Julia awoke with a start, not from a bad dream or sudden noise. She was already excited before she was fully conscious—today was the day!

  She threw the covers off and all but ran to the bathroom, knocking into an end table on her way—whoops. That’s why Braden didn’t like it when she ran in the house. But who cares!? He’s not here right now, and today is her day. Her birthday. The day she finally gets a friend.

  She hastily splashed water on her face from the ever-full basin before throwing a dress over her head. She didn’t care for dresses under most circumstances. Too hard to move in. Too loose and likely to get caught on sticks and bushes and basically everything nature created. Today was a special day, though. She wanted to make a good impression on her new friend.

  Braden always said she looked pretty in dresses, but who cares about looking pretty? He said that looking good can be a weapon on its own, but he wore the same raggedy robe every single day! So, how effective could that weapon be?

  Anyway, she didn’t have time to think about such things. Her yellow dress with light blue flowers would have to be good enough. She tied her just-past-shoulder-length blonde hair up with a white ribbon and made a halfhearted attempt to scrub her teeth with the same chewed-up twig she used yesterday, before racing out the door. Friends didn’t care how your breath smelled, right?

  She made it to the front porch before the scratchy wooden boards informed her she’d forgotten her shoes. After a quick jog back to get a pair of white sandals, she rushed back outside towards the town gate.

  Or, well, the equivalent of the town gate. Rockyknoll wasn’t really large enough to have anything like a wall and gate. What residents called the ‘gate’ was nothing more than a hole in the wooden stakes that formed a rough palisade There were a couple boards on the ground to cover the ditch that went around the outer edge of the palisade that one could walk over.

  Not exactly luxurious, but the residents of Rockyknoll didn’t care to have a great deal of travelers anyway. They liked the handful of traders that made regular trips to and from the closest city, Striton, and that’s it.

  Julia was reminded of this every single time she was outside and saw the suspicious, bordering on disdainful, looks that the people around her—no! No thinking about things like that! Today is a good day. A special day. She’ll not let some malcontent rubberneckers bring her down!

  She reached the gate just as the sun crested the horizon. Unfortunately, because Striton lay to the east, the gate faced directly into the early-morning light. Squinting and holding her hand in front of her, she sneaked behind a stake in the wall and positioned it directly between her and the sun. There. Now she can watch the road without the sun shining directly in her eyes. At least, she can until the sun rises above the stake in front of her, but Braden should be arriving well before that.

  A few days ago, Braden had to leave. Again. Her guardian is an adventurer, and an apparently high-ranked one at that. He’s frequently called to the city to handle this-or-that for them. Sometimes there are also jobs closer to town posted at the city that no one wants to take, so they get mailed to him. He told Julia before he left that there was no way he was going to miss her tenth birthday, though, so she knew he would be back today. And then, the ritual. Her new friend.

  Just as she was beginning to drift into a daydream about how her new friend would play and spend time with her, she spotted a silhouette on the horizon. A figure in a dark blue robe, just shy of dragging the ground, approached at what appeared to be a leisurely walking pace. However, knowing it was Braden, for who else could it be in such an old, familiar robe, she knew that the gait and the pace would be deceptive.

  As a higher-Level person (though, what level specifically, he never said), Braden’s steps would carry much farther and be much faster than hers. And, sure enough, what appeared to her like a pleasant walking speed ended up eating ground almost mysteriously as she watched.

  It was distracting in a way her brain almost found uncomfortable. Watching a single step like she might take somehow consume many of her strides at once triggered something in her mind that evoked a sense of…wrongness. She had asked Braden about why it made her so uncomfortable once. He said something about your brain seeing something it’s not used to triggering…what was it he called it? Something about nervous…sympathy system?

  She didn’t know what a system for nervous sympathy was. Something about your brain instinctively knowing that someone that can move like that could be a potential threat. Or something. He said he wasn’t completely sure about it either and was just guessing, so whatever. It was just weird-looking. That she knew for sure.

  Getting lost in her own thoughts again, she was startled to find that Braden was so close that she could see his stupid, ear-to-ear grin now. That was not the smile of someone that was happy to be home. It was the face he made when he was up to mischief. Usually at her expense.

  Last time she had seen a grin like that, it was when she had asked what would happen if she pressed the water spray button on the magic toilet when she wasn’t sitting down on it. He got that big smile and told her to go ahead and try it…and she was rewarded with a soaking of toilet water.

  Braden was always adamant about not telling anyone about all the magic devices their house had. She had begun to suspect that it was so that no one else around town could warn her about the pranks he could play with them. Not that anyone around town would tell her anything, since that would require talking to her—stop thinking about that!

  “Enjoy the taste of bugs, old man? Is that why you’re smiling like that? Like to use your teeth to catch them as you walk?” She called. He was still quite a ways away, but if he was close enough to hear her shout. His pace would mean he’d be here in just a minute or two.

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  “I never pass up extra protein if I can help it. A growing girl like you should be taking notes rather than chiding.”

  He sounded annoyingly smug. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t like it. Probably because her past experiences with that grin were not positive.

  When she cupped her hands around her mouth to shout what was sure to be a scathing retort, she noticed the guard at the gate giving her the stink eye.

  “Just walk out there to ‘im if yer wantin’ a conversation. I ain’t paid enough to defend the gate from nothin’ all day and listen to people scream at each other first thing ‘n the mornin’. My first cup a ale ain’t even half gone yet. That means it’s too early for whatever this business is.”

  Giving the guard a sheepish nod, she walked out past the wall. Somehow, in the seconds that exchange took, Braden had closed the distance so much that she could fully see him now. She was surprised to see his long, raven-black hair down. Usually he wore it up in a bun or tail if he were out on the road.

  His build was what she would describe as…average. She knew that under that robe, he had tightly coiled muscles that could bend steel, but he certainly didn’t have the warrior build. His Classes had clearly focused on magic. He had maybe put a few points here and there into Strength, but people that invested heavily into Strength typically started showing it pretty early on, and although she didn’t know his specific level, it had to be high. Maybe even above 50.

  That would actually explain being strong without the muscles to back it up. Level thresholds tended to bestow a certain amount of across-the-board Attribute increases once reached. For a person to have a level above 50 and a body that you could throw a rock in a crowd and hit an exact match to, though? That practically screamed ‘mage.’

  His trimmed beard (barely above what you’d call stubble) was pristine, as always. He cared an almost concerning amount about his beard. He’d have no problem letting his fingernails grow long enough that they’d probably hurt when he made a fist, but that beard never got a single bit too long or short. “The sweet spot is difficult to maintain and easy to lose,” as he liked to say.

  His staff/walking stick clacked the ground as he walked, as ever. Nothing more than a thin pole of wood whose tree of origin she had trouble identifying, he never went anywhere without it. It was something of a curiosity for Julia. She knew that many casters used a focus, like a staff or a wand or something, to boost the power of their spells. Braden was a caster, so was his staff also a spell focus?

  It didn’t look like it. In fact, it looked far more like a quarterstaff than anything. Foci typically had some kind of crystal or other artifact embedded in them. Actually, that was the one thing that didn’t change between foci. The shape of the focus would change, but there would always be something to focus the mana through, be it a crystal, a piece of a monster, or some other magical material.

  Braden’s staff didn’t seem to have that. It was, as far as she could tell, just a polished pole of solid wood. True, the color was a rich amber with a freshly-polished sheen, but she had seen similar things in the furniture at some of the carpentry shops around town, so how special could it be?

  Regardless, Braden was, in every sense, average. The one thing about him that wasn’t was his piercing, violet eyes. They very nearly glowed. Actually, there were times she recalled seeing them literally glow, but it wasn’t often. She was unsure what the glowing conditions were. Something to do with magic, probably. Admittedly, she seldom saw him casting more than the most basic of spells, which he only did when he was teaching her.

  The eyes’ piercing quality came from the way they looked at you, though. Or, rather, through you. It was like he could see all the way through you, out your back, and behind you in a way that was hard to describe. She had asked him about this once as well, but the second he started in about his “wisdom as an elder” or whatever, she immediately tuned it out. He couldn’t be more than 35, anyway. People with high Constitution would appear young for much of their lives, but again, Braden was clearly a caster. He very likely did not have a great many points in Constitution.

  Despite her thorough inspection of his person, nothing seemed out of place. No tatters in his robe or scuffs on his staff. Not even his hair was messed up. If he had come across any trouble, it didn’t do enough damage to him to show. She was glad he made it back safe and sound. She knew it was silly to worry about someone high enough within the Adventurer Guild to be called in from a town over, but she couldn’t help worrying.

  She found herself picking up speed as she approached and was soon running at full-tilt. Braden stopped and his mischievous grin softened to a pleasant smile. She launched herself off her feet and plowed into his chest, wrapping her arms and legs around his middle. She exhaled softly in slight disappointment when he didn’t fall over backwards. She had just hit six in Strength a few days ago, but she was sure she could muster up enough force to knock him down if she put her whole body in it.

  “You’ve gotten a bit stronger, haven’t you? I don’t recall having to plant my feet to catch you,” Braden said as he began to walk towards the gate patting her back.

  “I wasn’t even trying. You’d have fallen over if I were.”

  “Oh, so not trying is just a trend this morning, then? I thought maybe your morning breath was because you’d forgotten about that herbal paste I mixed up specifically for this purpose, but it’s good to know you did remember it and simply decided not to try very hard” Braden said with a wry smile.

  “...no, I did brush. I definitely tried. Things just ended up this way,” Julia said with a sniff. She’d have her nose turned up at him if she weren’t still draped across him like an ill-fitting towel.

  “That makes it worse for you, doesn’t it? Forgetting is forgetting. It happens all the time, but what you’re claiming is you…what…are bad at brushing your teeth? That’s…well, I say this with all the love in the world, Jules, it’s a little pathetic. It’s not a complicated task. That said, I’ll love you just the same even knowing you’re incapable of a task as simple as brushing your teeth,” he chuckled.

  She lifted her head from his chest and squinted at him. He pointedly looked straight ahead without acknowledging her disapproving stare.

  “You can’t talk to me like that. It’s my birthday, so what I say goes.” She had him this time. There’s no defying a birthday girl.

  “I was just going off what you said yourself, but point taken. It’s the spirit of what’s said rather than the specific words that matter. I brought a gift for you back from the city, but unfortunately, I won’t be able to give it to you if I’m constantly being repelled by your stink-breath. How about we go home, and I’ll give you your gift once you use the paste?”

  “Fine, but I’m riding like this the whole way there. A birthday girl doesn’t have to walk if she doesn’t want to,” she said with satisfaction. Just one more push since he decided he was going to be snarky on her birthday of all days.

  “Agreed,” he said while chuckling.