that can help.”

“Would you tell me something first?” Griffin asked. “Do you know what kinds of things can cause problems for you? What might set you off? Knowing what we’re looking for will help us make a plan. Like, for example, some folks will simmer for a long time, adding little things onto a pile until the cumulative frustration reaches a critical mass. For them, it’s not any one thing that sets them off but the next thing. Then there’s people who only find themselves losing their grip on the wheel in response to very specific things.”

“Violence, maybe, or someone hurting me?” Aaron began, searching for the words he’d avoided consciously putting together even in his own thoughts for so long. “No, that’s not right. It’s more like… danger, I guess. I’ve been in fights where I didn’t have that problem, you know? But there have also been times when I took a punch before the fight even really started and that was it, we were off to the races.”

“Has it ever happened outside of a fight or getting hit?”

“No, I-”

Aaron cut himself off. A jumbled memory rushed into his thoughts, emerging from the foggy haze of his childhood.

He’d chased a classmate around the playground in the fifth or sixth grade. Or, not really chased so much as stalked. He’d been too heavy to run after the smaller boy, but he’d pursued him. It had been a joke to everyone else, at first, and they’d all been laughing. They stopped laughing when Aaron broke a big porcelain drinking fountain trying to kick his classmate into a wall.

After that, some of the bigger kids had grabbed onto Aaron, trying to hold him away from the other boy. Aaron had just dragged them along in his wake, step after step, like they weren’t even there.

It had to have been fifth grade because the other boys had been in the sixth grade. They were older and bigger, starting to go through growth spurts and develop real muscles; they even had a couple hairs on their chins.

Why had he done that, chased that other boy? The memories were all disjointed. Aaron tried to piece them together into something he could make sense out of.

He remembered the boy was named Julian. Julian had been laughing, laughing at Aaron. Julian had transferred to the class a month or two after the year started and everyone called him Baby Face; he had these big dimples and all the girls seemed to have a crush on him.

It was hard for Aaron to talk to girls at school. He’d started having crushes on girls in kindergarten, years before the other boys stopped thinking they were gross, but he’d never managed to figure out how to not be weird around them.

There was something to that. Something connecting to the memory of going after Julian. Had one of them been talking to girls?

I was, Aaron thought. I was talking to a bunch of girls during lunch recess and I was trying to do some kind of proto-flirting. I doubt it was going well for me — it never does — but where does Julian come in?

The memories were like individual frames from a film, blown up into stills and flashing in a haphazard slideshow. There was no sensible order to them and what Aaron could see in his memory was often cropped into strange perspectives. But that was changing.

The more Aaron focused on specific details, the more it started to make sense. Pieces came together fast, like random sections of a puzzle being solved, and Aaron was trying to pick out what was happening in this memory-movie.

He had been talking to some of the girls from his class out near the playground, trying to impress them. That was the beginning.

It had gotten all turned around at some point. He could see one of them — Maria, he thought her name was — frozen in time. She had a hand on her hip and she was saying something to him. Her smile was not kind. Had the girls been mean to him?

He felt like that was right, or at least close. He’d tried to be funny or charming to impress the pretty girls, had been weird and off-putting instead, and they’d started making fun of him for it.

Even now, two decades later, Aaron knew how sensitive he was to mockery and how hard it was for him not to fire back. As a child, he would have thrown up his emotional defenses if he’d felt like he was being spurned and gone on the offense. So they’d been mean to him and he’d been mean to them, that was the second act of this little drama. But where did Julian come into it?

Then the memory was there, searing Aaron’s brain with its childish ugliness.

As Aaron had struggled to salvage his dignity in a social arena where he was both outnumbered and outclassed, Julian had snuck up behind him and tried to yank his pants down. Aaron had caught the waist of his pants before they’d fallen so much as an inch, but the hilarity of children ensued regardless — the girls had fallen into hysterics and Julian had started laughing at him, too.

Aaron had needed to choose his target, to decide who would accompany him in misery. He’d chosen Julian.

“Humiliation,” Aaron said, quietly. “Humiliation, betrayal, and pain are all things that can get under my skin. But… it's only been pain for most of my life, since I was a little kid, really. I’ve been humiliated and betrayed enough times to think I’ve got an okay handle on myself there.”

Griffin regarded him in silence for a moment, then had the courtesy to look around the room as he replied.

“So the big risks are going to come from combat. That gives us some things we can work on to reduce those risks and keep your hand on the wheel.”

Aaron repeated his earlier question. “Like what?”

“Training, practice, and experience,” Griffin said. “Making you more capable and confident at defending yourself will minimize the risk of injury and any sense of helplessness, loss of control, or other underlying feelings that contribute to your anger grabbing the reins. It will also train your body to remember there are options other than going right for the throat and that you can be effective without being reckless.”

“That sounds okay,” Aaron said. “It’s not that far off from things I tried myself when I was younger and I think they helped. I got through high school and college without any real incidents, so it’s not nothing.”

Griffin beamed. “That’s awesome! You’ve got a foundation and you already know it can work, so that’s going to be super helpful. I think you should consider looking into meditation, too, on top of therapy, but that really has to be a ‘you’ thing.”

“Sure,” Aaron agreed. “So what’s next?”

“Next, we grab those drinks from the cantina, then go meet the others in the Chamber of Suffering. Should be a lot of fun!”