Atlessoa’s stealth and invisibility dropped and she appeared next to me.
“Pilus,” she murmured. “The ship has just arrived.”
I glanced over at my spymaster, and noticed her expression. “Everything all right? How do they look?”
“All is well, but…” she hesitated. “They have two children with them. A girl and a boy.”
“Huh.” I allowed myself to explore my feelings about that, then nodded. “Right. Thanks for the heads up. Tell Nodel that the children should be invited in as well.”
Nodding, Atlessoa vanished, and I returned to my work, but quickly found my mind wandering. I stood, stretched, and sighed.
“Probably not getting anything else done today. Come on, Rika, let’s go get ready.”
The frosted direfox curled up in the corner of the office lifted her head then got to her feet, padding along after me as I left the room.
* * *
The doors to the throne room opened, and a family of four tentatively walked into the room, eyes downcast in respect to the crown. They approached slowly and carefully, uncertainty written in their body language, although the two younger children kept peeking up and around at the impressive throne room.
I glanced around it myself, noting the changes I had made. It was less garish, in my opinion, with significantly less gold after I had plundered it for materials in my artifact-making marathon, but it was still an impressive sight to take in for some kids from Mirut.
The two adults knelt when they reached the end of the carpet leading up to the throne, and with a quick tug, the children followed their parents’ lead. I looked down at them, already deciding that I had gone about this all wrong. My summons for the family had been an official crown summons, because that was the easiest option for me at the time.
Musing over my personal failures allowed the silence to stretch slightly overlong, and the less disciplined children started to glance up curiously. When he peeked, I met the young boy’s eyes, and gave him a wink.
Aside from his wavy blond-brown hair, he was strikingly similar to the reflection I had grown up seeing in the water, with the same blue eyes. He was probably only about the same age as I had been when I fully awoke in this world, around four years old. The brows over his eyes furrowed a bit as he studied me, then looked over to his father, then back to me.
In another room I might not have overheard his whisper, but in the large, mostly empty, and silent throne room, it carried all the way to me.
“Papa, he kind of looks like you.”
“Hush, Varus,” Horg whispered back to his son.
His sister had heard him, though, and snuck a peek herself. She had her mother’s eyes, with a hair color to match, the same that I had inherited. Like mine, it was less wavy than the parent we had inherited the color from, borrowing instead from Horg’s messy blond-brown hair like my own, but she was still clearly Sharma’s daughter. She was slightly older, maybe seven or eight, with an air of seriousness beyond her youth.
I stood, descended the steps, and approached my family who knelt before this new king who had summoned them to the capital without explanation. When I arrived before them, I crouched, and Varus looked at me in surprise.
“Hi Varus,” I said, and looked at his sister who was studying my face with a quizzical expression. “And what’s your name?”
The young girl paused before answering, thinking about whether she should, likely based on what our parents had told her before they had come in before the king. Deciding that a direct question from the king overruled her parents' orders to stay quiet, she nodded to herself before answering in a clear voice.
“My name is Mari.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mari, Varus. And I’m sorry that it took so long. I’m your big brother, Pilus.”
Horg stiffened at Varus’s side, and Sharma let out a startled gasp from beside Mari. Slowly, in disbelief, she raised her head and looked up at me where I still crouched before them.
She had aged since I had last seen her, and if my quick mental math was correct, she had turned thirty-eight the winter past, with Horg having turned forty in the spring. She was still thin with a studious intensity to her gaze, but her face was starting to show some lines, especially around her brows, probably from furrowing them while trying to decipher written works about magic.
“Hi mama. Sorry it’s been so long,” I said, nervous and awkward.
Her eyes started to tear up, but my eyes were pulled to Horg as he lifted his head as well, confusion on his face as if trying to understand why someone would make such a joke. His movement froze when his eyes locked in on the sword I was wearing on my hip, the same simple arming sword he had given me when I left Mirut. His own first sword.
Horg’s head snapped up, and he met my eyes, hope now written plainly across his significantly more wrinkled face. He spent all his time out in the elements, and the sun had aged him much more than my researcher mother. He looked smaller than he did in my memory, muscles hard and wiry but not overly large like my own Strength skill-improved body, but it was still a surprise to see what was basically an older, blonder version of my own face looking back.
It bothered me that I had forgotten enough about my father’s face that I had never noticed how much I had grown to resemble him. My own fault, I thought. I was too afraid to face them.
“Pilus,” he said in wonder, breaking the silence. “You’re alive.”
I nodded, and then was pulled into an embrace by my parents, everyone forgetting the location of and circumstances that had led to our reunion as the tears began to flow in earnest.
* * *
As was becoming a pattern, we quickly retired from the throne room and headed to my office for some privacy. I introduced my siblings to Rika, and once they were happily playing, turned back to my parents.
Having recovered from the shock and happy surprise that I was alive and well, I could tell I was about to get reamed out.
“How could you just disappear and never let us know you were well!” Sharma exclaimed, simmering with a mother’s fury. “All this time! And now you’re the king? Am I going crazy?”
Horg put his hand on Sharma’s shoulder, but it had little effect. He looked at me, his concern much more quiet, his gaze hard. “Can you tell us what happened? Why did you never return from your apprenticeship? How did you get on this path?”
Exhaling, I put my forehead in my hands as I debated what to say. I would need to share at least some of the truth, I knew, but I did want to temper the worst parts of it, like the fact that their first child had always been more-or-less a middle aged man from another world.
“What have you heard about me, as in, the new king?”
“We heard your name, of course,” Horg said. “I confess that was hard for us, but we never imagined…” He shook his head, continuing. “We heard the king was the founder of a guild of tamers in the east, some kind of master of beasts, as well as a formidable mage and warrior. The only way that the new ‘King Pilus’ seemed like you at all was the physical description and the rumors that he was also quite business savvy, and you had taken a mercantile apprenticeship, but the rest seemed too fanciful.”
“The truth is,” I started hesitantly, turning to my mother. “I started reading your books about magic when I was… well, when I was about four.” Sharma’s mouth opened, about to chew into me, and I raised a hand to cut her off. “I know how dangerous it was to experiment with it on my own, but I had a knack for it, and… well, I started sneaking out of Mirut and into the jungle,” I elaborated, wincing at Horg’s expression at my confession.
“How?” he asked.
I was definitely not going to cop to having tunneled through Mirut’s walls, but I stopped doing that after the first few years anyway. “I swam around the walls.”
“Pilus! I told you to stay away from the water! Do you know how dangerous that is?” my mother exclaimed, as if I wasn’t already a twenty year old man who could both swim without issue and had, clearly, survived doing it as a child.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I know, and I apologize. I was keeping a lot of secrets from you. One of those was that I had learned to tame beasts from a sailor at the port. I tamed a whaloid, and he helped me with the water.” I thought back to Vlad, nostalgic. It was a partial truth, but it would do. “In fact, I became quite good at taming beasts, which is how I eventually went on to form the Tamers Guild.”
“I had no idea,” Horg said, surprisingly pensive. “So that was how the combat taming I’ve been hearing about started? You tamed beasts to keep you safe in the jungle, instead of for farming? You never got injured?”
Should I admit to having learned healing magic as a child as well? …No, not if I can get away with hiding it.
“Basically. And I trained my magic in private, until I felt… too restricted by Mirut, I guess. That’s why I joined the convoy. I wanted to see the world, push myself to greater heights, and to go on a grand adventure.” I paused, looking at Horg and watching his face carefully. “It was… not all good. Bandits, and then the convoys being called to supply the war.”
A flicker of something passed over Horg’s face, and Sharma, her fury starting to flag, sighed. “What a waste, that war. We lost Master Vorel to the rebels, you know–what am I saying, of course you know. You’re the king! I still don’t understand how that happened.”
More than happy to have a reason to skip over the details of the war for the moment, I gave them the same story we told the public, about being invited to the Tournament of Talents because of my leadership of the Tamers Guild, winning, and then dueling Rugnor.
“I was only able to win because of my magic, which I had continued to hone even while working on building the Guild. He had only been expecting a tamer, I guess. Anyway, the rest is well known. I called for peace. We have a Velgein ambassador from the north here in the palace now, and we’re trading for materials instead of wasting lives on a fruitless war. We’re even admitting the Velgein and half-Velgein children born in the Kingdom as citizens, now, and extending full citizenship to the southerners who had been denied it in the past. This Kingdom has been wasting too much potential.”
Since childhood, I had been concerned about my father’s role in the past war, before my birth. Even now, as I spoke about that, I watched his eyes and his face, trying to read him. I saw no anger, and no hate, but it was hard to read his largely stoic, trained expression.
“Enough about me. I want to know about your lives as well. Tell me about Varus and Mari, and how Mirut has been in the years since I’ve been gone.”
The story did not begin happily, as they had found themselves rather unmoored once I had left. Horg threw himself into his work, as did Sharma, and when Vorel was called to the capital, she took a leadership role at the Research Institute.
For a while, it seemed like they might drift apart, entirely focused on work and spending little time together. There was still love, but once Sharma’s master was killed and they still had not heard from me, it was increasingly strained.
“Then Mari came to us,” Horg said with a warm smile. “She… saved us.”
I felt a bitter pang, knowing that I was almost the cause of a split between my parents, two people who had done me no real wrong and had been in love, followed by a great fondness for my sister for being an instrument of healing for them.
Having a daughter caused Sharma to realize that she had been too absent in her family. She blamed herself, in part, for me leaving, having not done enough to build a home in Mirut, too focused on her work with Vorel. She left the Institute to focus on Mari, and a few years later, Varus arrived.
Horg remained captain of the Mirut guard, which was more than sufficient to keep the family afloat, and had stopped overworking after Mari’s birth in order to be more present as well. The family was very close with each other now, and I could see the love in both their eyes when they looked over at the two children playing with a very patient direfox.
I felt no jealousy at that, only happiness for them. Despite their concerns, I had no complaints about how close we were as a family in my youth. My need to leave home was entirely rooted in the fact that I was from another world. I had been happy in my home in Mirut otherwise, and if I had felt confident in coming forward with Treepo and my other companions, perhaps there was a version of my life where I stayed in Mirut studying magic at the Institute and growing up in my hometown.
Our conversations continued, but soon the kids were getting restless, and I had some palace staff guide Sharma to get some food and then get settled into a guest room. I held Horg back so we could talk.
My father milled around my office, examining some of the projects and items that I had scattered in the room. When I turned back from closing my office doors, I saw him looking up at a skull I had mounted on my wall. I walked up next to him.
“Is that…?”
“A draconic beast, yes.”
“You asked about those once when you were a child. I remember telling you that I was not a hero who could slay draconic beasts. You defeated this?”
“A draconewt. It wasn’t that powerful. You could have handled it, had I not got to it first.”
Horg turned, staring at me. “When exactly did you…” he trailed off.
I grimaced. “Well. It would have been right before I asked you about it, I suppose.”
“You… you weren’t even ten! How strong were the beasts you tamed?”
I shrugged, deciding not to share that it had literally eaten me. “If you think that’s impressive, you should have seen the dracosaur my Guild and I defeated in the east. It was dozens of times the size of this.”
Horg shook his head in disbelief, eyes falling to the sideboard below the mounted skull, and he absently looked over the golden artifacts assembled there.
“Pop–Horg. I need to ask you about your role in the war.”
The former soldier’s expression steeled, and he looked back at me. I could read nothing on his face. “What would you like to know?”
“I asked about it when I was a kid. I had wanted to know how you had learned so much, how you had got so strong. You told me you would tell me when I’m older,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I’m older now. I take it you were involved in the first war in the north? Will you tell me about it?”
Horg sighed. “Aye. I was only a young soldier when the pass opened and King Tobar made the first overture. A novice recruit. The battles…” His voice trailed off and his eyes got a faraway look to them, but he cleared his throat and refocused before continuing. “The northerners were powerful warriors, with weapons that put ours to shame. A lot of Horuthian soldiers died in the first engagements, but it only strengthened King Tobar’s resolve to claim that power for the Kingdom. When it became clear that they had no concept of magic, soldiers of merit who had survived were given tutelage on the basics. I was one such soldier, and was given a tutor in 4-point magic to use against the enemy.”
“That’s when you met Sharma.”
“And fell in love,” he said, a soft smile breaking through his pained expression. He sobered, and continued his story. “With a large force of soldiers using basic magics, we were able to win several engagements, and in doing so, claimed some of the northern steel for ourselves. With magic and steel balancing the initial disadvantage, and backed with powerful mages like Vorel, the Kingdom managed to suppress the north in full, and claim their resources for itself. As a soldier who survived the entire war, I had earned many commendations, which translated to a decent amount of wealth as well. I left the army, and moved from the capital to Mirut to be with Sharma, who had followed her master there, to join him in his retirement.”
“Hmm. I seem to remember our home being rather humble for a celebrated war hero, especially one who presumably continued to earn a decent income as captain of the guard.”
Horg shook his head. “I barely touched the coinage. It was there for emergencies, but I wanted to make my own way after the war.” He sighed. “I didn’t need much to be happy, son. Just your mother. I had seen what the wealthy could be like from my time in the capital, and around royalty in wartime. A warm, quiet home was all I needed.”
“So… do you regret your part in the war?”
“No,” he said, looking me in the eye. “But only because it brought me to your mother. I know you’ve made peace with the north, so let me be clear: I hold no issue with the Velgein people, and regret that I had to take so many lives, enough that I wanted little to do with the bloodsoaked wealth and accolades that came from it. I was much happier protecting our peaceful town in the jungle than I ever was in war.”
I nodded. “Good.” That was an understatement, to be sure, as I had spent much of my childhood concerned about the atrocities my father may have committed and how he felt about them. However, just like I had gone on to do, he had done the violence he had felt that he needed to, had regrets, came to terms with it, and moved on. I could not fault him for that, as no one with power was able to claim it without blood on their hands. It was only those that enjoyed inflicting misery and pain that were unworthy.
Standing in silence for a while, I allowed him to process through the memories I had dredged to the surface, and once he appeared to have settled, I pointed down at an artifact on the sideboard we were standing next to.
“Want to see something neat?” I asked.
I guided Horg to place his hand on the adventurer measurement tool—which really needed a better name, perhaps “Adventurer Scale”—and guided him to inject it with a small amount of magic, like any other enchanted item.
The captain of Mirut’s guard had managed to gain some levels over the past decade, despite his high level, fending off beasts and the like which threatened the town. The scale lit up and displayed him to be a rank A adventurer, an Expert, and he looked at me quizzically. “What is this?”
“It’s an artifact which measures the strength of adventurers, and categorizes them into eight tiers, of which only the top six are combat worthy,” I explained.
I went on to describe a bit about the guild of adventurers I pictured, similar to the guild of tamers I had constructed, and how they could benefit the Kingdom, even in peacetime through food stability, reduced banditry, and beast suppression. Horg nodded along, pointing out the intersection of the would-be guild and town or city guards, as well as how it could work with established hunters and butchers.
“You know,” I said, appraising Horg. “An Adventurers Guild would need a strong, capable person to run it. There aren’t many people who would light that scale up with your rank.”
Horg looked back at me. “It’s… an interesting opportunity. Are you offering me the job?”
“I think I may be. It’s a little complicated because you’re my father, and I do want to keep the Adventurers Guild somewhat separate from crown rule—it will not be a branch of the army, and possibly have protections for high ranking adventurers from conscription—but it would be nice to have someone I trusted to work towards a common good, at least at first.”
“...I’ll give it some thought. And I’ll have to talk to your mother. I… well. Thank you for thinking of me for the role, Pilus.” He sighed slightly. “I’m sure there were capable people in the capital, but I’m glad you summoned us here to reunite, even if this was your ultimate intention.”
I blinked hard a few times, and Horg must have noticed that my response was different from what he expected.
“This… is why you called us here? Isn’t it?”
“Oh. No,” I said, realizing I left something out while catching up with my family. “I’m getting married.”