Beginnings

To get Una to work properly in Sequel and Partners, I threatened to tell his story, as in, delve into the past of the people. He… agreed. Thusly calling my bluff as I knew nothing about him before he met Rava and Ayato sometime after he became a troupe master.

So I started searching and when I got the first bit written I found that it didn’t want to move any more. The story was refusing to budge. So I poked Rel and Rel kept giving me the same answer “Una told me the story of his life” and I’d go away puzzled, wondering on it and wondering why it was happening the way it was.

Then I realised that the problem was that I had it in the wrong… view. The wrong person.

I swore up and down that I would never write first person again. Up and down and I find it annoying and silly to write. ‘Caught up inside someone else’s head? Pah!’ I said. But then I started writing, getting Una to recite the story word for word for me (which involves the strange concept of having an imaginary conversation over drinks and around a fire while sitting on logs) and things started to move.

*The fantastic that Una refers to is not the “oh, this is fantastic cake!” it is more referenced towards the fantasia or the fantastic of Vladimir Prop, a literary theorist who I haven’t read in a while but the story still makes me think of his theory.

When starting a new story I always panic. One, will it be liked (I know people don't particularily like Una because he can be quite an ass). Two... all those story tags. Some I toss in because I'm not certain if it will happen or what's going on.

So when you see minor character death? Let's recall that Una is immortal and the chances of him living through a death in this story are... pretty good. If I've missed a story tag... I apologise.

Read, Review and Enjoy.






Every story teller suffers the same problem when telling the tale of a life. Where to begin. At conception? At birth? At the first incident, the first oddity of the life? Telling the tale of a life and telling a myth are two entirely different things and in the cases of a few souls, the story need begin, not with their birth or conception, but at the very utterance of their soul. Deciding where to start my story is more difficult than others.

I hear those of my troupe pondering out loud where to begin their tales and listen to them tumble through events. For them it is easy, how many things could happen in a short lifespan? For myself, I must delve back and beyond myth and legend.

My birth is unknown. The couple that raised me found me on the side of the road on their move between one village and another. A fresh pile of dirt and myself sprinkled with the stuff, as if someone had just abandoned me there upon hearing the wheels of the cart drawing near. By my head, they told me many a time, was a tiny seedling of a tree.

That tree grew and thrived a good long time before the people chopped it down for their king’s furniture and they paid dearly for it.

But I stray to future events.

My childhood was made up of golden years, when the sun always seemed to shine and the crops and harvest always came in bountiful. The small village where I lived with my adoptive parents thrived during my first fifteen years of life. Children did not die during their early years, the population swelled and soon our small village was bordering on something more. Over the course of my childhood I learned a good many things.

I learned to hunt and fish, as my father dictated any man should be able to do. I learned gardening and shamanism from my grandfather and herbal remedies from my mother. From my grandmother came what others called witchcraft but, in years later, I learned was just good medicine. Not herbal remedies that might or might not have worked, but true medicine. From my brothers I learned to fight and from my sister I learned fair play, sewing, tea service and primping. I could walk like a lady, talk like a lady and be passed off as a female.

Well. Before I hit puberty.

My siblings were all older than I and my sister desperately wanted someone else to play with. Which fell on me, being the youngest of the broad and too slow too run away from her before I was ten. And yet in later years, those skills… came in handy.

Teaching a goddess to walk the part requires intimate knowledge of how to walk and talk.

From the village priest, who communed with nature and then with us (where as my grandfather communed with animals and the spirits) I learned how to speak Mother’s tongue. I was an adept student and absorbed everything presented to me. The merchants, travelling through, would teach any child who wanted to learn how to count coin.

Well, at the time I thought I learned, I thought I was a smart fellow. So did the girls my age at the time, they would bat their eyelashes at me as I batted mine at the merchants’ sons, never realising what I was really doing. I learned a good deal growing up, but it was all bare bones. The only thing that really, truly seemed to stick, seemed to be a full concept, was the teaching my grandmother gave me, the witchcraft of plants.

The rest was good knowledge to have in such a small village, I could have remained there and become the village leader or something important. As it was, I met Vera and… well that is getting ahead of myself. Getting ahead of my story. Vera is part of it, but a later part.

My parents loved me and my siblings. The village accepted me and, despite being large, it was quiet and prosperous. So quiet that crime was a word we applied to other villages, other places. To people beyond our borders. The outside world had crime, we had peace, order and good, kind people. We, my siblings and I, were never taught to discern bad people from good people. We were never taught to protect ourselves or each other from other people.

Everything was good, everything was bright.

Until my death.

Ah, and there, there is where the tale should begin. At my death, at the time when I had entered puberty and was on the cusp of manhood. My hair was dark brown, bordering on black. My eyes were brown. I was tall and lean and of such a build that muscle could hardly be gained. My appetite was larger than my brothers’. I ate nearly twice as much as any of them and was constantly hungry, seemingly constantly growing.

During my fifteenth year I died. I was raped and murdered without concern for the ripple affect those actions would have on my family, on my friends and the village that I had once called home.

My name is Una Estabont, immortal, game master, troupe owner, power user. Pupil of Vera, master of the arts (except painting, that skill has always eluded me) communicator to the gods. Mother born am I. Though my tale could go on long after your deaths, though there be not enough time to recite to you all the happenings of my life, my tale started somewhere, just as yours did. I was not always the man I am today and like everyone else, I grew the most in the darkest times of my life. So sit back and let me tell you the tale of how I died.

And how I came to live a life more fantastic than I had ever imagined.

.