A vent for all the hot air; or, a man reborn

[Treadwell]

Meditation. Thoughts. A lack of precious sleep for the last twelve hours of night. Instead, a nocturnal period of piecing together information from two different lifetimes all crammed into one head.

This morning, that bag of hot air everyone calls Treadwell needed to vent.

More specifically, he needed to write. He needed to sit down somewhere and get everything straight.

What everything?

Well, in the past week, three very different men have emerged in Myrken Wood, all of them connected in some say or other to the previous man who'd lived life as Father Winter, one Roderic G. Cliche by name. With those three visitors came a surge of emotions and memories in Treadwell, for better and for worse; he'd thought he had worked through all of this when he took on the memories and life of another man, but perhaps he hadn't realized that the other fellow's life had stretched--just like his belly--over a span of some two thousand years. Perhaps he should have given it all more than just the occasional daydream to think things over.

That's what happens when you have a fat old wintry entity getting into any amount of trouble in his own magically lengthened time before passing all his knowledge, experiences, and abilities on to another man. A fat old wintry entity brought into life fully grown, white-bearded, big-bellied, and crafty enough to come up with an entire backstory for himself as he learned to live among mere mortals, eventually marrying a nagging, constantly henpecking wife and settling into a normal, everyday existence combining laziness, gluttony, and an ever-present, though often impossibly secretive, toymaking role.

Run-ins with vampires, wizardly types, friendly dwarves, elves, certain red-headed thieves, and whoever else. At the best: several decades spent as mayor of a small town--Delamar, a few miles west of Treadwell's own Westenford in Amasynia--where Mr. Cliche knew every last person by name, could tell you when he or she was born, where each lived, and any other number of details. At the worst: living two lives at once by being a short, fat old man cursed by a malicious wizard to start all over again, spending fifteen hundred years changing forms for sometimes weeks out of each month--changing forms into a plump baby dragon growing from hatching out of an egg to being a full-blown, downright obese ancient black dragon with two heads and the frustrations of not knowing how to rid himself of this situation. And most importantly, how in particular Roderic dealt with all of this with his characteristic, seemingly inimitable mix of clumsiness, ignorance, grace, and jollity.

Aloisius Treadwell could very well handle all of this. He knew he could. With the know-how of two very similar men crammed into his head, surely he could work it all out for himself and reconcile everything.

But to reconcile it all, he would have to come to grips with everything first, whether through magic or through just good old hard work.

= = = = =

A solution is eventually found. Ideas are eventually straightened out.

When Treadwell emerges from the back of his toy store around noon, rest assured that he has an entirely different outlook on any number of things: himself, life as a whole, and his purpose as a secretive Father Winter among a province of folks who believe in his ongoing crusade to please the children of Myrken Wood.