Kobold Life

Paralogue 1: Rose

As I turned away from my home it was to hide the tears in my eyes before they were visible to the others. I could tell I wasn't fast enough. I was not crying for the loss of the building I had painstakingly made, no that was not my home it was a residence and a poor one at that, I was crying because I was saying goodbye to the one person who currently was my home. We had only known each other for a few months, but he had lifted me out of a stupor of solitude and regret. He was foreign and new, and that had been interesting, but he was also defenseless, he was learned, but by the standards of another world. He was like a child, and in the years since my solitude, I had underestimated how much I had needed one.

I had decided to protect him, to give him a chance in this world, but I also knew that he would likely not find happiness here. From the stories, he had told me he had been from a city far different from any in this world, where everyone was expected to have their own carriage which moved without horses or other beasts. He had told me of machinery beyond even what the gnomes were capable of, the ability to fly without magic, using mechanical wings without feathers to carry dozens of people around the globe. For a long while, I fancied his stories as make-believe, though I wouldn't tell him as such, after some time it began to make sense as to how a world like that would produce one such as him, and how well he understood these fantasies, the easiest solution was simply that he was telling me the truth. One night I had him explain to me the "science" behind one of these creations as a test to see if they were really as non-magical as he believed, for fools would group magic and science in this world together if they did not understand them.

He explained that while most people didn't have a good understanding of his choice, he was advantaged due to being a student of its craft, he explained the system behind their transmission of signals through waves, how they translated Ones and Zeroes into an invisible wave that could be interpreted on the other end, and using complex mathematics to ensure it's correctness on the other side before using more complex mathematics to translate it back to something readable. It seemed unnecessarily tedious, given the relative simplicity of the sending spell, and far less secretive, after all how would one know if a message was meant for them if they couldn't read the recipient until after they had translated it. His answer for that was even less satisfying, apparently there was yet another special layer of math called "encryption" which was made to be especially difficult to solve such that only the recipient could solve it using a "key" that sometimes also had to be transmitted. Quite honestly it seemed impractical, but well explained enough that I presumed it must be true.

Regardless, our worlds were quite dissimilar, and in the month's I had sheltered him here, he had seen very little of it. He was not prepared for the rest of it, but then again, no one could be until they faced it. It felt wrong to leave him, to let him face it without me, but it had become apparent that there was a new threat in this jungle, and for some reason it wanted him. If I didn't stop it in its infancy, there may be no where to hide from it. I had to stop it, and I couldn't bring him with me, otherwise I would be delivering to them exactly what they wanted. The only solace was the fact that I was leaving him in capable paws. Opal and he had once fought each other for their very lives, now they would fight to protect the other. I hadn't seen a bond like that form that quickly in a long time, she was fast, strong, and smarter than one might expect, so she would do whatever she could to keep him safe. The human was another issue.

It was no secret that I had a distrust for them, I had seen their greed and their determination cause plenty a problem while trying to solve another. Some even blamed them for the calamity which had corrupted the very nature of magic on this world, myself included. That said, something about my inherent distrust somehow improved his candidacy. He had been graceful and light when he stabbed the orc from behind, it was a practiced flourish not done out of fear, but of opportunity. I could tell he was a seasoned fighter, if a dishonorable one. He would be manipulative, he would fight unfair, and he would do what was necessary to get what he wanted. Altogether a useful friend to have, as long as he valued you more than the next enemy. I had made sure to preserve the illusion that this threat had been after him, since the first orc had in fact been on his tail. That made it to his best interest to keep others around, he was deadly from the shadows, but didn't seem particularly capable at the center of attention. I disliked him, but he was self serving, and ultimately that meant as long as Cyrek stayed useful to him, he would have more protection.