Peter watched the kids disappear upstairs, then followed his wife as she headed down the hallway and into the kitchen. When he got there, she was peering around the empty room, her eyebrows pulled down and her nose scrunched up as she took in the sight.

He laughed, pulling her over and kissing her on the head.

“What?” she said, looking at him askance.

He smiled. “Honey, we have no money and no idea what furniture costs. We don’t even know what furniture looks like in this place. For all we know, everyone nails it to the ceiling.”

“I can still think about it,” she said. “Besides, are you planning on decorating the house?”

“Absolutely not,” he said with a grin.

“Which means…?”

“That I should keep my mouth shut about furniture unless I’m contributing?”

“Bingo,” she said. She stepped over to the counter and hopped up, sitting facing him with her legs dangling off the side while Peter took up position opposite her, leaning against the centre island.

“I’m not wrong,” he noted. “We have no money and our Renown is abysmal. We couldn’t even eat tonight if it weren’t for the last of our pack rations.”

“Oh, I’m definitely aware,” she said. “If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

He hesitated. He had one idea, but he knew she wouldn’t like it.

“I know that look,” she said, leaning forward. “Out with it. What are you thinking?”

He grimaced. “Right now, I’m thinking that we’re both tired and it’s probably not the best time.”

“Peter…”

“Okay. Since you ask, what I’m really thinking is that I should look into working for one of these Families.”

She reacted exactly how he’d expected.

“Eliza explicitly said that was a bad idea!” she said. “You can’t do that. We have no idea of the implications of that kind of decision!”

“I agree,” he said, nodding his head. “We absolutely have to get more information before we jump into anything. But it sounds like these Families control all the agriculture, which is where my expertise lies. Who knows? Maybe I can just contract out my services without becoming an employee.”

Beth scowled. “Indeed, how could laundering money for multiple competing gangs possibly go poorly for us.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, crossing his arms. “We’re talking about planning and selling crops, not money laundering. And this isn’t some criminal underworld either—from the sounds of it, these Families are the literal government of Palmyre.”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I know I’m reacting strongly,” she said before opening her eyes again. “But this is very stressful. We just made it to Palmyre, and I don’t want to make any mistakes that have long-term consequences.”

He gave her a tired smile. “I know, honey. None of us do.” He walked over and wrapped his arms around her, holding her as she lay her head on his chest. “We’ll make it work. You know we will. Just look at the kids.”

She pulled her head back and looked up at him, a quirky smile on her lips. “Did you hear what Angela said? She can do magic. Our daughter. Magic.”

“I don’t know whether I should be proud of her or terrified for the people of Palmyre,” he said with a shudder. He looked upstairs through the ceiling to where their kids were. “I was going to ask her to show us some, but I don’t get the impression we’re wanted right now.”

“It’s good for them to talk. Although Angela’s probably cursing like a sailor.”

He laughed. “If anything warrants a few F-bombs, it’s being murdered by a bunny rabbit.”

Beth snorted. “If nothing else, it’s proof that irony exists on Arenia.”

It took a moment for Peter to work out what she was referring to, but when he did, he burst out laughing. “Oh god, I didn’t even think about that! Somewhere, somehow, Snuffout is laughing his butt off.”

“The rabbit’s name was Snuffles, and it was an accident,” she said.

“A pretty horrifying one.”

She shuddered in his arms. “No argument there.”

Giving her a quick kiss on the forehead, Peter took a step back. “Well, I want to get prepared for bed while there’s still some light. It’s not like this place is wired for electricity.”

She poked him in the chest. “And while you’re setting up the bedrolls, I will have a bath.” The way she emphasized “bath” made it sound like a 3-hour trip to the spa.

“It’s a bad sign that I didn’t prioritize that higher, isn’t it?” he said.

“Probably,” she said. Then she scowled slightly, taking his bandaged arm and gently pressing on it. He flinched. “I know you don’t want to talk about how this happened, but—”

“The details aren’t important,” he said, his dark memories making his voice firmer than he intended. He didn’t want to think about that fight with the goblins. To picture the look in his wife’s eyes if she discovered how he’d been so enraged after seeing her hurt that he’d beaten the perpetrator beyond recognition with his bare hands. How he’d yanked the goblin’s dagger out of his own arm and stabbed the thing over and over until Eliza forced him to stop.

She patted his hand gently, unaware of his thoughts. “Be that as it may, we need to find you some soap so we can clean and re-dress this.”

“Good idea,” he said with a tight smile. “Who knows what kind of weird bacteria exist in this place. In the meantime, you enjoy your bath.”

“I will. I’d invite you in, but that would be disgusting considering how dirty we are.”

“Not to mention it would traumatize the kids,” Peter noted.

“They’re in their 20’s. How much more can we traumatize them at this point?”

“A lot. Now go!”

He chuckled as she gave him a wink and headed down the hall. Soon the sounds of running water emanated from inside the washroom, so he headed to the sitting room and grabbed their bags, only to remember the kids were talking upstairs.

Probably best to leave them alone, he thought to himself.

With nothing else to do, he took a seat and leaned against the wall. Then he closed his eyes and revelled in the fact that for the first time in a week, he could really, truly relax.

Mark led Angela up to the second floor and gestured around lazily.

“There’s three rooms on this floor; mom and dad will take the loft upstairs. I’m sure we’ll give the one at the back of the house to Grandpa Jack. It has a nice view of the backyard and saves him the extra flight of stairs. As for our rooms, I don’t really have a preference, so take your pick.”

Angela scrunched up her face. “Maybe we should convert that sitting room downstairs into a bedroom? It’s been fifteen years since Grandpa Jack slept on the second floor.”

Mark nodded. “Good point, although knowing mom, she’s probably already on top of it.”

“You’re probably right. Come on, I want to see the loft.”

“Yeah, for sure,” he said, leading her up a narrow, steep stairwell that released a cacophony of creaks and thumps with every step as his feet and staff strained the old wooden stairs. It was a short trip though, and soon he emerged through an opening in the middle of the loft floor with Angela right behind him, nodding appreciatively.

“This ain’t too shabby,” she said. Mark tended to agree. One side of the ceiling sloped down, matching the contour of the roof, but the rest was nice and open, with French doors at the back that opened onto a balcony overlooking the yard.

His sister walked over to the balcony and looked outside, nodding to herself, then turned back towards him.

“Alright, spill it,” she said. “You obviously want to get something off your chest without mom and dad knowing, and those floors are squeaky enough that we’ll hear them coming. What’s going on?”

He grimaced and sighed. He wanted to talk about it, but how the hell was he supposed to explain everything that had happened?

“Blargh,” he said.

“That bad?”

“Yeah.”

He went and joined her on the balcony, leaning against the railing as he looked out over the river. His gloved hands gripped the staff in front of him tightly as he shook his head slowly. “Shit went down, Angie.”

A silence stretched out between them. Eventually, Angela reached over and patted him on the arm. “I’m sure it felt good to get that off your chest.”

Mark burst into laughter. “You always approach things with the proper sense of gravity, sis.”

“And you walk around with a stick up your butt,” she said. “C’mon, let’s hear it. Whatever happened, happened. Sometimes the hero gets thrown a curveball and they have to get past it if they’re going to succeed.”

“You think I’m the hero of this story?”

“No, that’s clearly me, but even supporting characters can be entertaining in small doses,” she said, grinning.

He rolled his eyes, then considered the staff clutched in his hands. “How about we start with something simple.” He handed her the weapon, its length the colour of aged ivory, one end broken off and blackened.

“Cool,” she said, taking it from him. “Did you make this?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She looked closely at the blackened end, poking at it in several spots. “Guess this is the part you stick people with? Kinda weird texture. It looks like burnt wood, but it’s super hard. Way sharper than I’d have expected, too.”

“You think that’s the weird part?” he said. Taking his glove off, he reached out and grabbed the staff. Immediately, the strange, hair-width iridescent whorls burst into being, drawing and erasing themselves across the yellowed wood.

“Holy shit!” she yelped, jumping back and letting go of the staff. “That is so awesome! How did you—” her eyes widened when she noticed the markings weren’t just on the wood, they were also crawling over the flesh of his hand and arm where it gripped the staff. “Dude, what the fuck is going on with your hand?”

“I already told you. Shit went down.”

“Yeah, I’m still gonna need you to get more specific.”

So he told her. About how he’d been pulled into the fog and chased by the twisted spirits. How he had killed one, then fallen into the ground and gotten sucked into that orb of unfettered power before being tossed outside, waking up without knowing how he got there. Wounds healed and staff in hand, but with more questions than answers.

“And the Tome said it couldn’t see you in there?” she asked when he was done.

“No. Apparently, I was invisible.”

“Man, what I wouldn’t give to get off those fuckers’ radar for a bit,” she said. “Maybe I should head over there, too.”

“Don’t even joke,” he said, shaking his head at her. “That fog has been there for thousands of years, and from the sounds of it, I’m the first person to ever make it out.”

“Seriously? What makes you different?”

It was a good question; one he’d thought about at length. Whether he liked it or not, there was only one answer he could come up with that made sense.

“Okay, this is going to sound super weird, but I think it’s my epilepsy,” he said.

“Say what now?”

He nodded. “Think about it. We’ve both read enough fantasy novels to know what I found in there.”

Angela threw her hands up in the air. “Yeah, dude! It’s fucking chaos! You fell into a ball of raw chaos. That kind of shit does NOT happen on page one of the story. What were you thinking?”

“It’s not like I did it on purpose!”

“Of course not, you’re not an idiot,” she said. “But… your epilepsy? How would that help anything?”

He let out a sigh and leaned on his staff. “Because a seizure is basically your brain firing in a chaotic mess. I bet that thing in the fog took one look inside my head and said, ‘Hey! Twinsies!’”

Angela's brow pursed. “But you haven’t had a seizure in ages. Not since they got your meds all sorted.”

“Yeah, tell that to the grand mal I had about ten seconds after I fought that dire rat.”

Her eyes went wide. “What? Holy shit man, I am so sorry to hear that.”

“Me too. According to that voice we heard when we were hovering above Arenia—Verna was her name, I think—Earth medicine doesn’t work on Arenia. Which means that when I got here…”

She started shaking her head rapidly. “Please don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”

“…the meds in my system stopped working.”

She winced. “Forced cold turkey? That’s brutal.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “My brain has been a mess since I got here, but like I said: I think the only reason I survived that fog was because I was having a seizure when it pulled me in.”

“Dude,” Angela said, rubbing the back of her neck and wincing, “the idea of chaos taking an interest in you makes me pretty fucking uncomfortable.”

“I guess, but I’m not even sure that glowing ball thing was alive. I think it just reacted to the weird resonance in my head and glitched the fuck out of my Tome.”

She chuckled and shook her head. “Which led to you waking up outside the fog with a new class and a bitchin’ weapon. Legendary.”

“Yeah, well my Tome guide kind of flipped out over it. Apparently, it’s not supposed to be possible to have a class forced upon you, but this thing—a Primal, they called it—basically makes its own rules.”

Something in what he’d said must have gotten Angela’s mind going, because her eyebrows abruptly pursed and she looked at him very intently. It was almost uncomfortable to be stared at with such focus, but not as uncomfortable as when she grabbed his ears and started shaking his head as a way of punctuating her next words.

“Bro, you can never, ever, tell anyone about this.”

Pulling his head back out of her reach, he said, “Why not?”

“Do you know what the people around us think of chaos?” she asked. “For all we know, these people’s creation myth says that chaos is the source of all evil. They could kill you on the spot if they knew what happened!”

“Oh,” Mark said lamely. “I probably should have thought of that.”

She dragged a hand down her face, looking at him over her fingertips. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“No, but mostly because of my Tome. Given how it reacted, I thought it best to not mention it for the time being.”

“Well, good,” she said. She gave him a nudge. “Probably want to crank up that INT stat. Can’t have you making boneheaded mistakes.”

Mark scowled. “I have a Luck of 12. Intelligence isn’t going to be the reason this secret gets out.”

“12?" Angela said, raising her eyebrows. "Woof. Fair point, then.”

The siblings sat in silence as they mulled over Mark’s revelation.

“So are you like, a sorcerer or something now?” she asked, breaking the silence.

“I think so?” he said. “That’s not the name I was given, but maybe மாற்றம் is a juniour class of some sort.”

Angela pulled her head back. “Wait. You can read that shit?”

“Read what?” Mark asked.

“Those squiggly lines you have instead of a class. Kind of like what’s on your staff, now that I think about it.”

Mark frowned. Pulling out his Tome, he opened it to his profile page and flipped it around to face his sister:

MARK SULLIVAN

Renown: Level 10 – மாற்றம்

Species: Human

Age: 20

Experience: 19,450

Experience to Next Level: 2,850

Base Attributes

Strength – 19

Constitution – 19

Endurance – 18

Dexterity – 18

Willpower – 19

Intelligence – 17

Charisma – 14

Luck – 12

AVERAGE: 17.0

ABILITIES

*Boon – Class Compensation

*Boon – Deus Ex Machina

TRAITS

Evolving (human)

GENERAL SKILLS

Tier-II:

Writing – 22

Tier-I:

Jumping – 11

Tier-0:

Rope Use – 6

SURVIVAL SKILLS

Tier-I:

Hiking – 13

Tier-0:

Field Medicine – 6

Running for Your Life – 5

Sense Danger – 4

FIGHTING STYLES

Tier-0:

Brawling – 1

ACTIVE QUESTS

Find Jack – Part I

CLASS QUEST: What the Hell Are You? – Part I

“You’re telling me you can’t read my class?” Mark asked.

“No, dude, not at all,” she said. “It sounds like ‘martum’ when you say it, but that ain’t what’s written.”

He sighed. “Super. Looks like we’re in one of those, ‘I can read a language nobody else can’ situations. Too bad I can’t understand it.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I’m kinda in the same boat.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“My runes,” she said, tapping herself on the chest. “Druid, remember? They’re how I do magic.”

That piqued Mark’s interest. “Seriously? How does it work?”

Angela brightened. “It’s pretty sweet. I have—well, I had—this one rune that—Oh my god, I totally forgot!” In a flash, his sister’s Tome appeared, clattering to the floor with a thud. She immediately dropped down beside it, shuffling through the stone slabs as she hunted for something.

“What did you forget?” he asked.

“When my class advanced to full druid, there was a notification that said there were some changes,” she said without looking up. “I haven’t gotten a chance to read them, though, so just give me a sec and I’ll see what they added.”

Before long, Angela’s search ended with her triumphantly holding up a sheet of pink-tinged marble. “Here we go! Okay, let’s see how this all works….”

Mark shook his head. “Angie, so help me god, if you have tutorial information in your Tome, I am going to smash that thing over your head.”

“Pfft. I wish,” she said. “I’ve had to muddle my way through this just like you. Hell, I had to work out my whole spellcasting mechanic after falling out of a tree and breaking like, forty percent of the bones in my body.”

“Wait, what?”

She looked up and raised an eyebrow at him. “Dude, you’ve seen my Injuries to Date page. I didn’t get all that from being over-hugged by kittens.” Her attention returned to the slab of Tome in her lap, so Mark waited, watching as her expression shifted from excited, to confused, and on to panicky.

Tossing the pink-tinged slab off to the side, she picked up a different one, rapidly skimming through the contents before returning to the original slab. Then she moved on to a different one and repeated the routine, bouncing back and forth for a good 30 seconds before finally sighing in resignation and looking at her brother.

“Well, fuck.”