“Boasting about that won’t make your sword any sharper, so quit yapping and help me get camp set up or I promise you they’ll both be useless when you need them.” Varus chuckled as he moved the quill over the paper and shook his head. That line wasn’t of his making, but of hers, and he could still hear the snark as surely as he could see the blush of an old friend that preceded his assistance in getting camp set up instead of lazing about as he was prone to doing when work wasn’t ‘properly heroic’. Which in his case? ‘That was everything the bards skipped over in telling their stories.’ Varus mused with fond remembrance and then briefly paused his writing.
‘Why’d you stop? You’re just getting to the fun part!’ The hero said over his shoulder, and Varus looked over his shoulder to the pile of finished quills, enough were made that he wouldn’t need another batch made for years.
But more importantly?
‘She should have been back by now? Just how long a conversation are they having?’ Varus clicked his teeth together disapprovingly and pushed himself back from his writing desk, rose to his feet, and set his quill down.
He glanced toward the far window, there was still light coming through, so it hadn’t been that long…’Maybe I was harsher than I thought?’ Varus felt another twinge of guilt at that. ‘No, yes, no… you were trying to do the right thing for them. I’m just not good at doing things delicately.’ He told himself, though his excuse sounded to him like what it was. An excuse. ‘Even so,’ he contemplated, ‘I should check on them. Just… without interrupting directly.’
With that solution in mind he walked to the window and looked through it.
He expected to see Lithia’s lithe form kneeling down in front of the two children and explaining things to them in a clear and earnest fashion. Or better, to find them playing after having settled down, and Lithia minding them with the diligence one would expect out of an adventurer.
But he saw neither.
No one was there to see at all.
“What?” Varus asked nothing and no one, and never in his life had he felt like such an utter fool, staring at the empty space in front of the cottage where he expected the trio to be.
He stepped back from the window as the breeze blew his long white hair around his body, and when he did, his red eyes caught sight of a scrap of paper. The book that Lithia had been reading was gone, and so too were the bedrolls of both Tuesday and Hannah.
The top half of the scrap of paper was dominated by a child’s doodles, himself, represented by a crude skull on a stick figure, and the two young ones, distinguished by ears and crude tails. Inside the space between doodles were the letters he’d been teaching them only a day prior.
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But below that lay something more. A note written in the handwriting of an adult other than himself. ‘Lithia.’ he concluded at once, and taking the paper in hand, he held it up to read.
‘Varus, first let me say, I believe you are who you say you are. I had my doubts at first…and second…and third. But I got a chance to get a closer look at your library. Hundreds of books, all in the same hand. All with the same voice, and you…well, I don’t want to ramble on like a drunken bard. Anyway I believe you. I still don’t know what to make of your story about becoming an Elder Lich, but you’re you, and I love your work. Speaking of, I’ve taken the liberty of picking books from your library to take with me. I know the market better than you do, what with me not living out in the middle of nowhere and actually going places and all that. You understand.’
Varus paused his reading to let out a sigh. Her handwriting was very small, and as she rambled on after promising she did not want to ramble on, he understood why it was so tiny. ‘She seems to have more trouble getting to the point than an arrow loosed by a blind archer.’ For some reason, that made him smile, at least mentally, before he read on.
‘So, I explained everything to your two guests, and they understand. I was going to tell you, but when I looked in through the window, you were already deep in your work. So I used my invisibility cloak and a basic silence spell, gathered what was left behind, and then we packed up some food from the cellar outside. I’ll take your guests to the village myself, and explain things to them, and to the guild. I’ll do it in such a way that nobody comes out here to bother ‘exterminating the undead monster’. I don’t know how to manage that, but I’ll figure something out, just trust me. So, there we have it. You’re alone again, just like you’re supposed to be, and you won’t be interrupted from here on out. Good luck with your next manuscript. I’ll make sure to tell a few merchants about your freely given books, maybe they’ll make your cottage a regular stop. Who knows? So, anyway, all that, and take care of yourself. Oh! And promise you won’t take over the world after this, or I’ll look really stupid later.’
~Lithia
Varus set the note down and looked from the doorway of his cottage, to the writing desk where his quill and paper waited for his return.
“So, they’re gone.” Varus gave voice to the thought and let his skeletal fingers linger over the note. The wind outside picked up, and whipping through his cottage, the feather quills began to billow about in all directions, rolling, sliding, and bouncing over the floor at random. Varus’s long white hair danced in the breeze as he took in the reality that they were gone, and gone from his life it seemed, almost as quickly as they’d entered it.
His index finger traced around the doodle of the two stick figure girls hugging the skeleton, and he deeply inhaled the fresh air as if it were not useless to him. The silence around him confirmed the truth of the note, though he held out a moment more before he said out loud, “Good. Yes. It’s good that it’s over with and they’re gone. Now I can finally get some work done without interruption.”
He then returned to his writing desk, sat down, and got to work again as if nothing happened at all.
