Written by Arcahan

They rushed down the corridor like a little wave of chaos, like a tiny herd on a stampede.

Their feet beat the floor, their merry laughter echoed from the stone walls. A cacophony of jabber and chatter heralded their arrival. A choir of shrill screams and cries echoed behind them as a fading reminder of their passing. More than one servant ducked into niches, doorways and side passages, barely escaping with dignity still unbruised and -- more importantly – wine pitcher or tea setting still safely arranged on the tray. Heads turned to stare after them wherever they passed. Some adults regarded them with a scorn, others just snorted and rolled their eyes, while still others watched the herd's passing with a smile and a little chuckle.

But such was the behavior of children. It was a part of their nature, to explore the world, to never stand still, to never pay a thought to the serious concerns of the adults around them. They could both amuse and annoy grown-ups to no end.

"Hah!" laughed a dark-haired young boy who ran in the head of the herd. In his little hands he twiddled a simple leather ball. "You're never gonna catch me like that!"

"Just you wait!" shouted one of the four other boys who chased him. "You can't hold the Crystall Ball forever! And I'm gonna --"

"In your dreams!" exclaimed the dark-hair. "You couldn't --"

Just then, his young legs decided that it was an excellent moment to tangle up. Down the boy went, hitting the floor with an almighty thump. The ball slipped from his grasp and bounced down the corridor. The rest of the boys rushed past their fallen comrade, each of them stretching his stride to be the first one to reach the Crystal Ball.

The leather ball came to a halt as it rolled against the hem of a black cloak.

The four children halted in unison, their faces paling, their laughter melting away from their lips.

The man would have been intimidating for even other adults. To these children, however, he was a towering figure in the garments of darkness. A tall yet bony man of middle years, his dark hair carefully oiled and combed. A neat, dark beard covered his strong jaw. With heavy eyebrows and a network of lines around his eyes, the man’s face seemed to have been permanently set into a grim scowl. His robes were made of the finest black velvet, decorated with trimmings of red and gold.

The children stared at him.

He stared back at them.

Then, the black-robed wizard -- for everyone in the castle knew Vir to be a sorcerer of remarkable power -- bent down to pick the leather ball with his slender fingers. The children scattered from his path as he moved through the corridor.

By this time, the dark-haired boy had already climbed to his feet. He alone did not show fear nor discomfort in Vir's presence. Instead, he looked up at the wizard's face with a boyish smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes.

"Did you hurt yourself, Eric?" Vir asked with a deep, quiet voice.

"Nope, I'm all right", Eric replied boldly, although the wizard had noticed how the boy had grimaced while struggling to his feet.

"Mn", Vir nodded as he handed the leather ball back to Eric. Then, perhaps as an afterthought, he brushed the boy's head with his hand, running his fingers through the dark hair before continuing his way down the corridor.

Behind him, the wizard heard Eric's fading voice: "My Dad is --"

* * * *

Guards snapped to attention as Vir strode past them. His robes rustling around his legs, he turned around corners and climbed stairs, resolutely approaching a series of private chambers that belonged to one of the more important families within the castle. In a dark corridor, he halted before an innocent-looking wooden door. Closing his eyes for a moment, the wizard drew in a breath, turned the handle, and stepped inside.

"I have returned."

It was a large bedroom, made warm and cozy by flames crackling in a dark stone fireplace. Thick carpets covered the places where the floor had not been occupied by a wide wooden desk or a broad twin bed, the two pieces of furniture that dominated the room at the opposite walls. An arched doorway, currently covered by red curtains, led into other room.

"Welcome home", came a voice from the doorway. A hand parted the curtains, and a tall woman, even taller than Vir himself, stepped into the room.

Lady Erissa was a striking character, with clearly defined features and luxurious blonde hair. She moved with sinewy grace, with smoothness that seemed equally fitting for a cat lounging lazily in the sun and a serpent striking out for a kill. Although certainly not young any more, she was still a woman in her best age. Dressed in a light blue gown that was so different from her usual working clothes, she held a tray loaded with a decanter and several goblets. "Although, I was expecting you a little earlier", she continued with a slight frown.

"Mn", Vir replied as he turned the desk's seat around and sat down. "Eric seems to be getting along finely with other children."

"That is good", Erissa nodded as she set the tray onto the table. Vir watched in silence as she poured wine into a goblet and he accepted the drink with a little nod. However, instead of lifting the cup to his mouth, the wizard brought it up to his nose, sniffing at the contents gingerly.

Erissa's lips broke into a slanted smile. "Fear not", she said and poured some wine for herself as well. "It's not poisoned."

Vir looked up at the woman, a small, reluctant smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "It must have become a habit for me", he replied and sipped at the wine.

"Besides", Erissa added with an innocent shrug, "if I really wanted to kill you, I would have had thousands of better opportunities to do so."

"I could expect nothing less from you", Vir said, a hint of something that might have been warmth in his voice.

"So", the woman pulled out a chair for herself and sat down. "How was your day, beloved?"

Vir took another sip from the goblet before setting it onto the table and leaning back on his seat. "Not very good, I fear", he finally said. "It seems that someone has discovered the cargo we meddled with, and the Merchant's Guild of Annar is now in an uproar." Giving a serious glance at Erissa, he continued: "It might be that I will need one of your assassins to dispose their spokesman, if he gets too suspicious."

"Hmm." Erissa frowned and brushed her chin with her long-nailed fingers. "I can't keep a very good track of our people in the field, now that I spend my time more with the trainees, but…" Pausing, she nodded slowly. "I do believe we should have an agent or two in Annar as well. Shall I send them a word?"

Vir nodded. "Tell them to be ready to move." He reached out for his goblet again and drank. "It might be that they won't be necessary, but it is good to be prepared for the worst."

Erissa opened her mouth to respond when the door abruptly burst wide open to allow the enthusiastic form of Eric to dash inside. In the boy’s small hand flapped a large piece of paper that seemed to be covered with numerous colorful splotches. "Mom! Mom!" he shouted, his bright voice ringing in the entire chamber. "Look! I made it all by myself!"

On that very moment, Erissa’s mien brightened. Gone was the scheming expression, gone was the tone of voice that she had used just a moment ago to speak about killing and assassins. Her eyes wide and her mouth smiling, she leaned forward and eagerly reached out with her hand. Studying the parchment that Eric had given her, she gasped with delight and exclaimed: "Oh, this is so beautiful!"

Then, casting a sly glance at Vir, the woman handed the paper back to her son and added: "You should show this to your father as well."

"Oo! ‘Course!" Eric couldn’t have agreed more. His face beaming like a little sun, he immediately charged across the floor to hold out his work for his father to inspect. Without a word Vir took the paper from his son’s hand and turned the picture over.

And he frowned.

It was a picture of a castle on the top of a steep hill. Or, at least Vir assumed it was a castle on a steep hill, although he had yet to see a castle whose master had deemed it necessary to paint the fortifications with gaudy green colors. And the bright purple hillside was definitely steep, for it rose in an almost vertical angle. Black, blue and yellow spires rose above the castle battlements to reach for the merrily red skies overhead. The towers, it seemed, had been designed by an architect with quite a sense of humor, for none of them had ended up straight. Indeed, every single one of the spires slanted slightly either to the left or right (the main spire, Vir noted, actually managed to tilt in both directions at the same time).

And then there were the windows. There were plenty of windows, actually, red, pink, yellow, blue, green, brown, and a color that perhaps could be best described with words blurred rainbow. As a matter of fact, there were so many windows in the castle that Vir had to begin to wonder that with all the holes littering the walls, how on earth the building still managed to stay in one piece.

"It is… nice", Vir said after taking his time picking suitable words of praise.

"Nice?" Erissa echoed teasingly. While Vir had been studying artwork, the woman had risen from her chair, moved behind the wizard and was now leaning lightly against his shoulders and watching the picture with him.

Vir cleared his throat. "Very nice", he amended. "Imaginative."

Eric puffed up with pride at his father’s words. Obviously he, much like his mother, had learned what sort of praise one could – and could not – expect from Vir.

The father was already beginning to fear that the son would be demanding even more feedback about his artwork, but fortunately, the mother intervened. "Well, Eric", Erissa said, leaning forward to run her fingers through her son’s hair, "Run along, now. Your father and I have to talk about things, and your nanny must be looking for you by now."

Eric pouted, obviously unhappy about having to leave his parents so soon. He also knew that when the nanny was looking for him, it usually meant some unpleasant event, such as a lesson, bedtime, or – worst of all – a bath. Finally, however, he obeyed his mother. The determined mien on his face, though, indicated that the nanny would have plenty of chasing to do before this boy would submit to the horrors of the bathtub.

Erissa chuckled as the door closed after her son. "That child", she muttered, shaking her head as she left her place behind Vir and returned to her chair. "Now, what were we talking about?" she thought aloud, seating herself again. "Ah, the assassins. I believe we should be able to – beloved?"

Vir’s scowling eyes were staring at the door. He had done so ever since Eric had closed the port behind him. There was intensity in the wizard’s gaze, as if he would be attempting to see through wood and stone, to stare at his son’s distancing back. Whatever was moving in Vir’s mind, it gave his face a fiercely engrossed mask. It was a mien Erissa had seen numerous times over the years.

"How do you do it?" Vir asked softly. Turning his grave gaze at the woman he loved, he continued: "How can you be so natural with him?"

Erissa smiled. Somehow, she made it look both like a smile of an assassin whose poisoned arrow has just sunk into her victim’s neck, and a smile of a proud mother whose son had just been praised. "You will get used to it, beloved."

Vir scoffed. "You said that the last year… and the year before that as well."

Erissa said nothing. She merely smirked with that double-meaning smile of hers and sipped her wine. The silence lasted between them for several minutes. Vir stared at Erissa, and she stared back. It was a challenge of sorts, a quiet test of will between the lovers, a little, personal game the two sometimes found themselves playing.

Finally, Vir submitted and decided to change the subject. "So", he began with a grave tone of voice that was somehow in conflict with his mouth that was once again attempting to twist itself into a little, hard smile, "how was your day?"

Erissa, pleased that she had once again triumphed over the wizard, shrugged. Draining the last drops of wine from her cup, she returned it onto the tray and collected Vir’s goblet as well. "Could have been better", she admitted. Shaking her head, she rose to her feet and picked the tray into her hands again. "I lost another apprentice, a young woman. I keep on telling them to be careful to coat their mouths and lips with the antidote before adding the poison, but…"

"Adding poison to lips?" Vir cut her short. His scowling eyebrows knitting together, his sharp wit quickly drew the connection. "You can kill people with a kiss?"

"I told you", Erissa said, half-turning to aim her lover a smug glance, "if I really wanted to kill you, I would have had thousands of opportunities to do so."

* * * *

The wood had long since burnt out from the fireplace. Dry logs had long since turned black and faded into gray, they had long since crumbled into ashes in which only a glowing nest of embers still smoldered. Vir, however, had not bothered to summon a servant to restock their supply of wood. Instead, when the room began to grow cold, he rekindled the ashes with a gesture like only a wizard could.

"You should come to the bed", Erissa mumbled from where she was laying between silken sheets. The woman had discarded her blue garments and replaced them with a nightgown several hours ago already.

"Mn", replied Vir from where he was, sitting before his desk and working with parchment and quill and ink.

"What are you doing anyway?"

"I have to finish these accounts", the wizard replied without looking up. His quill traced on the parchment, night-black ink painting lines and arcs across virgin surface.

"Accounts?" Erissa repeated, a hint of annoyance apparent in her voice. "Don’t we have bookkeepers to take care of our accounts?"

"Would you trust those people with your accounts?" Vir countered, not fazed in the slightest.

Erissa considered this. "Hmm. Good point."

For a long while, neither the woman nor the man spoke anything. Magical flames danced and crackled in the fireplace. Quill scraped. Papers and parchments rustled.

"But in truth", Erissa finally spoke, "you’re thinking about Eric."

It took a moment from Vir to answer: "Mn."

"Our son."

Quill dove into the ink bottle and leapt back up again. "Mn."

Erissa shifted under the sheets and rolled to her side. Absently she stared into the flames leaping in the fireplace. "I still remember the year when he was born. It was the same year when I left my career as an active assassin and became an instructor." Wrinkling her brow, she added thoughtfully: "I knew that if I stayed in the field, I couldn’t see him so often."

Once again, Vir did not reply immediately. It was only during this pause that Erissa noticed that the quill had suddenly ceased its journey across the parchment. The wizard sat unmoving, his dark-clad back silent and inscrutable. "Sooner or later", he spoke absently, as if musing aloud, "he will grow old enough to realize the truth about what we do to live."

Erissa nodded, slowly. "Yes, he will."

Abruptly, Vir moved, dropping the quill back into the ink bottle. "It must be well past midnight", he said, his chair scraping against the floor as he stood up. "I will feed Lucien and then come to the bed."

* * * *

The corridors were dark, cold and echoing with silence, as was fitting for a sleeping castle. Worn torches burned with agonizingly small flames, their withering glow barely illuminating Vir’s journey through the passages. Fortunately, however, he knew the way well enough. His destination was not too far from his and Erissa’s bedroom, but tonight, it felt like an oddly long distance to him. This was because many things moved through his mind during the short time it took from him to reach the chamber he was heading for.

Sooner or later, his son, this boy they had named Eric, would grow old enough to truly realize what his parents were doing. But how would he react to this knowledge? And how should his parents, Vir and Erissa, react to his reaction?

Vir was fully and gravely honest with himself when admitting that he dreaded the possibility that Eric would accept the knowledge about the organization. Maybe he would even try to make his own career in the same profession. Vir didn’t think this would be an entirely unlikely vision of the future, for Eric had already spent the first years of his life with the organization. People often learn to take things they grow up with for granted. Just like a person who has grown up in the poorest district of a city can easily learn to take it for granted that it’s well worth the risk to sneak into some noble’s fruit garden just to steal a handful of ripe, red apples to quell the demands of a hungry stomach. Or, just like the offspring of a rich noble house can learn to moan and lament about the wicked peasant children who can think of nothing else to pass their time with but desecrating his dear gardens with their filthy presence.

But an organization had its rules, and this was where Vir’s true fear lied. Several times in the past, the wizard had without a blink of an eye ordered the execution of an incompetent subordinate, to silence an agent who had failed to meet the expectations and had proven to be more trouble than worth. Should Eric fail to meet the requirements of the organization, could Vir order his execution? Without a blink of an eye? It was easy enough to eliminate people you did not know or truly care about, but your own son?

The other vision that Vir could think of was almost equally painful. Eric could also be horrified by the truth about the organization. He could abandon his parents, flee from the castle that had been his home and try to live by his own. To live always with the knowledge that his parents served evil.

At this point, Vir actually hesitated for several breaths before taking the next step down the corridor.

It was a strange word. Was Erissa evil? Was Vir himself... evil? He knew that the organization they served was definitely not good, but did that make it completely evil? Did that make Vir and Erissa evil? And should Eric, that innocent child who painted castles with ridiculous colors, choose to serve the organization, would he, too, be evil?

And, under all these thoughts and questions lied the final riddle: however should Eric choose to grow up, should he choose freedom or the organization, or some other, unknown road that Vir had not foreseen, how should his parents react to their son’s decision?

These were the questions that troubled Vir’s mind. As a matter of fact, they had troubled his mind ever since the day he had first learned that Erissa was pregnant. And still, after so many years, he had still not found the answer.

"I may never find it", Vir thought aloud as he halted before the solid door that led to his destination. "Or, I may find it only after it’s already too late."

The iron lock clicked open with a gesture from the wizard’s hand. Quietly he pushed the door ajar, peering into the dark room. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but soon he could distinguish the black shapes of furniture, toys littering the floor, and a single bed where slept a young boy and dreamed about… whatever boys of that age dream about, be it fantasies about castles built of sweet honey or nightmares about bathtubs.

It was Eric’s bedroom.

Instead of stepping inside the chamber and taking a risk of stumbling across a stick horse or a ball or a wooden sword and thus awakening his son, Vir remained in the doorway and reached out with his will. Soon his mental command was answered, and out from the darkness, silent like a sigh of moonlight itself, glided Lucien. The wizard reached out with his hand, and the black, adder-like thing landed onto the offered perch. Its leathery wings, thin like spider web, folded against its body and its long tail curled around Vir’s arm.

Retreating back into the corridor, Vir silently demanded a report from the creature, whether someone dubious had moved within Eric’s chamber. Lucien’s eyes gleamed like two black pearls as it replied that nothing suspicious had happened. Vir nodded with satisfaction and whispered: "Feed."

Lucien obeyed without hesitation. With the speed of a striking snake it sank its teeth into Vir’s finger, and sucked the crimson nectar of life. Its pleasure was obvious, its sleek body writhed and trembled as it drank more and more of sweet blood.

"Enough", Vir finally said, and Lucien – while a shade slower than it had been to strike – obeyed. "Go", the wizard whispered to his familiar. "Go, and protect Eric from all harm. Protect him with your life." Thus saying he tossed the thing back into his son’s bedroom, where it once again melded into the shadows.

The wizard was already pulling the door close again, but he could not resist throwing one more glance at Eric’s sleeping form. Hesitating for a second, he then closed his eyes and pulled the door shut. The lock reset itself with a gesture.