Whatever of Noue’s feathers Quill had ruffled with his revelation on Monday, they were suitably soothed by the time Saturday rolled around. He and Noue had seen relatively little of one another, in light of the threat posed by Decontextualized. However, Quill had spent what felt like a rather substantial amount of time with Glue, experimenting with his humors to increase his resilience in the face of psychic assault. Decontextualized, fortunately enough, did not make an appearance in the intervening near-week, though Quill supposed that with her ability to cloak herself he might not have known she was nearby. He dreaded their inevitable confrontation, her partially unraveled lock in his mind a definite answer as to where his loyalties lay. While he left his glyph locked, the remnants of her lock kept present in his mind the nature of the threat she posed; Glue could do nothing to obscure it.
Quill was at The Golden Spoil approximately three sandglasses after the end of his half day, having seen to his duties and dispersed his volunteers. Once again he found himself fidgety and nervous, because for all that he knew and loved Noue, taking her to meet his parents felt dangerously like a pattern he had followed before. One which would make them worry about him in the months or years down the line when Noue was… gone. Left. When she appeared at the top of the staircase, a vision in mint green, he let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Noue,” he said, going to greet her. She folded neatly into his embrace, his head over hers, and they both drank in the moment. Quill felt no small amount of relief that their separation had, evidently, bothered her as much as it had him.
“So we’re going to meet your parents,” Noue said, as Quill winged his arm for her. Quill confirmed this. Almost too casually, she asked, “Did you take Epilogue to meet them?” Quill nearly tripped over his own boot, and then nodded. But that had been a long time ago. “Not so long that you have forgotten. Will you forget me?” Quill began to wonder whether she had in fact missed him, or simply saved up ammunition. Giving the matter due thought, he replied that he would miss her to the extent his fog allowed, which was presently that she would leave a Noue-shaped hole in his heart. “I will miss you too, then. To the same extent.” Quill let out a sigh of relief.
That was, evidently, to be the extent to which the past was dredged up. Instead, Noue started asking him questions about his moms. She wanted to impress, and to her that involved polite adherence to protocol. Was Kweeleh the taller of the two? What were their places of origin, their own lineages? That, he couldn’t answer. At their insistence, and then later his habit, he had called them mama Kweeleh and mother Plotarc as long as he could remember. She chided him that how long he could remember was not that long, but accepted the answer. He told her that they would insist upon calling her Denouement, no familiar title. Rather like Epi had always been Epilogue to them. He felt comfortable referencing his former love, knowing that Noue was unbothered by his existence. If it had made her insecure, he wouldn’t have brought it up, but it was a useful example.
Outside the squat, ugly apartment block, Quill turned to Noue. As he was about to ask if she had any more questions, the door clicked and swung upon, and the moms were upon them. “Quill!” Mother cried happily. “And you simply must be Denouement, he’s mentioned that coat. Oh, it’s so lovely, the subtle cold branding really is a look. Don’t you agree, dear? Well, obviously, seeing as you have the taste to wear it.”
Mama Kweeleh was a little more subdued, but took her turn fawning over Noue. “Come in, come in, you need to have a bite to eat. And then, when you’re in a food torpor we’ll tell you all about our boy.” Quill smiled indulgently at the diminutive term, and Noue’s eyes sparkled with mischief. She was going to enjoy seeing Quill a child again, clearly. Perhaps when she left he could go with her through the Fireplains and return the favor. As she served up heaping helpings of beet soup, surely only the first in a number of courses, Mama went on with a sad glance at Quill, “He’s had the worst luck in love. I can tell you’re going to last. No traveling to Spirithome for you, I think.” Noue’s eyebrows nearly met her hairline at this bald declaration. She asked what made Kweeleh von Barb—“I’ll have none of that. You’ll call me Kweeleh, dear. I love the Sevens, don’t get me wrong, but long formal names is one of our lesser sources of pride as a nation.” Quill smiled indulgently at his moms’ insistent informality, hoping it was charming Noue as much as it charmed him to watch. His smile turned to a grimace at the next change in topic, but he’d known the risks of introducing Noue to his moms.
“He was such a high-spirited boy. He’s more reserved now, though I might suppose that’s from his Incarnate practice than any school of hard knocks. I mean, he’s a librarian. But he takes it very seriously, I do believe it causes him pain when someone can’t figure out their arcane filing system. You won’t catch me in a library before I figure it out, I couldn’t stand to see that—yes, that exact smile. Now Quill, you knew when you brought her here that she’d have to hear about what you were like as a boy.”
His moms launched into telling a story Quill remembered well. It was not a memory he had called up recently, but he was certain of the outline of events, the course of the story. He must have been eight, when he found the apartment complex’s snow shovel. Now, of course, he wasn’t going to clear the walkways with it, or the road outside. No, he was a child, there was snow outside, and while he had summer chores he was somewhere in that gray area of having completed them and not thinking of them.
But the snow shovel. He hadn’t been certain what it was when he found it, propped against the building, likely left there intentionally by whoever’s job it was to shovel the snow and just waiting for a break in the summer flurries. By the time he had determined it was neither a sled nor a comedy prop, the snow was stopping. In the course of his experimentation, he had plunged the snow shovel into a drift, and then he leaned on it, thinking it would behave like a shovel thrust into dirt. Instead, the snow bank gave and the shovel, and the boy leaning on it, fell to the ground. He realized it was a perfect implement with which to move snow. Being himself but smaller, he decided there was only one reasonable course of action.
He would build a snow fort. But not just any snow fort. Armed with his instrument of snow mobilization, he would build concentric rings of defilade banks, tamped down and each equipped with a supply of snowballs. Covered shelters housing larger stores of snowballs dotted his fortifications, each ready to mercilessly pelt intruders should they only think to dig beneath the block opposite the entrance.
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He had found the snow shovel in the midmorning, and by the time his moms called him for dinner, he had made no fewer than nine star-angled rings in the biggest offensive gesture towards snowball warfare that had been seen in Coldpass. Had there been other children in the neighborhood, they doubtless would have grown bored in the face of his overwhelming security and tactical superiority, refusing to play after he had retreated only once or twice. But Quill was one of a very few children in Coldpass, and so he came in from his industry leaving his work untested, hungry and perhaps just a bit cold despite his exertion. When he told his moms over dinner how he had spent his day, they smiled and asked if he had left room for wheelchairs in his defensive embankments. He was indignant. But of course, he had left a two foot gap along every retreating path and snowy slope, sufficient to allow anyone egress.
He had always been a thoughtful boy, his moms concluded. But high-spirited, without a doubt. He had begged and pleaded and wheedled until finally his moms had agreed that they would have a snowball fight with him on the condition that he be the one to assault his impregnable fortress and they be the valiant defenders. They were onto the main fish course by this time, baked mullet with potatoes. Noue was eating heartily, a sight that made Quill glad.
The follow-up, having lured her into a sense of security with baked fish and tales of childhood antics, was mother’s incisive protectiveness of her boy. How, pray tell, had Denouement come to be a wealthy investor, from whence came her interest in rock climbing and philosophy, and what were her intentions towards his boy? She didn’t ask this all at once, of course. It started out harmlessly enough. “Quill tells us you’re an investor. That must have taken a lot of capital to get into.” Noue was cheerfully eating and nodded, then was prompted into a further response by the silence that followed aside from the clink of cutlery on dishware. She had done a recovery job for someone wealthy, rather like the work she had done for Quill’s… library. Her skill then had been climbing, and she had slithered down into cavernous depths to retrieve a locket of sentimental value to an old man generous with wealth he couldn’t possibly spend before he died. His parting words had been suggestions on how to invest it, the banks rendering too slow a return for such a small amount of money. It had been more than she had made in her life, and to him was a paltry sum.
Her nose wrinkled as she related this, and Quill confided in his moms that she did this when she found something distasteful. When they asked her what was so distasteful about being given such a boon in exchange for hobbyist work—her rock climbing was a hobby, they assumed? They hadn’t heard that she did it competitively—she launched into a diatribe about social justice and the hoarding of wealth. It made Quill the slightest bit uncomfortable, as dragons were the prime hoarders of wealth and somehow it had never come up with his moms how they felt about dragons, but they were smiling and he smoothed his emotional feathers. He noticed mama watching him and smiled a bit more broadly. While he didn’t live up to even her most public ideals—yet—he was very proud to have attracted the interest of someone who held such liberal views. He felt it would encourage in himself the development of truer adherence to the ideals he also believed in. After all, he… something.
A shadow had passed over his face, it seemed, from the concerned looks mama was giving him, but he just touched his temple, shook his head, and smiled once again. The look she gave him spoke eloquent volumes as to the lack of success he was enjoying. She did, however, smile very broadly when Noue also asked Quill what was wrong.
“She’s observant, this one,” mother said proudly. “Knows our boy well.” Mother was forever the meddler, and often his champion when he didn’t want to discuss things. She asked Noue what her intentions were with her son, and while Quill flushed he was glad the topic had changed. He couldn’t tell if Noue was coloring, but suspected she was just a little. He leaned over to kiss her cheek and the heat of it confirmed the matter. She replied slowly, thoughtfully. She said that she had a passion for Quill’s work, and that while he was not always—but no, that wasn’t what she wanted to say. “What isn’t? You have to tell dear old Plotarc now, she’ll be up all night cross-stitching and wondering.” Noue said that she allowed for the possibility she simply didn’t understand the nuances yet, but that Quill did not always live up to his own principles. Mama and mother exchanged a glance. Noue hurried to assure them that she approved of Quill, and that his ideals, even only partially realized, put him head and shoulders above other men in her book.
Then Noue dragged the discussion back to the original topic, of her intentions towards “their boy.” She had come to town on business, and business might drag her away again—his moms exchanged worried looks at this—she would count Coldpass home as long as it had Quill. In the short time of their association, she had grown quite attached. Quill could tell she had impressed mightily with that statement. But this wasn’t what she was promised, Noue said with a sly grin. She had been assured she would be deluged with stories of “their boy” and so far she’d only heard one or two.
Just then, mama had declared that her apple bake was ready to come out of the oven—Quill would never know how she could smell a baked dessert just shy of burning without the aid of a sandglass or hourglass. As she sprinkled powdered sugar over the dessert, mother, a devilish gleam in her eye, launched into another tale of Quill’s gradually settling down into his current ways.
This time, it was a little later in his life, when he had attended the local university. It had been home to one of Coldpass’ three metal spires, and to hear Quill tell it, she said, his eyes had about popped out of his head at the assortment of books lining its steps. More books than he could read in a lifetime. She shook her head in amusement, recounting when Quill had invested all he had put away for further education into hiring a spirit mage to summon a powerful spirit of lore. He still read, however, and that had been her biggest worry. But she always wondered if Quill might not have been happier if he had stayed at the university longer instead of becoming a librarian. Growing up, it had been a perpetual dream to spend his days in contemplation of philosophy and reason, and now he contented himself with reading the latest nonfiction arrivals to Dragon Tales.
She smiled, a little sadly. It wasn’t her place, she said, to question Quill’s decisions in his life. He was a grown man, although she would always be her boy. Noue expressed that if she had her way, Quill would yet be a scholar. Mother smiled at that, though her wry grin suggested she wondered how Denouement would achieve what the aggregate nagging of his moms had failed to. All in all, Quill counted the evening a success, the more for plans to see Noue the following day. He might have been just the slightest bit concerned they would scare her off.
