Chapter 186

“Lady, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you are creeping me out.”

Valera ignored Luke as she circled around him again. Off to the side, Zea looked about ready to attack the woman, and Hakiro just shifted in place, clearly uncomfortable. Luke stood in the middle of the room, still dressed in the clothes Zea had bought him that didn’t fit all that well, while Valera sized him up.

After her fifth rotation, she announced, “I can see the resemblance. You really could be the descendant of William Wyrmsbane.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “I can’t believe anybody called my dad that. More like Bill Beersbane.”

To Luke’s surprise, Valera started laughing. “He was well-known for the astonishing amount of alcohol he consumed.”

Luke gave her a sour grunt. His father had been a low-functioning alcoholic who bounced from job to job, completely incapable of taking care of his three children after his wife died. It was one of the reasons Luke rarely drank himself. When his friends in high school had managed to get a case of beer, Luke always caught shit for not wanting to have more than one or two if any at all. It had almost gotten him kicked off the baseball team when he’d gotten into a fist fight with Kenny Brown over it in the eleventh grade.

If his dad had prioritized stamina in his build, Luke could easily picture the man downing entire kegs in one marathon drinking session that lasted from sun-up to sun-down, then doing it again the next day. There were drinks created to cater to high stamina individuals—Luke had accidentally gotten black-out drunk off a single beer once when he’d first arrived on Aros—but he doubted there was anything that would work on him like that now that his stamina was up to 88.

They’d gone over what Valera was referring to as ‘temporal acceleration’ in regards to their two worlds, and she seemed to accept the idea at face value. Luke knew nothing about it beyond what System had told him, that his brother had died almost a century ago despite being missing for barely a month and that his father had died about eight hundred and fifty years ago. He’d disappeared eight or nine months prior to Luke’s own abduction, and the idea that their worlds moved at different speeds through time was the only reasonable explanation any of them could come up with.

With that all out of the way, Valera started asking him questions about his dad. So many questions. Luke didn’t have answers at first since her curiosity was focused on the life of William Wyrmsbane on Aros. In that regard, she knew far more than Luke did.

Around the fifth time she mentioned some feat of glory he was known for, Luke cut her off and said, “Look, it’s cool that you think this guy was just the greatest thing to ever walk the planet, but I don’t know him. My dad didn’t do any of this stuff before he disappeared. All I’m going to tell you are stories about a man who didn’t have enough energy left to raise his kids after he got home from work. He worked, he drank, he slept. He repeated. Every now and then we’d move somewhere new when he ran out of places to put in applications around where we were living.”

“That can’t be your only memories of him,” Valera said.

“When I was six, he used to help me with my math homework,” Luke said. “Then Mom got sick, and everyone was focused on that until she died. And then it was booze. Cheap beer. Cheap vodka. Cheap whiskey. I remember him coming home pissed off because he got fired again for drinking on the job when I was thirteen. I remember him giving my sister fifty bucks to take my brother and me clothes shopping at the thrift store for a new school year. I remember him selling our kitchen table and our tv for a hundred bucks to pay rent one month.”

Luke looked around at this shrine thing they were standing in. There were wall scrolls with ink paintings of a man that could have been Luke’s father if he were twenty years younger, a hundred and fifty pounds lighter, and had never started drinking. The only one that really captured Will Bennet’s personality was one where he was about to lay a beat down on some sort of bipedal bear-looking thing that had four arms and a shark’s mouth full of teeth. Luke’s father had had that exact look on his face one day when he’d come flying out of the bedroom right around noon with a hand raised and ready to administer a whupping to both boys for being too loud and waking him up when he was trying to sleep through his hangover.

Seeing his father finally get his shit together, acting like a hero, loved and adored, it made Luke’s blood boil. It wasn’t fair. Half of Luke’s life had been spent dealing with a drunk who had no interest in his kids and honestly seemed to resent them for existing, and here was the same man with a fucking shrine dedicated to how great he was. If it hadn’t been part of the contract Zea had hashed out to let Valera pester him with all the questions she could think of, Luke would have turned around and walked out right there.

And to think, not twelve hours ago he’d been eager to visit this place and find out about his father’s life on Aros. Luke honestly didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

There were good memories too, but the older Luke got, the more they became few and far between. Lizzie basically took over raising Curt and Luke when she turned eighteen. If Valera had been interested, Luke could have told her lots of stories of spending time with his siblings, of them helping him with homework or school projects, of going to the park to play basketball, of Lizzie handing him the money to buy sports gear so he could practice during the summer months and telling him not to ask where she’d gotten it.

The tour moved into the next room. If the first room was all artwork with attached stories painted on canvases, the next room was completely different. For one, the door had a lock on it, and Zea’s eyebrows shot up in surprise when she got close to it. “This is pretty heavily enchanted,” she remarked.

“It’s not that I think anyone in the family would try to steal from here, but the artifacts inside are some of the only remaining remnants of William Wyrmsbane’s legacy,” Valera told her. “The whole room is enchanted, not just the door.”

“Hmm, do you mind if I…?”

“Take a look?” Valera finished for her. “Go ahead. I’m told a great deal of effort was spent protecting them from casual examination, so please, if you do find some weakness in the enchantments, let me know so I can arrange to have it fixed.”

She opened the door then, pausing with her hand on the handle long enough for the entire thing to flash with a faint blue glow for a second. It faded away and Valera turned the handle to let them into the new room.

The first thing that caught Luke’s eye was a huge, two-handed sword mounted on the wall opposite of the door. The blade was five feet long and six inches wide, mostly black but edged in white. Veins of blue, red, and yellow ran through the white portion of the sword, all originating from a rock set in the pommel that had the three colors banded through it over and over.

“Fancy sword,” Luke said.

“One of William’s many weapons,” Valera explained. “It’s made from a core of dragon bone with a dream stone edge powered by tetracite filigree.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Dragon bone is practically indestructible,” Zea said. “You need rank 5 in blacksmithing, alchemy, and enchanting just to work with it, and the tools and materials required to shape it are beyond expensive. That sword is probably worth ten thousand gold, more than the rest of this estate combined.”

“I don’t know about it being worth more than the whole estate,” Valera said, “but yes, it’s the single most valuable artifact your father left behind before embarking on what we believe was his final journey. He had a whole set of custom weapons crafted of those materials, but the spear was never found after he disappeared.”

“Not my style,” Luke commented. He glanced over at some of the other weapons mounted on the wall around it, all of them made in the same materials. Immediately to its left was a halfmoon battle axe, and past that was some sort of glaive. To the right was a morningstar, a flail, and finally, a mace. Luke’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. “Now that, that is something I’d use.”

Much like the sword, the haft of the mace was black with a striped stone capping the bottom of it. Veins of red, blue, and yellow ran up its length, and the entire head was crisp white metal that had a grain to it. It reminded him somewhat of granite, but smoother.

“Ah, yes. Your father didn’t find much use for that unless he planned on fighting heavily armored foes, but he wasn’t one to let propriety get in the way of effectively defeating his enemies. When the mace was the best weapon for the job, he used it,” Valeria told him.

She gestured away from the display of weapons towards a glass case with several books lying inside of it. “This is what I wanted you to see,” she told Luke. “The real reason I believe you are who you say you are isn’t because of your bloodline skills or what you look like. Here, let me show you.”

Valera touched the corners of the case with both hands and the glass vanished in a shimmer of light. Delicately, she reached in to pull out one of the books and flipped through the pages. “This is one of William Wyrmsbane’s personal journals. He often mentioned things from his own world, including his family.”

She held the book up for Luke to read. He was somewhat thrown to see it written in English, and spent a second using [Analyze]on Valera to see if she had a skill for the language. Nothing showed, but she did have rank 3 [Deciphering], which he supposed could be used to translate a foreign language. Luke didn’t have a skill for his native language either, now that he thought about it. He supposed that made sense for the system not to recognize a language that wasn’t spoken on the planet it governed.

Luke peered at the words, written in his father’s tight, angular script.

“For all the nightmares this world has given me, I have to credit it for my returned health. I feel half my age, no, better. Stamina combined with Tracia’s healing magic has me feeling better than I have since Heather died. My own cancer is completely gone, so far as Tracia can tell at least. It certainly feels like it’s gone.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking of my children, of all the ways I failed them. Lizzie really stepped up to the plate for me, but she shouldn’t have had to. She was the only one old enough to really remember exactly what Heather went through, and I think she realized I was sick too. As far as I know, she never told her brothers. She just quietly started doing more and more until soon she was running the whole house.

“There was no beating it, not according to the doctor. If I hadn’t been chucked headfirst into Aros, I’d be dead by now. I know that, in my head, it’s a good thing that I’m here. One way or another, I was going to disappear soon, but I still feel like a failure as a parent. I know Luke resents me. It’s hard to blame him. I was so caught up in my own miserable life that I neglected all of them. If he ever sees me again, I’m sure the first thing he’ll want to do is punch me in the face. And I’d deserve it. I just wish I’d figured this all out back on Earth.

“The only thing I can do now is close that God damn door for good, so none of them end up here. This place has already claimed my sister and my nephew. I won’t let System take my kids too.”

Luke blinked rapidly and cleared his throat. “That’s… Could I read the rest of this?”