Side Story: A Father's Worries (Patreon)

Alright! Side story number 2! For the time, we are at the end of Arc 1/EF, right after Lou returns home. This is a brief glimpse into the mind of Luke Tome. I had to step carefully, didn't want to give too much away.

Also, I've decided that on side story release days, there will be no regular update for the Reader tier. It throws off the update schedule and kind of ignores the point of the higher tiers. You guys are taking a bit of a loss here, sorry. It's only every other week though. Silver linings?

Without further ado...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remember how small you truly are.

A Tome family saying, passed down from the first patriarch.

A saying mocked by most who heard it. The words sounded cowardly and demeaning amongst the many families with their traditions of grandeur, opposed the illusion of the infallible nobility. However, there was no better words for a summoner.

They were small. What was their greatest scholar compared to the Librarian of the Mezzamotania Library realm, the Keeper of Knowledge? Their greatest caster versus the Immortals of the Kunlun’er Mountains? Why fight over iron mines or gold deposits when there existed realms where the ground was made of crushed diamond and the rivers of liquid silver?

Summoners, as those who accepted how small they are, opened themselves up to the bigger mysteries of existence. The term summoner was new, a term coined in the new land they’d been forced to settle in after the Great War. Centuries ago, they called those who opened doors between realms wise men and women, those privy to knowledge beyond the mortal realm. Another saying popular in the Tome family, a wise man knows how little he knows.

Luke Tome took the words to heart, focusing on the lesson they were meant to teach. There were things in the world and beyond him or his understanding. Limits? No such thing existed, if one knew where to look. Problems seemed incredibly small when one could throw the full weight of a higher realm at it.

This openness to the realms and their infinite possibilities allowed him to develop his Zero Affinity Theory. The breakthrough that should have catapulted his fame and revitalized the Tome family, damn those interfering Grimoires.

It also fostered another idea. An idea that anyone would call preposterous.

Luke Tome didn’t believe his daughter was dead.

All the evidence pointed to her death. They were attacked by a powerful waster caster, a massive wave throwing their carriage off the road. Luke had been stunned by the blow, bordering on unconscious as someone opened the door that was now above him. He heard his daughter’s pained groans as she was dragged out, leaving him to conclude she had been injured.

When his knights recovered and came to check on him, he wondered why they weren’t all taken. Later, after hastily reporting the incident to Summer Spire and joining the team to track down the rogue caster, he’d discovered that the madman known as Crowley Cain was acting alone. Too many bodies would have been troublesome to move so he grabbed the lightest package.

The dank basement they traced Crowley to also suggested her death. The floor was covered in dried bloodstains and decaying bodies. Mysteriously, his daughter’s body was missing from amongst the rest of the victims. Crowley was also missing.

Given the clear evidence of the caster’s willingness to kill, anyone would conclude that his daughter had met an unfortunate fate. Either angering her captor and never making it to be sacrificed or meeting a worse fate. That’s what the investigating knights told him and he’d nodded along.

As months passed and his daughter remained missing, their theories seemed more plausible, his doubts more outlandish. But, Luke couldn’t smother the strange hope that made it hard to sleep soundly. Lourianne was a summoner. No one embraced the family’s sayings and teachings more wholeheartedly.

And, as much as she tried to deny it, she was clever. Not smart, but devious when she wanted to be. Combined with her missing body, there was just enough for his mind to refuse the obvious. For a summoner, he believed in infinite possibilities. Nothing was impossible.

And once again, Tome wisdom proved itself as his daughter waltzed onto his estate.

Oh, he had his doubts. There were creatures with impressive shapeshifting abilities that could easily take his daughter’s visage. A succubus was chief among the possibilities and he wouldn’t put it past the Tome’s family’s hated rivals to do something so despicable.

However, who would bother with such a simple family with no land but a small village and zero presence in the political circles of the capital?

Then there was the elf. Her…bride. No one wanting to pose as Lou would come back with such an unbelievable story.

Most importantly…it felt like his daughter. The sheepish smile as she walked toward him, their tension mirroring one another. Her soft sigh of exasperation as he failed whatever expectations she had of their reunion, though he wanted to assign a little blame to his unfeeling daughter who couldn’t so much as shed a tear in the moment. Her smug smile as he floundered over the green woman claiming to be his daughter-in-law. That unsavory personality that delighted in his discomfort was Lou, without question.

His daughter had returned safely. His hope had been answered. Yet, Luke Tome was not very happy. Another Tome family saying, everything has a price. No elemental worked for free. A summoner parted with a piece of themselves to form every contract. Their art was one based upon sacrifice. Sometimes, the price was as simple as blood. Other times, the devils of the many realms would entrap the summoner in a contract so insidious, they’d sign away their very souls.

He had to wonder what price his daughter paid to escape death.

“Father?”

Luke came out of his thoughts. After a moment to make sure Lourianne was whole and healthy, he invited her and…her wife…for a drink in his study. The two women shared a seat, looking quite comfortable despite being squeezed together, Lou resting her head on…her wife’s…shoulder.

“Apologies. It’s been a long day.”

“You’re telling me.” He watched with a twitching brow as she downed the amber liquor in her glass, wondering why he’d wasted so much money on etiquette lessons. His brow dipped with his frown as the elf refilled the glass from the bottle resting on the table beside the plush armchair. Hadn’t touched a drop herself but seemed to delight in his daughter’s excess. “Adventure sounds great but no one tells you how annoying it can be. I almost broke down and asked Kierra to carry me halfway here.”

“That would have been fun,” the elf mused. Luke was still having a problem thinking of her as anything else. He was shocked he’d even managed to greet her without tripping over his tongue.

“You haven’t asked me anything yet.” Lou’s voice was laced with suspicion.

“There will be time enough for that later. Right now, I only need to know about the problems.”

“Problems?”

He looked to the elf and she looked back at him with…was it amusement? Derision? The woman had an ambiguous edge to her smile and a presence that reminded him of veteran knights. He didn’t have to hear her story to know this was no simple woman. Fitting that his daughter would choose her.

“Father, she’s my wife. Not a problem.”

“From the history books, our relations with the elves aren’t the best.” He almost hoped the elf was a spy. At least he could make some sense of the world again.

“There’s no problem, father-in-law. I guarantee that.”

Luke flinched. It would take a while to get accustomed to the…new addition to the family. If he ever did. “Then what about Crowley Cain?”

“Crow—oh, right! Father, you aren’t going to believe this! Let me tell you about my so-called kidnapper.”

His daughter jumps into a story of summoner incompetence that he can’t imagine but that’s not what makes his eyes widen and his jaw drop. What shocks him is the way his daughter talks about her near-death experience. He watched as his daughter laughed to the point of wheezing as she recounted what should have been a harrowing experience. She could only see the complete annihilation of a man, a fellow human being, as something to be ridiculed. She spared no sympathy for the other victims, barely mentioning them.

Most times, his daughter was a simple existence, frustratingly easily to understand as she was entirely ruled by her baser desires. By the saints’ blessings, he’d managed to instill a proper sense of morality and values into her. She also shared an empathy with commoners he couldn’t understand and sometimes showed a remarkable generosity. A slight disappointment in her lack of ambition but a good girl.

Then there were a few times where something else shone through. A cold, malicious side of his daughter. Glimpses of something dark, a shadow that came over her eyes when she was pushed too far. Rare glimpses, as she seriously considered his warnings about offending the nobles that seemed to set her off and he learned not to push her into activities that irked her, even if it meant her education suffered.

He did not like seeing his “dark daughter” rearing her head. Worse, the elf stroked her hair as she recounted the gory details, eyes watching her intensely. With instincts honed reading the unspoken amongst two-faced peers, he knew the elf saw what he saw but her reaction was the exact opposite of his, her expression full of delight.

Dread twisted his stomach. Out of the infinite possibilities of the future, Luke wondered if the Harvest Kingdom had drawn one far worse than enduring the death of his only child.

“Hilarious, isn’t it?”

“Ridiculous.”

“True, true.” She drained her cup again but stopped the elf from refilling it, getting to her feet. “Hate to cut this short but I’m about to fall asleep in this chair. We should call it a night.” The elf smiled, grabbing Lou’s hand tightly.

“…of course. Rest. We can discuss this more in the morning.”

“Sure. Night, Father.”

“Pleasant dreams, father-in-law.”

Once the door shut on their exit, Luke refilled his glass. He felt out of his depth as he contemplated the ramifications of his daughter’s return. He’d have to write to the capital to inform the Royal Knights, the group in charge of the investigation. He couldn’t hide the involvement of the elf and there would be questions. Then, there would be demands. They’d push and who knew how his daughter would react…

“She takes too much after you,” he muttered to himself as a vision of his wife came to mind; a beautiful woman, her bleeding palm outstretched to a creature of death, a thousand malevolent eyes peering out from its realm holding him in place with their will alone. He swiftly downed his drink, the burn helping him to push away the memories.

He didn’t have time for reminiscing. If he was going to protect his daughter, and the Tome family, he would have to be quick on his feet and quicker with his words.

Rather than a miracle, Luke felt as if a storm had rolled onto his estate.