Third, and last, the dungeons changed the shape of everyday living down to the bone. Nobody visits a doctor for a cold anymore; you drink a potion brewed from dungeon minerals and you're right as rain by supper. It's cheap.
It's easy. We live longer and healthier than any generation before us. It also robbed this whole place of something I don't have a clean word for.
Meaning, maybe. Family. The particular dignity of doing a hard thing yourself instead of buying the shortcut.
Whatever you want to call it, I watched it drain out of Hallowmere like water through a cracked jug, and I decided, somewhere around the age of eleven, that I was going to fix it: bring my mother and father back, reunite what the age of wonders had scattered. Everything else was just going to be a means toward that one end.
You see, I have a secret. I'm something of a collector. Hidden away in an unused barn at the edge of our estate, past the fence my grandfather never got around to mending, are two very illegal pets.
Magic beasts.
There's no honest way to tame a wild magic beast out of the Livornian forest, not with kindness, not with force. But if you can get your hands on an egg before it hatches, you can raise something that will follow you to the ends of the earth out of nothing but habit and love. Two years back, while a hunting party of travellers cornered a flock of wyverns that had been picking off dungeon miners one by one, I slipped into their abandoned nest at the southern edge of the forest and stole an egg still warm from its mother.
Now I have a violet skinned baby wyvern who is entirely convinced I am his mother, no matter how many times I've explained the biology to him. I also lifted a baby flying monkey the wyverns had apparently been saving for a snack, which feels a little morally complicated in hindsight, but he's never once held it against me. Together, Aki the wyvern and Yoshi the monkey are going to help me find my parents.
One day. Somehow. All that's left to work out is how a farm boy with a stolen wyvern is supposed to get rich enough that his mother and father never have to lift a finger again.
I was working on it.
Every morning I woke before the sun and went into the woods to hunt with Hans, my best friend since we were both too small to hold a real bow. Nobody moved through those trees faster or quieter than Hans could, and nobody handled a dagger with the kind of casual menace he did either, which made it all the more ridiculous that he couldn't hit a target with a bow to save his own life.
I never missed. I want that on the record early, because it matters to what comes later.
Hans hates losing with a passion that borders on the pathological, so it drove him absolutely feral whenever I beat him shooting. Once, after a contest that ended in his crushing, public defeat, he accused me of cheating and refused to speak to me for a full week, which for Hans was practically a hunger strike.
Whatever our tensions over accuracy, our hunting partnership never failed us. Hans would circle wide around whatever we were tracking and drive it toward me, sometimes just by making enough noise to spook it in my direction. It was about as fair a fight as shooting fish in a barrel, and I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed every second of the unfair advantage.
That particular morning our haul came to three deer and two rabbits, a modest showing by our standards but nothing to complain about. All that was left was to bring it home to Abigail, who could turn even a middling haul into the best meal in Hallowmere, with enough left over to share with Aki and Yoshi in the barn.
I should tell you about Abigail, since I've mentioned her twice now and you deserve better than a footnote. I'd known Abi my entire life and still couldn't tell you where she came from. She simply appeared at the farm one day, small and quiet and furious about something nobody could name, and she never left.
She didn't look like anyone else in Hallowmere: dark brown skin, a wide forehead she tried to hide under a curtain of long auburn hair, and a build that was sturdy without being heavy, nothing at all like the baker's boy Nathan, who I say with love was built like a proofed loaf of bread. She wore her hair loose over one shoulder on the rare days she was happy, and scraped up into a bun so tight it looked painful whenever she wasn't. Asking about her past got you nothing but a flat, dangerous silence, so I'd stopped asking years ago.
For the time being I was content to admire her from a respectful distance, eat whatever she put in front of me, and let her keep my grandfather fed and clean until I worked up the nerve to tell her how I felt.
That day, when Hans and I finally dragged our haul up to the front door, Abigail came flying out of it and straight into my arms before I'd even set anything down. I held her there for a second, confused, until I realized her tears were soaking straight through the collar of my tunic.
"Abi, what's wrong?"
I asked, careful, because the only two emotions I had ever seen on her face were annoyance and something colder than annoyance. Watching her cry against me was so new I didn't have a place to put it.
"It's your grandfather," she managed between sobs.
"He wasn't breathing when I found him."
By the time we reached his room, he was already gone.
The days after that ran together into something I couldn't have described to you even at the time. Shock, then anger, then a confusion so thick I couldn't find my way through my own thoughts, then a depression that sat on my chest like a second body. What made it worse, so much worse, was the letter.