Hanging from the Rafters

[Glenn]

How much life can change in a year's time. Four years ago, the Ashfiend had been vanquished and it seemed like the knights might rebuild, that the boy, Elliot Brown, would have a future amongst them. Three years ago, he had been taking the girl, Niall, home to his father's funeral. The knights had waned further and he began to wander about with the mage in his increasingly free time. They had adventures and both faced adolescence together, neither delving in too deep. They made a unified defense against it.

Perhaps they would be defending each other against it still had the chocolate not been tainted. For a girl with such defenses, she was helpless against the drug, and her magic started to leak around them, turning the adventures into surreal dreams and nightmares, reality bending exploits that bordered on the truly insane. The girl had become more easy-going, more friendly, more open and cheerful. Everyday was a new maddening romp through the woods and through countless worlds, each one stranger than the last. Elliot encountered scores of magical nemeses and vanquished numerous foes through bravery and luck and piggybacking upon Niall's battle-tested skills and magic, and at the end of it, when the chocolate was taken away and the drudgery of real life fell upon them so did the realization that none of it mattered at all, unless they decided it did, that was. Niall seemed to accepted what her eyes saw but Elliot couldn't lie to himself. Not like that.

He stumbled along without purpose for the next few months. Niall and he parted ways without a conversation. Oh, they tried, but the connection was so much trickier now. She was no longer cheerful and easy-going and he could no longer turn a blind eye to everything that had happened, to everything she was and everything they weren't. Angst settled in, a chip ended up upon his shoulder, and at the key moment when he was at his lowest, a seemingly chance encounter sent him upon a completely different path.

Now, the better part of a year later, the once-squire found himself dangling out a second story window. The muscular frame he developed a knight-to-be has given way to something more lithe and athletic. Despite that, he had the look of someone far better fed. His clothes were dark and stylish and he moved with a brash confidence which would have never existed in any of his previous selves.

It HAD been an angst-ridden year, one where he found reason to alienate everyone and everything, especially those who previously mattered most. Friends and family were replaced with training and a mentor. His own hopes and ideals gave way to a far looser sort of morality. All that he held to before was ultimately meaningless, a false truth clung to in order to try to give life meaning. His teacher showed him a better way. She freed him from the shackles which held him down, and she did so by making him reach the conclusions on his own. She just gave him the rope, just loosened the shackles of knighthood and societal guilt, and he found his own way out, just like she taught him how to escape from physical ropes and chains. It made for a far more permanent change in the boy than if he had been forced down this path kicking and screaming.

With little social ties and money no longer being an issue, Elliot had nothing to do but train. Oh, yes, he had his dalliance with the the light being, Nova, but even that just made him more focused. Upon freeing her, he found himself in need of more money than before and practicing his newly developed skills and newly forged mentality was the only way to meet that need. His failure in freeing her without consequence only drove him to work harder.

And that's what drove him to this moment, another milestone, one that was more symbolic than practical. In through a window, the lock upon it child's play, and he was far more than a mere child now. A slightly shifted floorboard, and a careful, balanced rappel from one story to the next. This was his bounty, his reward, a freedom offered to so few others, a perch that was all his own in this world, just his and his mentor's, the way it should be. It was something no knight could accomplish, something that even Niall wouldn't be able to manage. He moved with precision and practice over unstable and perilous pieces of connected, load-bearing, timber. It had taken years to arrive, through twisting and turning paths that could not have be predicted by a youngster running away from the unfortunate life of a boy who knew he was a burden. Up in the rafters of the Broken Dagger, a rogue in both mind and deed, Elliot Brown had finally found his way home.