A cute little origins story.
When he woke up, his mother was gone, and the circumstances around her departure was a mystery to Firelis Tyv’ern only. None of the others seemed the least bit surprised. That angered Fii. He sulked for all of five seconds, his mother’s departure note crumpled and clenched tight in his fists, before stalking off to find his father.
Child, the crumpled vellum read. I have gone away. Stay with your father. Keep yourself safe. Farewell.
They were nomads. Wanderers. Weary travellers who were always on the road, occasionally stopping to earn a bit of coin before journeying onward. They were family, though only a few were related by blood. They had no one but themselves. They could love each other and hurt each other because they were a rough, hard people, but never before had Firelis Tyv’ern thought that they would leave each other.
The group had always grown. They picked up stragglers, sometimes. Other times they buried their own because of diseases or ill fortune. Never once in the past sixteen years had anyone left. Fii had grown up knowing nothing else.
“Why’re we always leaving places?” he asked once, many years ago, beneath a canopy of stars far away from here. He had laid in his mother’s lap. Her fingers ran through his hair gently, and he leaned into her touch.
“Because we have no homes,” said his mother, and there was something in her eyes then. He recognized it as sorrow years later, but never understood it. “But we have each other,” his mother continued, “and that’s just as good.”
He burrowed into her embrace, and slept contently that night.
“Where is she?” Fii demanded when he found the man. “Where could she go?”
“Who?” the man replied, his back turned to Fii, strong arms drawing water from the well behind the barn. His father was a strongman of forty, a mercenary by trade, with arms large enough to crash a man’s windpipe with raw strength.
“My mother,” Fii said, arms crossing against his chest.
The elder man paused a second in his movement, as though to consider something. Then his arms were moving again, pulling a bucket up the well. “Did she leave for good?” he asked mildly.
The mildness of his father’s tone angered Fii.
“Yes!” he snapped, and began pacing. His feet stomped against dry dirt and sent dust flying into the air. “Gone. No goodbyes. No reason. Nothing. I don’t understand. Why would she leave us? Where would she go? Where could she go?”
When the water bucket was perched safely on the ground, his father stopped and turned around to face the boy. Looked Fii right in the eye until the boy stopped pacing. “She’s a grown woman, boy,” he said gruffly. “She’s got legs. She can go anywhere.”
Stopped in his tracks, Fii looked down and threw his hands into the air, aghast. “But she’s gone. Don’t you care?”
His father looked at him strangely, pondering some faraway thought that Fii was not privy to. Then the man turned away and picked up the water bucket. A sign of dismissal. Some conclusion had been reached and drawn, Fii knew not what.
“Take today off, boy. Maybe she’ll be back by nightfall,” his father said and walked away.
“You don’t care,” Fii wailed in sudden, horrified surprise, rooted in his spot. “What if she died?”
That was when father burst out in loud, uncontrolled laughter.
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