Writing Index
PDF Version Full Text
Preface: No Home 'Round These Parts Preamble: A Myth of A Man Fair With The Family Distinction The Lamb Heist Disaster Mission In The Woods
Act 1: Iron Will Lost Inside the Forest's Throat The Trapper's Son Resignation and High Hopes The First Notoriety of Renard Cox Easy Accolades Cased in Steel Cold and Cavalier The Dove Foxed Usurpers Ill Thought Taking Water From Pilamine Peace Sprig Kingslayer Near to Heaven Putting Down Your Best Friend
Act 2: An Old Knight In New Lacren The Everyday, Normal Bounding, The Consequence The Source of All Sin in The World The Party Mirror of The Pit Audience With Verdan The Indifferent Night Good Role Model Denies You Again Only a Killer
Act 3: Love Affairs Who Massacred A Million Monsters A Sweet Touch For A Hard Man Scheming The Hunt in Fayette The Purpose of Slaying Ghouls Colette Too Much Of What You Want Stuck in a Corner A Notch of Aspiration All Possibility The Last Open Door
Act 4: Prodigal, Prodigious Settling Only For Her The Call Arrival in Ashurst That Boy, Fidel A Day of Adventure Into The Forest Left It To Fester Cleanup Leaving Ashurst The Best Course Inevitable Drift Concurrent Lives Off The Old Block Always Opportunity Unsheathe Planning The Offensive
Act 5: Nix Welcome To Nix Breathless The Shadows The Independent Summit Respite and Regroup Plunge Into Depths Hard Press Knotted Roots Searchlight The Night Glen Confronting Arsene Fight Against Evil One True Way That Monsters Are Vanquished Renard Cox Postscript

Distinction

The festivities wind down and everyone returns home for the night. Tomorrow will be the last day of the festival — but Renard’s mind, as he lays awake in the bedroom he and Isen share, is elsewhere, ruminating over the day’s events.

He feels angry, frustrated, and broadly just terrible. Everyone else was having fun. Why not he? Thoughts of Isen’s offers play again and again in his mind, until he cannot help but feel lost and jealous. What did Isen do that let him be chosen? Why was he that lucky? But at the same time, even flirting with these questions feels somehow presumptuous, and leaves him with a lingering guilt. Discontent with stewing, and still intrigued, Renard gets out of bed to inspect Isen’s sword.

Checking over his shoulder that Isen has not stirred, Renard dares to touch its scabbard.

The moment freezes.

But still Isen doesn’t wake. Somehow disappointed, and too scared to do anything more with the sword than stroke the scabbard, Renard instead fondles Isen’s silks. Shot with abrupt disgust by how smoothly they spill in his hands, he throws the wad of silks to the ground and marches out of the house, furious.

He stomps on sticks and kicks over buckets, hungry to vent his anger. He grabs rocks from the ground and throws them at a nearby tree — one, two, three, four… as the rhythm calms him down from wrathful panting, the vision in front of him registers, and Renard is taken aback. He has managed to aim the rocks to stick between the junctions of the branches of the tree. Intrigued, he continues the impromptu performance, and finds himself able to land every shot until the balanced stones make the tree resemble a sculpture. Renard bows and is left quietly staring, feeling that he has just done something kind of beautiful.

Alright, he concludes. So maybe he’ll never be as respectable as Isen, and maybe he’ll never have whatever factor it is that makes Isen so great. And nevermind that Renard did return the coin to his father, because Isen’s specialness is apparently more than just being respectable.

But the sight of that tree assures Renard, that he can still be someone this town will remember, as a legend.

Next Chapter