Chapter Text
Angus McDonald is six years old when he first sees it. His first vision.
Phandalin is a medium-sized town, rustic but well-made. A thriving marketplace, several comfortable inns, all framed by the Sword mountain range to the south. Angus McDonald is riding on the back of a cart on his way to Neverwinter. He rubs his eyes, yawning, and blinks.
Phandalin is gone. In its place is a circle of black glass.
He blinks and the town is back, as if nothing had happened. Angus blinks again, shaking his head a little, confused. There’s a tickle in the back of his head, something half-remembered and mostly forgotten, then it’s gone.
He forgets about it. Until it happens again.
His parents live in Goldcliff, and he visits them every month, taking the train with his grandpa. They’re walking past the large bank in the center of town, weaving through crowds to sit by the edge of a shallow pool. His grandpa goes off to fetch them some ice cream, since Angus is seven years old and really likes ice cream, especially the soft Goldcliff variety.
The sun is sparkling off the water, glittering flecks of light from the gaudy bank behind him sending sparks of light through the pool. Angus takes off his glasses, wipes them on a plain white handkerchief embroidered with the initials A.M., and puts them back on.
There’s a flash a light that blinds him, just for a second, then it’s clear again. There’s a tree in the center of the pool where there wasn’t before, light pink froths of petals flying in his face. Angus stands. He doesn’t look away, afraid that this vision, if that’s what this really is, will disappear if he does. He walks forward, unconcerned with the water that’s soaking the hem of his pants and his shoes and his nice socks, wading through the pool towards the tree. There’s three people standing around it, but he doesn’t bother with them, focusing instead on the tree. It looks strange, almost as if there are two people inside of it-
“Angus, what are you doing?” His grandpa’s voice snaps him out of it. The old man is standing on the edge of the pool, two ice cream cones in his hands.
“I’m sorry!” He calls out, wading back to solid ground, his clothing wet and heavy. “I don’t know what happened, sir, I thought I saw-” He looks back and sees no tree, no other people in the water- “I thought I saw something. I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, sir.”
His grandpa sighs and hands him an ice cream cone. “Well, just don’t do it again. The currents can get pretty strong in the middle of the river. Now come on, there’s someone we need to go see.”
He looks over his shoulder once again as they walk away. But nothing’s there.
Angus McDonald is eight years old when he sees a man fall out of the sky. He won’t stop thinking about it, and eventually he tells someone, and then they tell someone else, and a week later he finds himself in a dim room with dusty magical tomes and shelves of potions around him.
“Look in this bowl,” an old man? Woman? Instructs him, pushing a bowl of water into his hands. He looks down dutifully. The best Seer in all of Rockport, according to the rumors. And the McDonald family wanted nothing but the best for their son. Of course, they really just wanted him to stop bothering them with his “imaginary” visions. “Now what do you see?”
“Me,” he whispers. His own reflection stares back up at him, looking slightly disappointed. “Just me, was I supposed to see something special-”
“No, that was just to make sure you weren’t lying,” they say, taking the bowl from him, chuckling a bit under their breath. “Can never be too sure. Now, tell me about these visions. Are they of the past, or the future?”
He shrugs. “Both, maybe? I can’t really tell.”
They push a mirror into his hands. “Okay. That’s normal. Tell me what you see in this mirror, please.”
The moon. The Stillwater Sea. A thunderstorm. Something flying through the sky, elegant and silver. A patch of grass somewhere turning grey, withering and shrivelling up. All of Faerun laid out before him as if he was up in the sky looking down. An sick something that swirls around him.
“Whoa, there, slow down,” the Seer says, taking the mirror from him. Angus holds his head. “You have a wealth of untapped magic, my boy. You see visions of the past and the future. Use this information wisely. You will be a great Seer one day. Do not be afraid of your gift, trust it.”
Without any further ado, they kick him out of their hut and into the bright Rockport day. He stumbles before catching himself on a fencepost. He blinks rapidly to clear his vision, then sighs. His grandpa was waiting for him at the train station. He rubs his eyes before starting on his way.
He might as well learn to deal with this. Maybe it’ll even come in useful one day. All he can do is hope.
The train ride back to Neverwinter is smooth, the hours being eaten up as they pass through the mountains, then wavy plains of wheat, then more mountains. Angus is reading a book, a new series called Caleb Cleveland, Kid Cop . It’s wonderful so far, the mystery keeping him on edge. Or, it had been, until he solved the murder halfway through.
He taps his fingers on the table, then stops himself. He folds his hands on his lap. There are only a few other passengers on this train. Angus looks to his right at the empty booths across the aisle.
Except they’re not empty. With a dizzying flash, he sees himself sitting there, looking older, though only by a few years.
“I can explain everything if you come with me to my sleeper car,” Angus is saying, looking up at three men. Well, he’s looking up at two of them, and slightly down at the other. All three of them have their backs to him, so he can’t see their faces. “There might be prying eyes. And listening ears!”
Angus, in real life, slowly stands and follows his vision-self down the corridor of the train. He can’t tell if it’s the same train, or if it just looks like it. He quickly tries to analyze his own appearance. Fancy outfit, blue tweed, with a smart-looking dark blue cap over his curls. Not something he owns, so definitely in the future. Future-him also has a small blue book, a small packet of what looks like tools, and a magnifying glass.
Vision-Angus has a wonderfully luxurious sleeper car, which seems a bit odd, since he is clearly still young. “My name is Angus McDonald. That part you already know.” This is so disorienting, listening to his own voice, watching himself talk. “Uh, I am, and I’m not being braggy, because I-- my grandpa says not to do that, but I am the world’s greatest detective.”
A detective. This must the future. Angus is a detective.
The train jolts and Angus stumbles, one hand on the wall of the car to stay upright. The vision disappears between one blink and the next, like a soap bubble popping. He frowns. What did that one even mean ?
But Angus is going to be a detective one day. The world’s greatest detective. He might as well start here.
Angus McDonald has just turned ten years old, and he doesn’t remember what his very first vision was anymore.
This is odd, but no mystery is too great for the world’s greatest detective! He writes down what he knows, trying to work around the strange fog in his head when he tries to recall.
I was in a town. I saw the town, and then I didn’t. It was... He taps his pencil against the paper, biting his lip. This is where he starts to lose the thread. Destroyed. Not there anymore. Something else was there instead. The name of the town was… He frowns. That is the strangest thing for him to forget. He looks at a map and tries asking around, but he gets no leads.
Maybe he was too young. But that doesn’t seem right, because he remembers everything before and after this town, whatever this town was. Maybe his grandpa knows. But his grandpa is in Neverwinter, and Angus is in Rockport, investigating a case related to the Rockport Limited.
Luck is on his side. His case and his personal wishes line up. He buys a ticket, ignoring the short flash of a swampy forest that used to be the train station, maybe hundreds of years ago, shaking himself. Not all of his visions were useful, and not all of them were amazing. Sometimes, he just looked over his shoulder and saw a person buying bread at the market that wasn’t there a second ago, and who isn’t there a second later.
As soon as he boards the train, he realizes that this is the scene from his vision almost two years ago, when he learned that he would become a detective. Duh. How did he not realize sooner? He even has his interceptor book and detective equipment, and is wearing the same exact outfit.
There’s a small part of Angus that never believed his visions were real. There’s a quiet voice in the back of his head that had always sneered at his ideas. But that insidious voice is immediately quieted when three men matching the men in his vision approach him. The incident plays out, and Angus gets more information than he had originally anticipated.
When all of the mess with the Neverwinter militia is sorted out, and the whole affair explained, Angus steps out of the Neverwinter North station and looks to the east. He sees something flash in the sky, the reflection almost blinding him. He rubs his eyes and looks again. There’s nothing but some clouds skidding across the blue expanse.
When Angus is approached by a tall orc woman, he is not surprised. What he is surprised by, however, is what he sees with over her shoulder as she leads him away.
He sees this woman getting married, surrounded by a crowd whose faces he cannot discern. Then he blinks and he sees the woman on the ground, wiping blood from her mouth as she raises a crossbow. Then he sees this woman, but she’s not a woman, she’s a young girl, punching a bigger boy in the face. Then he sees-
“Whoa, kid,” she gently shakes shoulder. They’re out past the city limits now. “You okay?”
Killian, she said her name was. Normally Angus didn’t trust random strangers approaching him on the street and taking him places, but she wore a bracer just like the other men had worn, a shiny silver bracer that he sees on his own wrist sometimes, when he’s half-asleep or half-awake, whichever is less awake.
He nods, looking up at the glass ball that lands in front of them. “I’m fine, Ma’am, thank you.”
The Voidfish. Of course.
His first vision was of Phandalin. And now everything else that had teased at the edges of his understanding comes back to him now.
The Voidfish leisurely twirls in its tank, the lights inside its body twinkling. Angus approaches the tank to take a closer look, and he sees something in the bottom of the tank. He puts his hands against the glass and squints down, and it almost looks like there’s another, smaller, Voidfish there, nestled against the bigger one. He frowns and turns to Johann.
“What is-” He turns back and it’s gone. His back stiffens and he peers back down at the tank. “Uh, sorry, Sir. Nevermind.”
Was that a past or future vision?