I woke up with a bit of a hangover, but some water helped me feel much better. Besides having a small headache, which, to be honest, I felt I deserved after my behavior the night before. You might think I would have had a really bad hangover but between my peak physical fitness, and the fact that I threw up most of the alcohol, it meant I was lucky enough to feel pretty good. Except for the embarrassment. Even that wasn’t too bad. I felt some regret for ruining the big wedding announcement but not for missing Delik Slin, Vone, Shydem, Cidun, Enik, and all the others. I don’t want to get all depressed again and I will if I have to list them all.

I have a rule, or a plan, or a tradition, about what to do when life knocks me down. Like most people I have a lot of rules, or whatever, but this is the one that is relevant to the story at this point. If something awful happens to me, I try to ignore it until I am in a safe place and a day of moping around being depressed won’t make my life measurably worse and then I indulge myself. I take one day to go ahead and be depressed. I embrace it. I wallow in it. I usually drink a lot. But the next day it is over. I apologize to anyone who deserves it, if I think I will ever need their help later. I can’t apologize to every single person who deserves it, not and get anything done. After that I just ignore whatever happened. If I do ever think about it again, which I certainly have, and do, when it comes to all of my dead friends, it doesn’t hurt near as badly as it did. That is the trade: one day of moping for less pain from then on. It works fairly well.

I had barely finished going to the bathroom when there was a knock on the door to my suite. I quickly pulled on a pair of pants but decided to not worry about a shirt. When I opened the door, it was Thilos, already dressed for the wedding in a very formal, and expensive looking, marriage suit. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he smiled. “Pleneth borrowed it for me. Fancy, huh?”

I nodded. “I bet you had to pay for it in bowing.”

Thilos laughed. “True. It is really something you should have handled as my second, but you were not very helpful last night. Your head must be killing you.”

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I smirked at that. Thilos knew me well enough to know I rarely suffered from bad hangovers. “You know, you never actually, officially, asked me to be your second.”

He smiled. “How do you know? I might have asked you one hundred times last night.”

That was a good point. I had to give that to him. “So, did you ask me last night?”

“No. There did not seem to be much point. I will ask you now, just to be thorough. Dirk, as my oldest, and closest, friend, would you do me the honor of being my second at my wedding to Imprid in just a few hours?”

I reached out and laid my hand on his shoulder. “It would be my honor to do so.” I smiled as warmly as I could. “At each of your weddings.”

He shook his head. “Thanks. Very helpful. You better eat some breakfast and then get ready.”

“Why the big rush? Do you have a lot of other important things to do today in addition to this wedding?”

Thilos smiled a very large smile. “Well, I do have one thing to do after the wedding.” He shrugged, still smiling. “Maybe two.”

I shooed Thilos out. I needed to eat, bathe, and get as dressed up as possible, which meant seeing if Pleneth could help. I needed to move quickly. At least Thilos knew about my moping plan and didn’t ask me if I was okay. He already knew I was. Old friends are very handy to have around. I hoped they didn’t all die before this was over.

Eventually, I was as ready as I was going to get, and it was time for the ceremony. Pleneth had informed me it was to be an elvish wedding, which made sense, I guess, since we were at an elvish home, and most of the guests were elves, and Imprid is half elvish. Plus, I didn’t really care.

We gathered in Pleneth’s garden, in front of the largest tree. Imprid looked great in a green elvish dress. Thilos hadn’t spilled anything on his human marriage suit so he looked pretty good, too. I looked great, of course, so I stood a few feet away from Thilos because I didn’t want to steal his thunder. I didn’t want Imprid second guessing her decision to marry him. I sure wasn’t going to marry her.

The only other guests were Pleneth and his household staff, I think. It wasn’t a very big wedding, not compared to some I have been to, but it was nice. It was mostly elven in look and feel but they spoke Mindolan and used the basic Mindolan speaking structure. An elvish priest of Murmok, God of Storms, officiated, which in an elvish ceremony isn’t saying much because they hardly have anything to do except gesture at the two participants.