Selcouth, God of Wanderers

The Tale of the Short Sword

My dad looks at my mom, who nods, then he looks back at me. Fleetingly, his face—illuminated as it is by the dying, dancing flames in the fireplace—shifts, youthens and darkens, and I see him not as he is, the settled village mycoherbalist I know and have always known, but as the adventurer he once was, handsome and brave and eager for experience.

"Very well," he says, taking out his favourite pipe, which signifies he has something serious to impart. He pulls out also a pouch of dried, powdered mushrooms, knocks some into the bowl of his pipe, tamps the powder with his thumb and holds the pipe briefly over the fireplace flames until it heats, then pulls it out, brings the pipestem to his lips, takes several long, audible puffs and exhales their fragrant vapours into the room. "I have always known I would need to tell you this someday, for my own sake as much as yours. You, my dear Grom, understand me as a certain kind of person, but I wasn't always this person. My alignment was not always lawful good. I am not proud of it, but there was a period in my life, years before I met your mother, during which I was decidedly chaotic. And, in terms of ethics and morality, approaching something akin to neutrality. Never evil, mind you—but flexible, opportunistic."

It is strange, but not entirely unexciting, to picture my dad as a rogue.

He goes on, "It was for this reason I found myself one day sentenced to ten years in a pit prison in faraway Daag. I had accepted, you see, a quest from a merchant of questionable reputation to procure for him a certain necklace of gems, and because this necklace belonged to the wife of a local nobleman—corrupt to the marrow of his bones, but nonetheless of sound legal right to ownership and possession of the said necklace—my procuring was, in truth, a lifting, and I was caught in that act by the very lady herself."

By now, although he is speaking to me, my dad is staring at the flames in the fireplace, trying to see through them into a past he appears both to regret and yearn for. The mixed feelings are evident in his eyes.

"I had no defense, and pretended to none, although given who the victim's husband was I would have been sentenced all the same had I the strongest alibi. Judgment and sentence were pronounced on the same day, and I was cast into one of the city's many penal pits. Hundreds of feet deep, they are, and dark and cold. And I found myself in one in the company of a crew of pirates. It is from them, Grom, I first learned of the wonders of herbs and mushrooms, for one of them had sewn into his shirt several vials of the most potent and rakishly useful potions.

"We began conversing, they about their sordid but colourful pasts, and I about my mine, and when I began recounting my skill at disarming traps and picking locks, their interest was piqued sufficiently for them to offer me a deal. They, being pirates and having found themselves confined in much worse places, did not intend to remain for long at the bottom of the pit, and proposed to take me to freedom with them if I agreed to join their company for a single job. 'What is it?' I asked, as it is always wise to ask. 'We wish to enter a goblin subterrain,' they said, 'where a green-skin warlord has allegedly stashed a trove of spoils from raids into the Kingdom of Kofnay.' Even I knew how famous was the Kingdom of Kofnay for its riches and its splendour. If these goblin raiders had robbed but a single Kofnayan merchant, the amount of loot one could find there"—His eyes flashed at the thought even now, so many years later—"was tempting beyond reason."

"You agreed?" I ask.

"I did."

"But how did you and the pirates get out of the pit?"

"Ah, that was clever, a combination of two of the potions I mentioned. The first could make of any encounter a battle, and so, at night, just after the change of guard at the rim of the pit, one of the pirates consumed the contents of the vial and cursed the new and unready guards. They replied—and battle ensued. When it was done, and the guards defeated, we all took sips of another potion, one of levitation, and rose from the bottom of the pit to the lip, then climbed over it and escaped into the city streets. From streets to alleys. An alarm was ringed on the city's bells but the pirates were agile and silent, and they knew which way to go to reach the docks, where their vessel was. I scampered as best as I could after them. When we reached the docks, we boarded the ship and sailed for open seas, albeit not for long, just long enough to be free of any pursuit from Daag. When morning came I spied the coast, and along it we sailed for a week or more until making landfall in a most wild and untamed environment."