I don’t think he ever planned for me to be a warrior, and if he did, he surely changed his mind after his demotion. “Bunch of damn beggars in armor,” he’d say. “Lousy mob whores praising the cowardly; worshipped those that pass out bread instead of the blade.”

This, of course, worked to my benefit. The rank and file could march off our land’s tallest cliff for all I cared. Like most children in Templeton, I enjoyed a comprehensive education, poring over sonnets and rattling an abacus with a series of tutors—maybe even more so, since no son of Augnor would wear armor in peacetime. My favorite subject was unsurprisingly biology, and it may have been boyish defiance, but Father’s classic soldier’s disdain for the arts and academia only strengthened my resolve to not only be a man of science but a medical doctor. So what if my tastes were a little unorthodox from the start?

With funding procured from Mother’s undergarments drawer, which had been procured from Father’s last heavy chest, I built an upgraded version of my laboratory—this time in the cobweb-infested cellar of our most vacated and dilapidated barn. Once I was sure the ogre who stalked my waking life was unaware of operational headquarters, I continued to explore the governing of all life-forms that I could drag through the candlelight.

Around the time when hair began to sprout in new places, I snuck out one night and penetrated deep into the city. I scurried through alleys. At the risk of abduction or worse, I finally found what I was searching for outside the back of a noisy brothel. It was soft, pink, and barely dead. I brought it home and down into the cellar. It was the first of its kind, but surely not the last.

III: Seasmil and Somyellia

Leading minds say all this gods talk is nonsense,” my old tutor used to say. “Tubes and muck are we.”

One of many in a long line of educators that ran screaming from our home, this tutor had been a student himself. The Institute of Human Sciences, Rehleia’s premier medical school, was placed on a Nilghorde hill like some jaded royalty. More than just eliminative materialism, I learned from this scholar that the Institute did all sorts of fascinating studies in its grand halls. The true tome of treasure came the day he brought me an old course book of his. I hid it deep in the cellar, behind a skull of a large dog and several jars of entrails from woodland fauna. The findings within the book were a stream of wonder. And soon a river.