1: Nightfall

Thaddius Poole, called “Tad” by those who knew the boy, watched apprehensively as the sun sank into the Angsul forest. Of all the days and nights of all the spheres, the night without Lunos was always the worst. The larger of the two moons watched over the dead, and without it some of the recently departed would forsake their dreamless sleep and take to walking around. And the walking dead were invariably hungry.

As if losing a loved one wasn’t painful enough, sometimes you had to put them into the ground again. Tad remembered his own mom and dad, whom he had buried only a few turns of Lunos prior, scraping at the wards around his window calling him to join them well before his time. If Nolan hadn’t been there to ... do what had been necessary, Tad might have gone out to them. For the hundredth time he thought, “Maybe I should have let them take me. In a few minutes it would have been over. How long can it take to get eaten?”

It couldn’t possibly take as long as his current ordeal, or be near as painful. Tad’s lord and master, a “gentleman explorer” named Nolan Brightstar, was enjoying a commissioned piece of music celebrating his latest achievement: killing a werewolf. “You need to make him more vicious! Werewolves are terrifying beasts that’ll eat anyone who gets in their way! And the sword has to be silver. You forgot the silver.”

The bard and songwriter, either through some miracle of patience or by meditating on how much silver he was getting paid, didn’t even roll his eyes as he started work on a new verse describing the horribleness of the beast, and then reworked the final verse to make the climatic fight more climatic. But Tad had a very different recollection of the event. In his memory he saw a graying man, clothes ragged from a night chasing gods-knew-what in the forest, exhausted and half-asleep, stumbling through the doorway of his home. He was impossibly hairy and long in the tooth, but probably looking forward to his bed. And there behind the man’s door stood another man, half his size but with a gleaming silver dagger in hand. The werewolf didn’t see the first blow coming, and afterwards he didn’t have the strength to fight. When it was finally over Nolan had just mumbled something about it being “a bit messier than strictly necessary”. Neither Tad nor Nolan had said a word about the killing since, until Nolan had found someone to write a song about it.

“Tad,” called Nolan, “fetch some water and help with the cleanup.” Tad didn’t mind helping Nordaleen, the caravan’s cook. She reminded him of his dead grandmother, the way she busied herself (and others) efficiently with the cooking, and then spent the rest of the day contentedly smoking her pipe while riding up front on the wagon next to Vallheim. At night she let Tad lay out his bedroll next to her, and when he woke up afraid at night she would stroke his hair.
But he didn’t belong to Nordaleen. He belonged to the “gentleman adventurer” Mr. Nolan Brightstar, the half-sized man who took him into dark underground places, visited wayside taverns inhabited by rough and scary people, made him sleep in wild places where the wolves howled until Tad sweat in fear. Some nights he couldn’t believe he didn’t get eaten right up. In the four months since he had been indentured, he couldn’t remember ever feeling safe at night, and not even Nordaleen’s matronly arms seemed able to fix that.

Tad tried to remember any time in his twelve summers that he had ever been afraid, before the trolls had come. He knew there had to have been times when he was unhappy or mad at his parents or afraid of something, but now there was a dark wall between him and that other life. On one side of the wall he had had parents and grandparents and an uncle and several aunts and was just starting to learn a trade in weaving. The old Tad had hated it, being forced into a trade he didn’t want. But the new Tad, the one living on this side of the wall, envied him. As the night took a firm hold of him, the boy doubted his chances of seeing another summer. He had a fantasy that, in some quick and surprising way, he would be killed and he could rejoin his family in the worlds beyond the Veil.