“...and then it exploded, just like that.” The storyteller snapped his fingers. “Kaboom! The whole fortress up in flames, all eight towers blown into rubble. Rock and dust turned the sky as black as night.”

Chuckles rumbled through the tavern. Of the thirty-odd patrons to this humble establishment, not one face showed the amazement that the storyteller had expected. A few polite listeners hid grins behind their mugs, but most laughed aloud. One hooded fellow in a corner grunted unintelligibly.

The bartender plopped a tray of filled mugs in front of the storyteller. When the young lad looked up, the bartender swatted him on the back of the head.

“You youngsters always have a knack for exaggeration, but exploding castles? I’m not paying you to spread nonsense. Get back to work.”

“It’s not nonsense,” the storyteller protested. He stood and lifted the tray, but even as he distributed fresh ale among the other customers, he continued speaking. “I saw it with my own two eyes. The flash of light was visible from miles away.”

More disbelief followed.

An older fellow tapped his hand on the table for attention. “Ah, let’s not pick on the poor boy too much. I understand what happened. There must have been a thunderstorm that day. He saw a flash when the castle was hit by lightning.”

Heads nodded around the old fellow.

“Yes, yes, this must be it,” the other tavern-goers agreed. “Good old Walt, always making sense.” Dozens of disappointed gazes turned to the young storyteller, who was now collecting empty mugs and dishes. “Why fuss over a bit of lightning? Why not tell it straight from the start?”

“It wasn’t lightning, I swear. Not a cloud in the sky…”

The storyteller defended his tale with increasingly frantic words and gestures, but it was a doomed endeavor. People began to break away into their own conversations, ignoring the fellow busing their tables.

The last table was in a corner near the fireplace. It had two chairs but only one occupant, a hooded fellow with a sword on his belt and the shifty air of a mercenary. He stared into the embers while his fingernails drummed on the side of a half-empty cup. The storyteller approached cautiously, raising a pitcher of ale like a shield.

“Refill, sir?” the storyteller asked.

“No need. Wait.” The mercenary held out a hand before the storyteller could retreat. Coins glimmered in his palm. A sly smile cut across his shadowed face. “Tell me more about that exploding castle. Did anyone survive?”

The storyteller’s eyes widened. He glanced around, wary of another scolding from the bartender, but his supervisor was nowhere to be seen. Without the threat of unemployment, the lure of talking to someone who believed his stories was too much to resist. He sat.

An old fisherman sat on a rock by the seashore, slowly drawing a string through the water. The fisherman, so named Snapper, wore a hat of woven reeds and the roughspun linens common to a rural lifestyle. By any villager’s standards, he would look to be a well-preserved sixty years of age, but most of the locals agreed that he had been fishing around these parts for more than eighty years—longer than anyone else still alive, at the very least. Below his crossed legs, dark fish-shaped shadows flitted through the water, occasionally bumping against the string. Snapper had high hopes about today’s catch.

A shadow fell across the water, and the fish scattered to safer depths. Snapper scowled. Even children knew not to let their shadows move near working fishermen lest they scare all of the day’s catch away from the sun-warmed shallows.

“My old friend! How have you been? Nice work blowing up that castle.”

A dark-haired youth sprawled over the rocks next to Snapper. The youth looked to be in his mid-twenties, tall and lithe of frame, wearing dark clothes and the carefree air of a troublemaker. His accent placed his origins somewhere west of the coast, but that in itself was not unusual for a stranger; almost everywhere inland was west of the sea. The sword sheath hanging from his belt indicated an occupation as hired muscle, roaming bandit, or perhaps upstart from the Adventurer’s Guild in the neighboring town—not that the three differed in much more than name. Violent hot-headed youngsters, the lot of them. Nobody Snapper would normally associate with, that was for sure.

“Good afternoon. Do I know you?” Snapper asked, reeling in his empty string and readjusting his hat to hide his most unpleasant glower. Spooked fish would not return to the shallows for several minutes, and there was little point in fly fishing when no fish swam nearby to see the lure.

The youth folded long legs in front of himself. One heel absently ground into the surface of an algae-covered rock, scraping off streaks of brownish slime. He had a smirk that tried too hard to seem roguish and instead ended up looking a bit nervous.

“Of course,” the youth laughed, sharp and just short of mocking. “It’s only been, what, fifty years since I last visited you? Don’t tell me that you forgot our friendship already.”

Snapper’s eyebrows drew into an incredulous arch. He stopped coiling the fishing line around his hand. “My memory might not be as sharp as you young people’s, but you definitely weren’t around fifty years ago. Why, you can’t be a day past thirty.”

“Oh. You did forget.” The youth’s playful demeanor vanished, and he glanced directly at Snapper. With a flat mouth and level gaze, the youth exuded a seriousness far older than his lineless face and bright eyes suggested. “I came too late. It happened again.”

“What happened again?”

“You took on another student. Any student but me, right?” The youth selected a flat stone from shore and tossed it out to sea. It skipped across the waves four times before sinking. He picked up another stone and hurled it at a floating seagull. The bird took flight, shrieking in protest.

Snapper had no clue how to respond, so he returned to the fishing pole. Fishing line looped into a neat coil around the end of the handle. As Snapper worked, a short splinter broke away from the pole. He scraped it off with his thumbnail. The wood had begun to fray from lack of oil and too much exposure to salt-water. One day soon, Snapper would need to make a new pole.

The youth forged on.

“When the Liege’s castle exploded, I knew that you were back to your old self. I came as quickly as I could, but the Sage Doctor must have found you first. He doesn’t like it when you try to take on new students.” The youth released a gusty sigh. He picked an isopod off his boot and pinned the wriggling creature between two fingers for inspection. “That’s how it always goes: you regain power, you find another student, and then the Sage Doctor makes you ‘Snapper’ again.”

The youth’s fingers came together, crushing the isopod with a wet pop. He wiped the remnants on a nearby rock and shucked off his boots. Both feet splashed into the shallows. He leaned back into a full sprawl, arms crossed behind his head as his feet swung through the water. Clouds of silt rose from the disturbed ocean floor.

Snapper grimaced. The local fish were skittish of mere shadows. Now that the youth’s feet had stirred the water as well, all hope of catching fish in these shallows was lost.

Unaware of Snapper’s displeasure, the youth stared up at the bottomless blue sky.

“Every time, I’m too early or too late,” he said mournfully. A curious sand fly came to hover near his face. His hand shot out in a blur, and the fly became a smear on his palm. These remnants were also wiped on a nearby rock.

Snapper gathered the fishing supplies.

“I don’t know about any castle or sage. I’m just Snapper the fisherman,” Snapper said. His tone strongly suggested that the youth should get his head checked. “Good afternoon, and mind the tides. This spot will be underwater in an hour.”

As Snapper walked away, the youth called out once more.

“How many times have you been ‘Snapper the fisherman’?”

Snapper did not slow his steps, but the youth’s words stuck in his head after he had left the rocky shallows. How many times had he been Snapper? What an odd question. The obvious answer: once, of course. He was who he was; who else could he be but Snapper?

Snapper sighed to himself as he climbed over rocks and sand dunes. That youth was truly an odd fellow to meet while fishing. Not one of the local fishing families, since Snapper knew all of the neighbors by sight. Not even a local, from the looks of his black hair and angular face. Perhaps a traveler from distant lands. Maybe a passing ship had mistaken his coast for a good place to maroon a sea-sickened deck hand. A foreigner was more likely to spin such tales. The people around these parts were sensible.

Where did the younger generation get these strange ideas? Surely it was the fault of storytellers who scammed gullible youths of their hard-earned money by spreading tall tales about magical sages and exploding castles. Too much dabbling in mythos was a danger to the mind, surely, for it distracted from the practicalities of life.

Either way, the current state of general education was hardly Snapper’s concern. The air was warm, the breeze was gentle, and it was overall the perfect day for a nap. Snapper laid down in a good spot, placing his hat over his face, and closed his eyes.

Afternoon heat soaked into Snapper as he basked on soft sand under the sun’s rays. At times like this, Snapper understood why fish risked swimming close to the surface on clear days: despite the danger of becoming someone’s meal, the warmth brought sheer bliss after long hours of work.

A voice intruded upon his peaceful respite.

“Such a pity. All that power… and one weak link.” A wet finger poked Snapper in the forehead.

Eyes as red as those of his namesake popped open. Snapper saw a too-wide smirk. The youth from before crouched between Snapper and the waves, one hand submerged in the surf. The other was dripping seawater onto Snapper’s head. Giving up on the prospect of an uninterrupted nap, Snapper rolled upright.

“You again.” Snapper wiped his face and brushed bits of seaweed from his clothes. His hat had rolled onto the ground beside him while he rested, but he returned it to his head after shaking out the sand. A thumbnail-sized hermit crab had crawled into his sleeve. He gently scooped it out, placing the crab far out of reach of the youth. The crab scuttled away into the shadow of a large rock.

“Kite,” the youth said.

Snapper glanced at the sky, but the only birds in sight were seagulls. Nowhere did he see the distinctive forked tail of a kite. Snapper turned a puzzled frown toward the other. “Eh?”

“My name. Kite,” the youth repeated.

That made slightly more sense, but Snapper had little reason to need the name of a random passing troublemaker. Snapper grunted a wordless acknowledgement, gathered his items, and walked away.

Footsteps caught up to Snapper, easily keeping pace at his side. Shells crunched under Kite’s boots, but the youth did not seem to mind the cracking sounds, trampling upon all underfoot. In contrast, Snapper carefully chose his path to minimize the damage, frowning at each unavoidable crunch. Was it worse to destroy out of carelessness or intent? Snapper could not decide, and the lack of certainty unsettled him. This, Snapper felt, was something that he ought to know without a doubt.

A sigh escaped the old fisherman. He had interacted with this youth for less than a day, yet already Kite was one of his least favored individuals.

Snapper did not usually feel strongly about other people. When watching the antics of the young, he sometimes regarded them with a grandfatherly fondness. When greedy salespeople tried to scam locals into buying faulty products, Snapper felt a vague distaste, but acting upon it seemed beneath his dignity. Kite was only the second person whom Snapper had met and immediately wanted to avoid.

The first was Chert, a local carver of stone trinkets. He often distributed the mis-cut or malformed artwork among any nearby children at the end of the day, and he was well-loved by the neighbors for his generosity. Despite Chert’s friendly demeanor, Snapper was careful to stay far from Chert’s shop or frequent haunts when visiting the village markets.

Two months ago, Chert had been on the deep-sea fishing scow that had dredged Snapper out of the sea. Snapper did not remember much of that first waterlogged encounter, but he clearly recalled Chert giving the strangest answers to his perfectly reasonable questions.

Answers such as, “Of course we know each other. We’ve been neighbors since before I could walk. Don’t tell me you forgot forty-seven years of this pretty face.”

Chert had grinned while speaking, broad and scraggly-toothed and entirely unfamiliar—or perhaps not entirely. Snapper had distant memories of teaching basic net-weaving techniques to a little boy with a similarly wide smile.

“Feldspar?” Snapper recalled, pulling at vague threads of the past.

“Yes! Feld’s son, that’s me.” Chert’s smile had broadened even more.

When they returned to shore, Chert brought Snapper to an old house with a blackened pile of planks to one side.

“Your home,” Chert said. “I didn’t want to pry, but I heard that the whole family… terrible, terrible tragedy. What, you didn’t know?”

The house, at least, was familiar. Less so was the emptiness inside. When Snapper asked about his family, Chert looked at him like he had lost his mind.

“Bream? Old man Bream? Minnow’s father? He passed some thirty years ago,” Chert said.

Snapper did not understand. Bream should be an energetic boy of seven—certainly not what anyone would define as old. Certainly not dead.

Snapper clutched the door frame for support while Chert watched him with pitying eyes. When Chert finally left, Snapper dropped to his knees, breathing raggedly.

Gone. All gone. All except Snapper.

How he wished that he could forget what was lost.

Perhaps Snapper had already forgotten something of significance—six or seven decades of significance, if Chert’s words could be trusted.

It did not matter. It was not enough.

Snapper rearranged the house so that it no longer reminded him of things lost. Hid away the items that didn’t belong, which, unfortunately, turned out to be most of the items. Picked up his second favorite reed hat and a trusty fishing pole, ignoring the way that the latter creaked like wood not oiled in years. Walked to the beach.

The beach, at least, was the same as Snapper’s memories. He knew the salty ocean breeze against his face, the roar and crash of waves, the chirping of tiny seabirds. It brought peace to his mind. Perched between the rocks and the sun, peering into the vast blue of the horizon as he waited for the next fish to bite, Snapper once again understood his place in the world.

Since then, Snapper had avoided Chert whenever he went into the village. He held no grudges against the cheerful fellow. It was simply easier to forget about the past when surrounded by strangers.

Two months after being fished out of the sea, Snapper had put the entire incident out of his mind. Snapper, lone fisherman extraordinaire, was accompanied by the sea and sky. No other company had existed, and no other company was needed or wanted.

Unfortunately, that was when Kite appeared—and simply wouldn’t go away.

Snapper risked a sideways glance.

Kite was still following him.

Snapper had tried everything short of direct confrontation to get rid of the destructive pest. Unfortunately, Kite stuck to his side like a limpet, attacking any small creature unlucky enough to appear within arm’s reach or stone’s throw.

Kite followed Snapper to the house to exchange the fishing gear for a basket.

He flung stones at nearby seabirds while Snapper harvested mussels from the mud flats. A few birds were too slow to avoid the stones. Snapper twitched every time one was hit.

He pestered Snapper with stories of his travels for an hour as they walked to the village marketplace. Snapper gave up on responding after the first fifteen grumbles of, “shoo, go away, can’t you see that I have work to do?” failed to dissuade the youth.

He sat on the roadside and poked sticks at the neighbor’s chickens while Snapper sold the mussels to a local restaurant.

He watched the chef pour live mussels into a pot of boiling water with excessive fascination. Snapper nearly escaped while the youth was distracted. Halfway down the block, those dreaded footsteps caught up. Kite answered Snapper’s scowl with a bright grin. He offered a hot, freshly cooked mussel, but Snapper kept walking.

Kite’s face fell. He ate the mussel in one bite and pitched the shell at a roadside chicken coop. Squawking erupted, and feathers flew everywhere as the chickens fled. The old woman tending the chickens shook her walking stick at Kite, and Snapper offered her an apologetic grimace.

As they passed one shop, a wave of dizziness came over Snapper. Dark spots blotted out the edges of his visual field. He missed a step, nearly falling as the world spun. Too late, he recognized the colorful sign of Chert’s gemstone shop. It was the third most popular shop in town, only falling short of the weaver and apothecary’s businesses for practical reasons. It was also the only shop that gave Snapper headaches whenever he passed it.

Hands caught Snapper’s arm before he collapsed to the ground.

“Snapper? What happened?” Kite attempted to help Snapper upright, but the tugging worsened Snapper’s vertigo.

They staggered halfway down the block before Snapper felt well enough to walk on his own again. He brushed off the other’s grip, blinking to clear the spots in his vision.

“Thanks. It’s nothing. Just the fumes,” Snapper gritted out. As a professional lapidary, Chert often used potent chemicals to polish and engrave new stones into art. Whenever Snapper passed the gemstone shop, the vertigo returned. He normally made a detour around this block to avoid such discomfort, with the added bonus of avoiding Chert himself, but Kite’s presence had distracted Snapper enough for him not to have noticed when they turned down the wrong street.

Kite hummed thoughtfully. He went closer to the shop, unaffected by whatever fumes had caused Snapper’s temporary discomfort, and stopped in front of the sign. The stone slab was propped against the side of the building as a clever advertisement of the Chert’s carving skill. Marbled red-and-white stone rose as high as Kite’s waist, and abstract images of sea creatures were cut into the surface. A dancing starfish featured prominently in the center of the sign.

Snapper appreciated the fine demonstration of carving expertise, but he also preferred to avoid the onset of another bout of dizziness. Leaving Kite to inspect the carved sign, Snapper continued down the street.

The sun had been slowly sinking toward the horizon for the past hour. The vibrant gold of dusk had only just begun to spread across the clouds. Though Snapper knew the path to his house well enough to travel in the dark, it would be less hazardous to start the hour-long journey while the sky was still bright. He left the village boundaries, walking the grassy footpaths back to his house amid the sand dunes.

After ten minutes of blissful silence, running footsteps once again caught up to Snapper.

The groan that Snapper had been trying to suppress all afternoon emerged at last. He stopped in the middle of the road, turning to face his unwanted companion.

“What do you want from me?”

Kite skidded to a halt just before crashing into Snapper. His usual smile was absent. Instead of answering, the youth unhooked his sword sheath and used the tip to draw in the sandy topsoil. He made a crooked, asymmetric five-armed figure. Under the fading light of dusk, the sketch vaguely resembled a swimming person with a disproportionately long neck.

“Do you know what this is?” Kite turned an expectant look toward Snapper.

“A starfish.” Snapper had been a fisherman for as long as he could remember. Of course he could recognize a starfish, even in an unlikely pose with dimensions that were unrealistic at best. Why bother to ask such an obvious question?

The youth’s face fell. The tip of the sword sheath traced a lopsided circle around the starfish, and Kite looked at Snapper again.

“A sea urchin? Cake urchin?” The flat, coin-shaped creatures often appeared on the shoreline during low tide. Was it too much to hope that a few coastal souvenirs might finally send the youth away? He waved a hand toward the shore. “If you want to collect shells, the beach is that way. Low tide in six hours, but you’d need a torch to find anything good after sunset.”

“Not shells.” The sword tapped on the sketch, making a divot in the dirt between two limbs. “Do you know the meaning of this symbol?”

Snapper was abruptly too tired to argue with the other. He frowned at the pattern. It was either a badly drawn cake urchin or the word for “straw” in an old northern language, but the latter option made no sense in context. Aside from Snapper, whose northern origins were as indisputable as the foreign redness of his hair, nobody around here could speak that old language, much less read or write it. The sketch had to be a cake urchin. Many of the locals wore good-luck charms engraved with similarly abstract symbols representing fish, squid, and other marine life.

“Looks like the cake urchin symbol on good-luck charms. One of the most popular designs this year,” Snapper said warily. “The gemstone shop we just passed sells those charms.”

Kite seemed to expect a different answer. At Snapper’s words, disappointment and a trace of sadness came over Kite’s expression. He scuffed the ground with a foot to erase the drawing.

“These good-luck charms. Do you own any?” the youth asked.

Snapper shook his head. He had never been one for superstition, and the daily chores were far easier when he did not need to worry about damaging or losing a decorative pendant.

“Well,” said Kite, and stopped. “Well, that’s a start.” He bowed to Snapper. The gesture was more formal than anything the old fisherman had expected from such a carefree youth. While Snapper was still astonished, Kite glanced up with a smirk that promised trouble. “Have a good evening. We shall meet again soon.”

Kite turned around and walked back toward the village. The sky was nearly dark by the time the retreating figure disappeared from Snapper’s sight.

The old fisherman sighed. Finally, finally, he was alone.