Sign: Snake
Buffs: Serpent’s Kiss (Romance twice as easy)
Debuffs: Curse of the Unspecified (Start the game with no gender, no name, and no other identifying feature)
EXP: 1,119
Alchemy
Coagula (LVL 0, 24 SKP)
Solvé (LVL 0, 9 SKP)
Theoria (LVL 0, 23 SKP)
Botany
Tending (LVL 0, 5 SKP)
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Cooking
Fire (LVL 0, 21 SKP)
Water (LVL 0, 11 SKP)
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Homesteading
Fire Tending (LVL 0, 7 SKP)
Tidying (LVL 1, 5 SKP)
Dirt Buster: The magical branch of Purification lends this Sorcerer the ability to ‘Bust Dirt.’ Dust and grime accumulate at a infinitesimally slow rate on objects you have cleaned.
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Speech
Logic (LVL 0, 33 SKP) Ready to level up!
Linguistics (LVL 0, 7 SKP)
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Total SKP: 160
Inventory:
Auros: 0
Cards of Destiny: 4 of ?? Discovered
Names: 2
Gillygad, The Stiched-Up Wonder (Pitchfork)
Zinia, The Serpent’s Caress (Snake)
Something small fluttered down from the ceiling. I caught it out of the air. It was a card, about the size of my palm.
I flipped it over.
New Card of Destiny Discovered!
The Midnight Candle
I lit the black candle. I played the deadly game. I won.
The picture showed a thin black candle, just like the one I held as I played the game. The new addition looked much older than my other cards. It was battered, and the edges looked frayed well beyond normal wear. There were dark splotches on the face.
I put the card in my pocket, and headed out of the small library.
My legs felt wooden as I walked. I had painful bumps all over my body where I had knocked myself around trying to outrun the thing in the shadows.
All the doors I had failed to unlock were wide open. The house had a sad atmosphere to it, like I had cheated at its game of locked doors and fogged windows. It felt lifeless now, devoid of its mystique.
I headed towards the kitchen by instinct. It had been the only room where I was truly starting to feel at home. Gripping the iron railway of the spiral staircase, my head was a weightless balloon, and I felt like I was in my body, and above it, at the same time. Was any of this real?
Every room was a mess. More so than when I woke up here. But I would have time to address it. Right now I was bone-tired and just wanted to sit down. Maybe, drink a cup of tea.
I opened the kitchen door, and immediately retracted my movement, nearly closing the door, but keeping an inch gap so that I could spy inside.
Someone was there.
No, something was there.
Whatever it was, it nearly blocked out the whole window. By the hazy morning light I couldn’t make out what it was. I stood there for breathless moments, thinking that somehow the monster from the darkness was still here in the house with me. But it didn’t move. And it didn’t look like a monster. I thought I spotted plaid, which made me think of lumberjacks or farmers.
I opened the door and stepped inside cautiously.
Approaching the thing, I realized what it was.
It was tall, the stitched-up fabric of his head bent against the ceiling. The straw hat on its head, completely smashed against a wooden beam. Standing in front of the kitchen window was a scarecrow.
It didn’t move at all. I slowly stepped forward, craning my neck to look up into the patchwork grin sewn onto the burlap-sack face.
It was very unnerving to look at. But, at the same time, I was very grateful that it had come and helped me in the eleventh hour. I was a disconcerting cocktail of warm feeling and wary hesitation.
Neither of us moved. I wasn’t sure the scarecrow could move. I stared at the fabric grin, and finally gave in.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, and then, not thinking it through, I did something very inadvisable.
I stepped forward and hugged it, my hands stretching around the wooden mounting pole, and the stuffed-overall legs.
Something caught me by the scruff, and I felt a strong upward tug, as the early morning kitchen disappeared around me.
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Giles Gadsby was born to a hardworking family of farmers. His father was a very fair and decent man, and his mother died when he was quite young.
The family did well, as the plot of land which they worked was very productive. Even when their neighbors were concerned about blights and insects, the Gadsbys could always count on a rich crop.
The Gadsbys did so well, they were able to send their children to a prestigious school in the old capital, and so they did. All of Giles’s siblings left the stone, ivy-covered cottage that had been the family’s for many generations. Except, Giles. He stayed to take care of the land and his father, who was starting to fall ill more and more frequently.
The same winter his father died, Giles met Emily.
It took some time, between mourning his father, hosting his returned siblings for the funeral, and all the rest of the proceedings, but eventually, Giles started a courtship to win Emily’s heart.
By his humble estimation, she was the most lovely woman to have ever walked the earth. She was beautiful, yes, but she was lovely in so many other ways, there was not enough time in a day to enumerate them all.
Emily was the teacher at the local school. The school was rustic, and only taught a sparse curriculum of basic maths, reading, and spelling. Emily was fond of little kids, and where other teachers lost their patience with children’s antics, Emily was secretly amused. She frequently spent her weekends leading the children on brisk walks through the forest, familiarizing the kids with the appearance of Chanterelles, Nightingales, Balsam Pines, and Fly Agarics.
Giles had not had much experience with little kids, aside from taking care of his younger siblings, but that had been a decade past him. After he had introduced himself to the lovely Emily, and the two became friendly, he started coming every day at school’s end to escort Emily home. Every morning he woke up thinking of the dirt path, bordered on each side by fragrant pine trees, which led to the country school. He thought of the school yard with the rough-hewn seesaw, and of Emily, waiting for him there.
It didn’t take long for all the kids to get to know Giles. Giles, himself, had inherited his mother’s good looks and sense of humor, and his father’s pleasant demeanor. He was hard to ruffle, and the little kids found themselves warming up to the golden-haired man who always waited on Miss Emily. Perhaps intending at first to impress Emily, Giles started making up games for the kids. Make-believe games, riddles, sporting games to play with a ball… Giles came up with all sorts! He found he had a preternatural talent for this creative endeavor. And, the kids loved it! They looked forward to the end of each school day much more than before, as they could always rely on Mr. Gadsby to teach them a new way to spend their afternoons.
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Word travels fast on the gossip of kids. Before long, the whole town’s retinue of children knew about Mr. Gadsby’s talent for making up games.
They followed him anytime he came to town. Sometimes, he even found stray children milling about his cottage. Giles never had the heart to run them off.
When he went to town for market days, the children trailed after his wagon, running in front of his old piebald pony, hopping up and down, and entreating him, calling after Mr. Gadsby the whole road. The littlest kids, the ones who were just learning to talk, and couldn’t quite pronounce Giles Gadsby’s cocophanous name, came up with their own nickname for the man.
“Gillygad, Gillygad, more games!”
It did not take long for the straight-forward and charismatic farmer to catch Emily’s eye, and then her heart. The courtship lasted a year in total. Not too long to make people second guess the couple, and not too short to be considered scandalous.
But Emily had a secret, one she did not divulge to Giles until the night before their wedding ceremony. Her dear grandmother, who had learned it in turn from her own grandmother, had taught Emily Sorcery. Emily was quite proficient in the rudimentary Sorcery common to rustic folks. Root to root, and bone to bone, she could make a calf’s tremors quiet, or a dog’s sick teeth heal.
Now, at that time, the Sorcerers’ Guild and the Holy Church had made a shaky truce, but most folks kept their magical workings secret, so as to not invite the suspicions of their neighbors. It was a common occurrence, in those days, that when pestilence or blight threatened people, the finger was pointed to the town Sorcerer; for not doing enough, or for doing too much, as it were.
Emily told Giles in confidence, and hoped for the best, for she did not know how the man might react to her secret. Giles had never been partial to the Church, nor to the Guild, so he had no ill feelings for his wife’s secret pursuits. And in any case, there was not much Emily could have shared that would have dimmed Giles’s love.
Once the couple settled down into Giles’s family cottage, Emily started teaching him the Magical Arts, and it wasn’t long before Giles was picking it up and improvising, adding his own expertise and flair for making up games, weaving it deftly into the basics of Sorcery which Emily so diligently taught him.
Then their first daughter was born. Then a son. Then two more children, and Giles and Emily had four in total; two girls and two boys. There was no longer any time for extracurricular pursuits!
Parenthood suited both Emily and Giles. They spent those happy years chasing after their kids and working their land. During the winters, when the fields were frozen over, Giles built a small yard for his children, with props and toys for his made-up games. There was a rotating scarecrow, with a wooden stick for a sword, which the children enjoyed batting at, and pretending they were knights on a quest. There were some strong ropes tied off to trees, which enabled the kids to swing to and fro, pretending they were birds in flight. Giles came up with new toys and games faster than he could build them, and every child knew the location of the Gadsby’s play yard.
The year that Nellie Gadsby, the eldest of the children, turned seven, was the year that the Mud Pest struck.
The Pest traveled fast, and not long after the Gadsbys heard of the dreaded sickness, their own town was overtaken with it. The Church blamed the Guild, and the Guild blamed the Church for this aberration of sickness, but neither Prayer nor Sorcery could be relied upon to cure the dreaded Pest. Some unfortunate towns were wiped completely off the map, leaving nary a soul behind; the dead piled up on the abandoned streets. Fortunately for the Gadsbys, their own town was isolated enough, with thick stretches of forest on all sides. But the Pest still arrived, in smaller, but still devastating, numbers.
The youngest Gadsby child, Edward, fell ill first, and died that same night. Then it was one of the daughters, and a week later their other son.
When the remaining child, Nellie, started coughing up the distinctive mud-colored droplets of viscera, Emily was on the verge of breaking. She worked day and night, trying to help her baby. She brewed potions, recited prayers, and carried water and food to her last child. Nellie lasted a week before the Pest took her, and then Emily started to cough as well.
Perhaps Emily would have been strong enough to fight off the sickness, but after losing four children, she had no will to fight it off. She died, and Giles had to bury the last and dearest member of his family under the Holly tree close to his house (the Church had closed its doors for burials, after being overcome with demand).
Giles caught the sickness, too, he discovered, two nights after he buried Emily. The Pest took him as far as the terrible wracking coughs, but no further. He did not wish to outlive the sickness, as he had no reason to get out of his sick bed; no wife to love, no children to play with, and his fields could all rot and wither, for all he cared.
But, Giles was strong from years of heavy, outdoor labor, and his body fought the Mud Pest off, and within a week, Giles was healthy again.
And so, Giles was left alone in his stone cottage, with nothing and no-one. His grief ran deep, and he had no want of anything from the outside world. He shut himself into his cottage, only coming out to forage for food in the forest, and in the neighboring orchard (where the family that tended it had all died to the one). Other days, he sat in his father’s old chair, and stared at the spiders weaving their cobwebs on the ceiling, entranced by their complicated craft. There were days that Giles moved not an inch from his place, and his head was empty and cold.
Giles made foolhardy attempts to delve deeper into the secrets of Sorcery, and even once attempted to bring back his beloved Emily. It was fortunate that no one came to the little cottage at this time, for this branch of Sorcery was very strictly prohibited by both the Guild and the Church (one of the rare subjects on which both organizations heartily agreed).
After seeing the monstrosity of insects and rot which he had brought forth, Giles quickly abandoned that plan, and laid Emily back to rest.
The devastation brought to the town by the Mud Pest was severe, but all wounds heal with time. After the Pest had burned itself out, the dead were laid to rest, and the living residents kept on with their lives. Many of the survivors of neighboring villages and cities traveled to Giles’s small town, as their own had been too sparsely populated to rebuild.
Before long, there were enough refugees to fill most of the houses, and the orchards and fields around Giles’s own were being worked again. The refugees came in families, and many had little children, the strongest ones, which had survived the Pest.
Even the school eventually opened its doors again. There was another teacher there, of course, but some of the older kids remembered Giles, and Miss Emily. They told the littler kids about the magical play-yard which Mr. Gadsby had built for his own kids. Everyone in town figured that Giles had perished to the Mud Pest, as they had not seen him in many months.
The kids started sneaking into the play-yard; the older kids, who had survived the Pest, showed them the way to Mr. Gadsby's house.
The first time Giles was awakened from his stupor by the children playing in his yard, he chased them off, yelling and waving a pitchfork at them. How dare they, he thought, how dare they play in the yard that had been built for Nellie, Lisa, Christopher, and Eddy. His own children were in a cold, muddy hole in the ground. It didn’t seem fair that there were others in the world who still had families to love and care for.
The children were scared off by Giles, but kids are nothing if not persistent. In a few days, Giles’s yard was full of kids again. And Giles chased them off, again. This continued for some time until Giles, who had not been eating enough food, was finally too weak to do anything about the little intruders.
So, Giles sat in his cottage, and watched the children. At least, now, he had another thing to focus his eyes on, beside the slow building of spiderwebs. He watched the children play, detached, empty, and resentful of the laughing and teasing which drifted through the window of his cottage.
Some of the older kids took pity on poor Mr. Gadsby, and occasionally brought him pies, and sandwiches from the town market. Giles was not in a position to turn them down.
It was on an unseasonably warm September afternoon, when Giles was sitting in his father’s chair, and observing the children, that something happened to him. The kids were playing a make-believe game. An older boy was pretending to be a mighty King, holding court, and a younger boy was a gallant knight, who came to usurp the King’s throne, as he declared, and put the King to justice. And then the King, who was actually a Sorcerer in disguise, had to run from his own kingdom and plot revenge deep in a swamp, and he was helped by the hag who lived in that swamp, to march on the New King, the knight, who by that point had trained giant flying beasts, to help him in his hour of need, and then...
It was all very difficult to follow. But Giles, who had done nothing more than stare at walls for nearly a year, found himself transported into the middle of the boys’ game. It was all so clear in his mind that the dream of the imaginary conflict was more real than his stone cottage which was slowly going to ruin.
And then the boys’ older sister called, shouting that it was high time for them to head home. The sun was setting soon. The kids ran off through Giles’s barren fields, into the sunset.
And just like that, the dream of Kings and Knights ended. Giles scrunched his brows in consternation.
What happened, he thought, to those make-believe men, when the kids dropped their toys and ran home?
They were here one moment, realer than the stones on which Giles rested his feet, and then gone the next… Almost like…
He watched the sun set over his rotting fields, and then something, a terrible understanding, crawled into his brain like an insect. He would be gone one day, just like his darling Emily, and all their beloved children. He would disappear as easily as the Sorcerer King in that game which the boys shared.
And if that was true, what was all of this? What was his roof, slowly leaking now, from lack of care? What were the crumbling cottage walls?
Giles was flying away, away, away, like a balloon set loose. It was all the same. There was nothing beneath the skin of this world. Pierce it, and all the air would whoosh out in an instant. Scratch it, and you would find the empty sky on which the world was so thinly painted.
Giles left his cottage, and went to the play-yard he had built.
His soul turned upside down, and he was laughing, laughing, laughing now, never sad. How could one be sad!
And Gillygad was back! And he was making up riddles, games, and stories, and songs, and, and…
The children started following him again, demanding games, as he walked to the market for food, and he indulged them, because games were more important than anything, and he didn’t have time to waste on tilling his fields, or mending his cottage, because those things were as real as the grasshopper who sang all summer, as real as a cow jumping over the moon, as real, as real...
He was much better now at make-believe games, and Sorcery now blent to his will like a tame dog; he could make his games real, as real as anything, which is to say, NOT real at all, and, and, and…
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I was sitting in a heap on the floor staring up at the scarecrow. At Giles. I didn’t understand something.
“What happened to you after?” I asked out loud. There was a gap, a blank space, between the golden haired man that had lost everything and the scarecrow in front of me.
A feeling of dread flooded me. I had a premonition that even after everything he’s endured, something even more awful had happened to poor Giles.
There was a noise.
It sounded like a moan of someone who was in pain. But it was muffled. I stood up, trying to pinpoint the source. I listened carefully.
It couldn’t possibly be, but it sounded like the noise was coming from inside the scarecrow. I suddenly had no desire to find out what happened to Giles, after all.
The terrible truth, which Giles had discovered, he passed on to me. It had saved me when I played the Midnight Game, but now... Now I felt like I had been infected with something of which I would not be easily rid. I felt it scratching against my brain.
“Adrian! There you are!” I heard the voice behind me, and I spun around.
“Aleister!” I cried, and the cat launched itself at me. So much for not liking being touched. I held the white cat in my arms, and I wouldn’t tell anyone, but he was purring.
I looked around to where the scarecrow, Giles, stood, but he was gone.
[End of Volume I: the Midnight Candle]
”If we Shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these Visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…”
—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream