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It’s a relatively early year in their long, long, long journey. It's become hard for all of them to keep track of the exact year. Sardonically celebrating their “birthdays” gets old after a while - at least to Magnus. It always seemed to amuse Lup.
It’s on one of those cycles that Magnus returns to the ship, bouncing a club he’s made himself against his shoulder. It’s not a dangerous world. It’s a peaceful world, a utopia of scientific research… done entirely by tiny mice people. He just made the club because he was bored. Science wasn’t really his thing.
“Yo,” he says, to Lucretia, seated at the table. She’s surrounded by journals, pages and pages and pages. Stores of pens, used and unused, sit around her like an army of tiny sentries.
She glances up at him, eyes wide, as if she wasn’t expecting him to be there. She gives a small, shy wave, then glances back down to the page she’s writing.
He slumps onto the seat in front of her, lays lazily against the side of the table, chin in his hands.
“What you writing?”
“Oh, just some things,” she says, somewhat dismissively. “I’m trying to keep a record of some of their knowledge. It’s a fascinating world, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
Lucretia sighs. “I had a feeling you’d say that. Doesn’t this interest you at all? The whole thing almost feels… a little ironic to me. Mice scientists and all that.”
“Nah, it’d be ironic if it was, like, mice experimenting on humans. That’s irony.”
She laughs to herself. “Fair enough.”
They sit there for a few minutes, somewhat awkwardly, silent except for the scratching of Lucretia’s pen. Magnus doesn’t entirely get Lucretia, as long as they’ve known each other. He’d give his life to defend her, just like anyone else he knows, but she mostly keeps to herself. She’s like his mirror image - small and shy where he’s big and boisterous.
She looks up from the page she’s writing.
“Magnus?” she says.
“Yeah?”
“What were your parents like?”
Magnus sits up, raising his eyebrows.
“Well, that’s random. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, entirely for journalistic purposes, of course,” she replies quickly, raising her hands. “Merle has been telling me all about his home life. He says it’s for his memoirs. So I’ve just been curious about yours. About all of your lives, before all of… this.”
Magnus cricks his neck, rubbing the back of it with a massive hand.
“I guess it can’t hurt. What do you want to know? Like, specifically.”
She leans forward with her elbows on the table, clasping her hands in front of her mouth.
“Start from the beginning.”
“Well, when two people love each other very much…”
She chuckles. “Skip ahead a little bit.”
“Heh. OK. Well, to be honest... even when I was real little, I never really liked my dad all that much. He was strict. I guess I kind of resented it. So I was kind of a rebel.”
She starts to write.
“A rebel how?”
“Whatever he told me to do, I’d do the opposite. He told me not to get too close to some of the rougher boys and girls in our neighborhood. So I became friends with them… until they started beating on this little dog. So then I beat them up. Tried to, anyway. It didn’t go so good.”
Lucretia nods, continues writing. Magnus continues talking.
And she writes, and writes, and writes, until Magnus yawns and asks to go to sleep. And then they do it the next day, and the next, until the Hunger comes down from the sky and swallows everything whole.
So they do it the next year. And the next after, and the next after, and so on, until pages and pages of Lucretia’s journals are nothing but stories about Magnus’ childhood. All the while, she asks him questions.
“What did they look like? Your parents. I’m just trying to get an image in my head.”
“So you were close to your mother? What was she like?”
“How’d it feel being an only child?”
He thinks some of the questions are… not exactly journalistic. At least not his definition of journalism - he wonders what relevance his feelings have, in comparison to the facts, and he wonders what her real motivations are.
But he doesn’t stop her. Nor does he mind. There’s something comforting, warm about talking about home, warts and all. Sometimes, it’s nostalgic. Other times, when her questions get more difficult, it’s like a release, as if he’s letting go of long, pent-up feelings.
And they continue that for decades and decades, growing closer and closer together. As the journey makes Lucretia grow stronger, more confident in herself, Magnus grows to respect her more and more. And the more he respects her, the more personal his stories become.
Until she becomes trapped on the crashed Starblaster, just herself and Fisher, for an entire year. And then Lucretia starts to slowly shut herself away, and the stories come to a stop.
“Please just lie down, I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself…”
Magnus thinks… someone is holding him, trying to prevent him from falling. It’s… a woman? Yes, a woman, with dark skin and white hair. He can’t seem to focus on her. In his mind, her image is distorted so badly he’s not even sure she’s human.
“I love you,” she says. That’s strange, he thinks. He has no idea who this is. “I love all of you. I’m sorry.”
For some reason, as the woman’s image distorts more and more, like she’s breaking apart, Magnus desperately thinks of something else, tries to keep it in his mind. He thinks of two people, a man and a woman. The man is hugging him while the woman looks on, but he can’t remember who they are. He can’t remember their names. He can’t even remember what their faces looked like.
It’s getting harder and harder to concentrate. He can’t even see the woman anymore - whether it’s the woman in front of him or the woman in his thoughts, he can’t even be sure.
“It will be over soon.”
Magnus sits on a stool in the Hammer and Tongs, whittling a chair. He’s deep in thought, but he can’t seem to focus on whatever he’s thinking about.
He’s trying to remember what the sky looked like.
He knows what the sky looks like. Blue, with huge towering white clouds that seem to stretch on for miles. Or pink or orange or gray. Or black, with stars. All depending on the weather or the time of day, of course.
But what the sky looked like? That he can’t remember. The sky in the past is… strange. It doesn’t really seem like a sky at all. It seems more like… black and white lines, like shapes in the air, distorting and twisting. Like a lightning storm, without clouds, where the whole sky is just the lightning.
He can remember everything else, at least vaguely. The green grass. The tall trees. The light brown sand. The blue ocean. He remembers running along the beach, and he remembers rolling in the grass. But he can’t remember what the sky looked like.
The chair suddenly collapses underneath his arms and he realizes he’s cut through one of its legs, which clatters to the ground. He curses under his breath. How is he ever going to get an apprenticeship if he can’t stay focused for five minutes?
“Boy,” says Steven. He holds up a duck painted to look like himself: white ‘hair’, dark brown feathers, and tiny glasses. “You’ve got a real talent for this stuff, don’t you? Now if we can just teach you how to make something other than ducks.”
Magnus laughs. “Thanks.”
“Where’d you go and learn this anyway?”
“Well, I…”
Magnus blinks. Where did he learn to carve things? Why ducks? He’d never really thought about it before.
“...don’t know.”
“Huh. That’s weird.” Steven admires the duck closely. “Were your parents carvers?”
That makes sense to Magnus, but as Magnus tries to think about it, he finds he can’t. Were his parents woodcarvers? What did his parents do? He tries to recall them, tries to form specific images in his mind, but they come out… wrong. Misshapen. Out of focus.
Magnus rolls his tongue over his teeth. “I’m not sure.”
Steven raises his eyebrows. “You’re… not sure?”
“Yeah,” Magnus says, almost offended in spite of himself. “Is that weird? It’s been a long time.”
Had it been?
“What are you, say, thirty? It can’t have been that long.” Steven shrugs his shoulders. “But, hey, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. I won’t push.”
Magnus squints. It seems odd, but he can’t even seem to remember how old he is. He tries to count the years, but he only sees little things, little flicks of images from his childhood. Chasing down some neighborhood bullies. Getting flowers for a boy he had a crush on. Protecting a puppy. Climbing a tree. There’s something… strange about all of them, something he can’t place.
And his adulthood? He can’t seem to recall his adulthood at all. It’s nothing but, for lack of a better word, static.
“Right, yeah,” he says finally. Steven jumps, as if him speaking again was unexpected. “Thanks.”
“Julia?” he says, laying against her, his head in her lap. The bedsheets beneath him are comforting, safe, but nothing compared to Julia. She pets his hair.
“Mmm?”
“Do you remember your childhood?”
Julia pauses, her fingers in his sideburns.
“Yeah, of course. That’s kind of a dumb question.”
Magnus blushes. It’s not a question he’d have asked anyone else, but he knows, inwardly, that Julia isn’t making fun of him. She’s just speaking her mind - he likes that about her.
“Is it? I can’t remember mine.”
She blinks down at him. “Really?”
“Yeah. I remember… little things. Dogs. Old crushes. That kind of thing.”
She laughs, her familiar low chuckle. “Should I be jealous?”
“Pfft, no. That was a long time ago. They’re…”
Far, far away, he thinks. Why does he think that? He hasn’t traveled that much, that he can remember. For all he knows, his old crushes could show up any day now.
“...gone. Unless you were talking about the dogs.”
“Maybe I was.”
He doesn’t laugh, or smile. He’s too deep in thought now. Why had he thought that? “Far, far away”? It almost sounded like they were dead. But that didn’t make any sense. He tries to concentrate on it, but it’s like there’s an itch in his brain that he can’t scratch.
Julia leans over and kisses him on the forehead. He smells her perfume, the smell of cedar, and he forgets all about it.
Magnus isn’t as much of a drinker these days, though, oddly, he can’t remember when he was much of a drinker very well either. He’s sure, at some point, he must have been - he has a higher alcohol tolerance than would even be normal for a man his size. He’s drunk so many people under the table he’s lost count.
Wait, hasn’t he? He can’t seem to remember their faces. Although he supposes that’s normal, when it comes to drinking.
He’s caught up in thinking about his past again, and for whatever reason, it leads him to the bar. It’s almost instinctual - maybe he was such a bad drunk that he’s just erased all memory of his past through nothing but alcohol-induced amnesia. Including, apparently, most of his childhood.
He drinks and drinks and drinks. Every fresh shot, every new bottle, he tries to imagine what his parents look like, some small detail, anything. It’s as if he’s hoping being drunk will coax out his memories instead of destroy them further.
Nothing comes. He can’t remember what their eyes looked like. What clothes they wore. What they smelled like. He can’t even remember the color of their skin. His father had sideburns, right? Maybe his mother even had them. That must be true - his surname is literally Burnsides - but he can’t seem to recall it.
Eventually, Will, the teifling bartender, tells him he’s had enough. And if they think he’s had enough, well, he’s probably had enough. Will says as much to him.
He stumbles home. Strangely, he can’t seem to remember where home is. His brain tells him to get to “the ship,” which makes no sense at all, because he’s never been on a boat in his life. At least, he’s pretty sure he’d remember that.
But, eventually, he manages to find his way to his actual home, which is, of course, the Hammer and Tongs. He remembers, in the fog of his brain, Julia, and that’s enough to lead him in what vaguely amounts to the right direction.
He gets halfway to the door before throwing up. Geez. He really is too drunk.
But, somewhere in his brain, he has a brilliant idea. He might not remember what his parents looked like, he realizes, but surely, he can remember where his parents lived. All he has to do is write them a letter and, when they respond to congratulate their son on his new apprenticeship and his marriage… why hadn’t he ever mailed them before… all the memories will come flooding back.
Hell, he could even ask them to attach a picture. That would do it.
With some effort, he fishes out the paper and envelopes from out of Steven’s hand-carved desk, the quill pen, the stamp. He sits down on one of his own chairs.
He takes out the sheet of paper, unrolls it. His hands are shaking so much he has to grab his arm with his other arm to keep it still. It doesn’t feel like drunkenness. It feels like something else, something more primal.
He takes a deep breath and puts the quill over the paper, to sign the greeting.
He can’t remember their names.
He can’t remember their names.
He closes his eyes tightly, thinking hard. He wills himself to remember. Such a simple thing. He must have heard it all the time. Surely, if he didn’t call his own parents by their full names (definitely not like him), then they did to each other? His friends did? Something. There must be some memory somewhere, buried deep in his subconscious.
But it escapes him. Damn it.
He writes “Mom and Dad” and then gets to writing the rest of the letter, concentrating on keeping his nerves calm and his hands still so that it’s legible. It takes effort for him to write in general. It’s never been one of his strongest suits. Especially while wasted.
“Mom and Dad,
Hi! I kno you haven’t herd from me in a long time - gez, how long has it ben, right? - but this is Magnus, yur son. I hope you remmbber me! Because I don’t remembr you!”
He scratches out that last line.
“I’ve been doing wel. I got a…”
...How does he spell apprenticeship? With two P’s or one? S-H-S-H or C-S-H?
“Aprentiship. And I’m maried now, to Julia! She’s a beutiful woman, I’d love for yu to meet her. She’s the duaghter of my teacher. Oh, yeah, I liv in Raven’s Roost now. It’s way up high in the mountens! There are these pillars everywhere! It’s amazeing!
I’ve ben thanking about home lateely. Remmember when I climbed that tree? And I fel down and broke my leg. I cryed for weeks! It sucked! Sory. Langage.
And yu kno when I spint to long on the beach and I got berned by the suns? It hert so bad!
And their was that tiem I wanted a dog, but yu wuldn’t let me hav one. I was soooo mad! I stol one of the neighbur’s dogs and took it home. You gronded me for a month!
I relly miss you. I’d luv to heer back from yu. Pleese mail me bac son.
Lov,
Magnus
P.S. Can yu send me a picture? I want to see what yu look like!”
There. It’s a short letter - and he recognizes belatedly that, no matter how hard he tried to concentrate, it’s absolutely smothered in spelling errors - but it’s good enough. All it has to do is reach them. If they don’t understand a word he says, he’ll send another one when he’s not drunk.
He reaches for the envelope and flips it over to the back side. He writes his address easily enough, although he misspells it the first time and has to get a new envelope and start over.
Almost automatically, instinctively, he writes his parent’s address in the center, in his big, scratchy letters.
He looks at it. He can’t seem to read it again… it just blurs, like the ink’s been soaked in water. But he’s sure, somehow, that it’s the right address. He isn’t sure how he’s sure. Now that he’s thinking about it, he can’t seem to remember what it was that he just wrote five seconds ago.
But it will do. He rushes off to stick the letter in the mailbox for the postwoman to pick up the next day.
“RETURN TO SENDER,” the stamp on the envelope reads. Underneath, in perfect handwriting, a note adds: “Sorry, Mags. Can’t read this address. Try again, OK?”
Magnus stares at the envelope.
“What?” he says.
“Exactly what it says, son,” says the postwoman. “Can’t make heads or tails of the damned thing. No offense, but you need to learn to write better. Want some lessons?”
“No, thanks,” he says, waving a hand. “Appreciate it though.”
The postwoman shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
She walks away, waving goodbye, and he waves back. As soon as she’s gone, he immediately goes to the writing desk.
She was right. His address shows up perfectly, but for whatever reason, the address in the center - his parent’s address - is completely illegible. Or, well, that’s not quite right. He can make out every individual letter. He knows each one he wrote. But, when he tries to put them together, he can’t.
He takes out a sheet of paper. Painstakingly, he looks at each letter, one at a time, and copies them out, one by one. His handwriting, while messy, is perfectly readable, and he can understand each letter individually.
When he finishes, though, he can’t read it anymore. Just the individual letters. The more he tries to concentrate on the address he just wrote down, the more his head starts to hurt.
Taking a knife, he cuts open the envelope and pulls out the letter to read it.
When he unfolds it, the only thing he sees is nonsense. He can pick out individual words - Raven’s Roost, Julia, apprenticeship. God, he mangled that word. But together? He can’t understand it at all. The words seem to blur together, to overlap each other, even to switch places.
It’s more than the past night’s drunkenness. He’s sure of it. Just like the address, he can make sense of each word individually - “tree.” “Leg.” “Beach.” “Dogs.”
It’s only when he tries to make sense of the letter as a whole that he can’t. He’s never seen anything like it.
He calls for Julia, shows her it. She can’t make sense of it either - it gives her a headache just to look at it, so he doesn’t show her it anymore.
He takes the letter and puts it in his nightstand.
For days, weeks, months, he takes the letter out. Every single night, when Julia is asleep but he can’t seem to, he opens the nightstand and unfolds it.
He tries desperately to focus on it. He reads it out loud, in whispers. It makes his head feel like it’s going to split open, but he does it. He’s sure there’s something in there, some clue about his past, some reason he can’t comprehend it. But he can’t even figure out why that might be. He wonders if he’s been magically cursed somehow, but he can’t understand who would do that, what their reasons would be.
One night, he writes another letter, to Julia, a love letter. He pours his heart into it, even though it’s just an experiment to see if he can. When he gives it to her the next morning, she’s so moved she kisses him right there on the spot, and he spends the rest of the day with her lipstick on his cheek and a smile on his face.
But, inwardly, he’s even more confused. He can write letters just fine. That much is obvious.
But he still can’t read the letter in his nightstand. And it’s only that letter. No others.
Months later, he leaves Raven’s Roost for Neverwinter, for the Continental Craftsmen’s Showcase.
And, as his home burns to ashes, taking the letter with it, he completely forgets he ever wrote it.
“So, like. What’s your deal?”
Taako removes the finger currently excavating his nose and tilts his head towards Magnus, narrowing his eyes. He quirks one eyebrow at him, as if to say “you’d better not be talking to me,” even though he’s the only other person awake. Magnus swallows. He’d known this was a bad idea, and yet…
“Yeah, you,” Magnus says anyway. “Taako, right? What’s your deal?”
Taako scoffs. “What’s my deal?”
Merle sits up from where he’s laying, on the grass, not even on a straw mat like the rest of them. There’s mud caking his face and cucumbers on his eyes.
“Oh no,” he says. The cucumbers on his eyes fall off and he starts to rub the mud off his face. “You two are not doing this right now. It’s freaking midnight!”
Magnus raises both of his hands, half pleading and half to block whatever magical incantation Taako might or might not be about to throw at him.
“Not in, like, a bad way! I don’t mean, you know, what’s your deal deal,” he tries to explain. “I mean… where are you from? Who’s your family? That kind of stuff.”
He looks towards Merle. “You too, dwarf guy.”
“It’s Merle.”
Magnus snaps his giant fingers. ”Yeah. Merle, right.”
Taako knocks on the side of his head. “Took a hit to the ol’ brainpan, didja? He’s part of the… what was it… the -” He makes air quotes. “- ‘Rockseeker clan’? It’s the whole reason we’re on this little quest?”
“Yeah, the elf’s -” Merle starts to say.
“Oh, I see, when it’s your name, it’s all ‘it’s Merle,’ but when it’s my name, who cares, right? Well, it’s Taako.” Without standing up, he does a faux-curtsy with his robes. “Thank you very much.”
“- right,” Merle continues instantly, as if Taako hadn’t spoken. “I come from a long, proud line of dwarves. Hell, I could talk your damn ear off about them.”
Magnus reaches up and, tilting his head, starts to scratch the back of his neck.
“Oh, I know about the Stonelookers.”
“Clearly,” says Merle.
“I meant more, like, your parents. Who are they? Like, where were you born?”
Merle gives him a wary glance. “Why the sudden interest?”
“I thought it’d help us grow closer as a team!” he says, more defensively than he intends. He’s smart enough not to add ‘and as friends,’ but he imagines that it’s probably implied.
“Well, mission accomplished,” Taako snaps, “because we are so not talking about this. Like, ever. Never ever ever. And, if you bring it up again, I will cast Magic Missile on you.”
“Bah, don’t listen to him,” Merle says, waving his hand. “If that’s all it is, I’d love to talk to you about my family, my birthplace, all of it!”
Magnus leans forward. He’s half-expecting Merle to cut down his hopes again, with some kind of sarcastic “like hell I would,” but Merle’s grin seems sincere enough.
“Really?”
“Really!”
Merle continues grinning for fifteen seconds before Taako coughs. Magnus crosses his arms, confused. He doesn’t want to interrupt whatever Merle is doing, but...
“Well, er,” he says. “Are you going to start?”
Merle blinks. His grin fades.
“Start what?”
“Talking about… your family.”
“My family? Why are we talking about that?”
Merle blinks again. Magnus notices the beads of sweat on Merle’s forehead. He looks to Taako, as if expecting answers, but then he notices that Taako is sweating too, even more than Merle. Taako glares at him, so he looks away again.
He notices, in the back of his mind, the sweat starting to roll down his own forehead.
“I thought…” Magnus starts to say. “Er, I thought…”
What was it? Something about wanting them to… something about a team? Why had he asked in the first place?
“Why don’t you talk about your family, huh?” hisses Taako. There’s more than a hint of venom in his voice, but also a hint of strain, as if it’s taking him effort to speak.
Magnus leans back on the log he’s sitting on. It’s suddenly so hot outside. He looks toward the fire - still burning, but it’s barely an ember at this point.
“Yeah. My family,” he says, to himself as much as anyone.
He can only think of one, of course. The images come to his mind instantly, without hesitation - her short black hair, tied up in a bandanna. Her father, old and gray. The rocking chair. The smell of cedar. Of burning wood. Of the fire.
He continues staring into the campfire.
Of the fire.
It all brings out two emotions in him, both fighting against each other - a sense of utter peace and crushing heartache. He concentrates on the former, and it’s almost enough to shake off whatever’s messing with his head, making his brain all… fuzzy.
But he can’t discuss that with them, he knows. Merle might be happy to talk about his family, but maybe, Magnus thinks, he understands Taako’s reluctance to speak about his better than he thinks he does. Maybe some things are too personal for team building exercises.
But his family… his parents… that he can talk about.
If he could just remember them.
“My…” he tries to say. He realizes he’s repeating himself. “My family.”
He tries to picture his father’s face in his mind. His mother’s. He feels like he’s tried this before, many many times, but he can’t remember… had he always had trouble remembering their faces? He wasn’t that old. Had it been that long since he’d seen them?
He tries to remember Julia’s face. It comes with perfect clarity. The oval shape. The slight roundness of her cheeks. Her sharp chin and thick eyebrows. Her short nose.
But his parent’s faces… there’s… something, in the noise. Did his father have his nose? Did his mother have his eyes? Was his father the strong one, or was his mother? Were they both as big as him, like he came from a long family of people built like lumberjacks, the same way Merle came from a long family of dwarves?
But it all blurs together, along with the memories of trying to remember. His parents, not just their faces but their whole bodies, are like unshapen clay, and no matter how much he tries to reform them, they continue to melt in his hands.
He never was good at pottery.
He wipes his brow. He realizes he’s sweating a lot now. He could almost drown in it.
“I…” Magnus says slowly, with a sense of finality, “...can’t remember.”
He’s come to expect some kind of sardonic quip from Taako, something about how he expects everyone else to talk about their family but he can’t be bothered to remember his own. But one doesn’t come.
He looks over at Taako, but Taako doesn’t look back. He sees Taako staring at nothing with wide, frantic, unblinking eyes. Taako’s hands are clenched tightly into shaking fists, his shoulders hunched. Sweat pours down his brow.
“Whoa, man, you OK?” Magnus asks, standing up. Taako’s head instantly snaps toward him. Taako’s pupils are tiny dots, and they flick back and forth, up and down. It’s as if he’s struggling to make eye contact.
Taako takes a deep, unsteady breath, and his eyes slowly focus. His fists unclench. His shoulders relax, his body returning to its normal slouch.
“Pfft,” says Taako, brushing his blonde hair out of his eyes. “I’m fine.”
“You know,” says Merle’s voice suddenly. Taako and Magnus both whip around to look at him. He’s staring off at a space directly in front of himself, not really looking towards them. “It’s the damndest thing. I can’t remember either. Weird, right?”
“Yeah,” Magnus says slowly. “Super weird.”
“I’ve got a big family, so… you’d think...” Merle says, before trailing off. He squints at thin air. “I mean… I think I do? Pan’s sakes, I really… I really can’t remember. Huh.”
“Well, OK!” Taako jumps in. “I think we’ve all had enough weird for one night!”
“Yeah,” Magnus agrees, although he continues staring at Merle, who doesn’t stare back. Merle just continues talking.
“I mean, my dad and I… we didn’t get along,” he says, blinking over and over. “He used to take me to these, these ceremonies, for Pan… and I hated them. I remember that. But I can’t… I can’t remember what his damn face looked like. I don’t get it.”
Merle rubs the bridge of his nose. There’s still mud on it, which sticks to his hands.
“I must have really hated that guy.”
“Yeah, that’s got to be it,” says Magnus, nodding.
But… that doesn’t seem right. He didn’t hate his parents. Did he? He remembers, he thinks he remembers, hugging his mother and father. That’s the last memory he has of them, he’s pretty sure, but he can’t remember why. Was it before he went to Raven’s Roost? Was it when he became a mercenary? The more he tries to think about it, the more it seems to escape him, like he keeps turning a faucet the wrong way and water just leaks out more and more.
“OK, that’s it!” Taako shouts, waving his hands. “New rule: no more talking about families, or parents, or… or… siblings, or anything like that! No more! Finito! Caput!”
Merle shakes his head rapidly.
“Yeah,” he says at last, looking back and forth between them. “I’m with him.”
“You got it,” Magnus agrees, although inwardly, he doesn’t really want to end the conversation. He swears there’s something just outside of his grasp, just barely , and all he has to do is reach a little further and he can touch it.
But Merle lays back down in the grass, and Taako huffs and turns away from them both, and that’s the end of that. Magnus tries, for the first time that night, to lay down on his own straw mat by the fireplace and rest.
But he can’t. He keeps thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it. The whole night, he hears from Taako a repeated string of curses, muttered under his breath, barely audible.
He doesn’t stop thinking about his parents until days later, when he’s distracted by killing a goblin and forgets he ever tried to remember in the first place.
When his memories return, they hit him like a battering ram, all at once. His father’s face, his scrawny body, the thick sideburns, the dark skin and darker beard. The crushing hug he gave him the last time they met.
“Couldn’t be prouder,” he hears his father’s voice rumble in his ear. “We’ll miss you.”
His mother he remembers too. Lighter than his father, but still with the thick red sideburns, the wide, gap-toothed smile. Her round, ruddy cheeks. Her warmth, boundless, her pride in him, endless. It went without saying. She didn’t have to hug him for him to know it.
And he remembers, simultaneously, everything else. The bullies. The crushes. The broken leg when he fell from the tree. Protecting the puppy. Stealing the dog. Arguments with his father. Trying not to cry to his mother and failing. The first time he painted his fingernails. Getting his ears pierced. Suddenly becoming a teenager, becoming too large, too gangly, too acne-covered. Rebelling more and more against his parents as he became an adult, wanting nothing more than to carve his own path in the world.
And he remembers telling all of this to Lucretia. He remembers her writing all of this in her journals. He remembers the letter he wrote, every word. He remembers everything. He remembers all of it.
When the shock fades, Magnus says something under his breath.
“Wow. I can’t spell at all.”
Merle glances at him. “What was that?”
“Oh. Nothing.”