by Glenn » Thu Jun 04, 2020 2:27 am
These things had to be planned precisely. Why, one might ask, would that be the case? On the surface, it all seemed innocuous enough: why, it was a birthday! And not just any birthday at that, but some especially celebratory one. Symbolic, ritualistic gestures were well understood by the party at hand. Unfortunately, Aloisius Treadwell was well understood as well. Were this a time and place of more idyllic repast, Glenn Burnie might have spent his years documenting the odd peculiarities of Treadwell's life. He might have organized and categorized and created a taxonomy that might have made blasted sense of it all. Impersonations and outlandish kidnappings and fairies of a more stereotypical sort and gods that looked harmless at a distance and horrific up close (the opposite of most gods, Burnie would add, though only to himself). But this was Myrken Wood, and here the threats were Fiends and Sellswords and Demons and Dark Elves and Mentalists (only two of the five listed being specifically Burnie's fault, it could also be added; well, maybe three). Treadwell's story then was a tangential tale, a bizarre and impossible addendum that had a gravity all its own.
Yet, he was a constant in a land of chaos, for no matter what outlandish malady or misadventure might have befallen the old gent, it only ever seemed to indirectly afflict Myrken as a whole. In fact, the parallel narrative of Treadwell's existence seemed almost a comfort, a hefty counterbalance to the wretched and cursed 'normalcy' of Myrken Wood.
Still, Glenn Burnie was no fool. There was power in rituals and power more in symbols and he wasn't about to stumble in on one as potent as a seventy-fifth birthday.
No, instead, he, so newly returned to the province, battered physically, obviously and unsurprisingly, by some response to his eternal defiance to literally everything around him, yet otherwise looking at least a few years younger than he ought to (for it was thirteen years now since he first arrived in Myrken Wood) knocked hard on the toy store's door just past closing hours on the day following. "Aloisius. If you're in there, do open up. I haven't all day and you haven't many days left by my or anyone else's accounting."