Book I:
Epilogues

Upon your return you find The Grange has continued its decline from a beautiful, natural space toward an ordered and efficient food production facility.  They are thrilled to see you, and to have your positivity and energy return.  But they are also wary of Quartermaster Ambara, the House Grosh guardian assigned to monitor their production quotas.

Your mind continues to grapple with what you saw in the Tomb of Rue.  When Fflewddur Fflam restored his family from nothingness, his sons looked just like you.  Why?  What did it mean?  Was he just using a familiar face as a model?  Who was the model for the woman?  You have more questions than answers.

When he hears you have gone into the Draw Weal and returned, Malcolm Ciarran welcomes the Champion of Dun with the gift of Mak-Porat, a massive greataxe.  Beneath his largesse, you can sense his fear.

You are encouraged to find that House Grosh has yoked the city so firmly in your absence.   Anibes insists upon a feast, though a small one.  It is a feat not accomplished by any mortal still living, and he is quick to claim it as an accomplishment for the House.  He makes no promises, but does not correct others when they speculate that you might lead the armies of House Grosh through the Draw Weal to conquer its mysteries and the lands that lie beyond.

During the feast, a fighting ring is established where a wild boar is pitted against progressively more difficult opponents.  First wild dogs, then hyenas, then a krenshar.  Eventually, you see a powerful lion enter the ring.  It regards the chaos around it with disdain, and will not be goaded by its handlers.  When the boar charges it, the lion watches, rears at the last second, and swats the boar down into the mud.  It then plays with the boar, letting it up and knocking it down, over and over.  It never gets excited, never loses its composure.  In the end, it kills out of boredom.  Something about this fascinates you.

WORK IN PROGRESS (add the duel with Erkent and the loss of Mak Porat and the title of Tusk of Grosh)

Not long after your return to Dun, you find yourself a bit lost.  Following a bunch of crazy adventurers has been thrilling, but also deeply disturbing.  You are heartened by Thearch’s reading of the Vizier card for your present.  You do feel strangely prepared to face life’s dilemmas.  But the Fool, crossed by the Idiot, troubles you.  Will you make some stupid mistake?  Who will suffer for it?  You have helped your friends change the future and save the world, can this future, too, be avoided?

It is as you ponder over these very questions and your attention drifts from your surroundings that you lose your footing.  You fall, hard, unsure of what tripped you and barely able to register that you have fallen and that you are looking at the sky but it is being blotted out by shadows and the shadows are bricks and stones and then they are on you and that is the last thing you remember about it.

Later, recovering in the Hospital of Baiste, you are told that you somehow fell outside the new church, and a load of building materials on its way up a pulley to the steeple fell upon you.  You have trouble understanding this, not because it does not make sense, but because you have trouble keeping your thoughts in a straight line.  Your memories are there, but fuzzy.  Your muscle memory is strong, but your recollection of the theory, the tradecraft, the knowledge, is all jumbled together.

You bond with Geneva, an ancient elven woman who assists in your care.  You tell her of your adventures, and of your fateful encounter with the magic tarot deck.  She tells you stories of her people, fairy tales of Terredebeau and the elven kingdoms.  Having lost her family, many friends, and finally her youth, she appreciates your recent losses.

Later, when you are better, she tells you that the Comet card was an omen.  You must confront an enemy and defeat it in single combat.  It will not heal your mind, but it will restore you memory.  She gifts you an elven sword that she carried in her stronger days.  It is named Espee de Feu, and it carries ancient elven magics.  Geneva tells you that if you hold it aloft and speak her name, it will burn with the fire of the elven forge.

adapted from "The Paper Menagerie", by Ken Liu

You receive a box from Slanawall.  The courier says simply, "Your mother's things."  Inside are some mementos, crafting tools, books.  When you open your mother's artifice box, a parchment falls out.  It is written in Dwarven, in your mother's scratchy writing:

Son,

We have not talked in a long time.  You are so angry when I try to touch you that I am afraid.  And I think maybe this pain I feel all the time now is something serious.

So I decided to write to you.  I am going to write in the sketchbook I gave to you that you used to draw in all the time.  Such wonderful inventions.

If I write to you with all my heart, I will leave a little of myself behind on this paper, in these words. Then, if you think of me on the Onyx moon, when the wall between this world and the spirit world is weakest, you will make the parts of myself I leave behind come alive.

Because I have to write with all my heart, I need to write to you in Dwarven.

All this time I still have not told you the story of my life.  When you were little, I always thought I would tell you the story when you were older, so you could understand.  But somehow that chance never came up.

I was born in Bagbail.  Your grandparents were both from very poor families with few relatives.  Only a few years after I was born, the Great Famines struck, during which many people died.  The first memory I have was waking up to see my mother eating dirt so that she could fill her belly and leave the last bit of flour for me.

Things got better after that.  We Dwarves are famous for our craft, and my father taught me how to make magical items and give them life.  This was practical magic in the life of the village.  We made clockwork birds to chase grasshoppers away from the fields, and cat constructs to keep away the mice.  For the Feast of the Firstpick my friends and I made magical pseudodragons.  I will never forget the sight of all those little dragons zooming across the sky overhead, holding up strings of exploding fire to scare away all the bad memories of the past year.  You would have loved it.

Then came the Imperial Revolution.  Neighbor turned on neighbor, and brother against brother.  Someone remembered that my mother's brother, my uncle, had left for Herraheim twenty years prior, and became a merchant there.  Having a relative in Herraheim meant we were spies and enemies of the people, and we had to be struggled against in every way.  Some boys with spears and swords dragged your grandfather away one day into the woods, and he never came back.  Your poor grandmother—she couldn't take the abuse and worked herself to death.

There I was, a twenty-six-year-old orphan.  The only relative I had in the world was my uncle in Herraheim.  I snuck away one night and climbed onto a wagon going west.

Near Dun, a few days later, some men caught me stealing food from a field.  When they heard that I was trying to get to Herraheim, they laughed.  "It your lucky day.  Our trade is to bring girls to Herraheim."

They hid me in the bottom of a truck along with other girls, and smuggled us north.  In Slanawall, however, an Imperial patrol stopped them and took us away.  

Slanawall was newly founded, and the many men working there had few women to care for them.  If I could cook, clean, and take care of a husband, he would give me a good life.  It was the only hope I had.  And that was how I met your father.  It is not a very romantic story, but it is my story.

In Slanawall, I was lonely.  Your father was kind and gentle with me, and I was very grateful to him.  But no one understood me, and I understood nothing.

But then you were born!  I was so happy when I looked into your face and saw shades of my mother, my father, and myself.  I had lost my entire family, everything I ever knew and loved.  But there you were, and your face was proof that they were real.  I had not made them up.

Now I had someone to talk to.  I would teach you my language, and we could together remake a small piece of everything that I loved and lost.  When you said your first words to me, in Dwarven that had the same accent as my mother and me, I cried for hours.  When I made the first construct animals for you, and you laughed, I felt there were no worries in the world.

You grew up a little, and now you could even help your father and I talk to each other.  I was really at home now.  I finally found a good life.  I wished my parents could be here, so that I could cook for them, and give them a good life too.  But my parents were no longer around.  You know what the Dwarves think is the saddest feeling in the world?  It is for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

Son, I know that you do not like your Dwarven eyes, which are my eyes.  I know that you do not like your Dwarven hair, which is my hair.  But can you understand how much joy your very existence brought to me?  And can you understand how it felt when you stopped talking to me and will not let me talk to you in Dwarven?  I felt I was losing everything all over again.

Why will you not talk to me, son?  The pain makes it hard to write.