Walking outside of the Mage’s Guild Tower, I squinted and held up my hand to block the light from my eyes. Their magic windows were wonderful, I could admit that, but they did a poor job of simulating what things were actually like outside. Looking up, there was nothing but clear skies, towers, and the sun.

Up here, natural sunlight only came for a couple of hours a day. I had always compared New Frausta to a turtle’s shell. The city was tall in the center with several towers, and they started getting shorter the further out you got. By the time you reached the walls, there were buildings that were only three stories tall.

Thankfully, New Frausta had a wonderful sunlight distribution system. This was necessary thanks to how the city was layered. Important buildings like the Royal Tower, Mage’s Guild, and other diplomatic institutions were on the Top. This was for the rich, famous, and elites. Even now, most of the people who were walking around either completely ignored me or sneered at my common, comfortable clothes. I ignored them.

Before we teleported to Crystal Snows, Ferrisdae had stayed at a place called The Inn Royale, which said a lot about the old money she had apparently come from. I hadn’t asked any questions at the time since I was still irritable about being stuck with a rookie, but I had plenty of opportunities to do my research while I was in quarantine.

“Badger!”

My thoughts were interrupted as my name was called, and I turned towards its source. Weaving through the crowd was my wife, Tabitha Rhodes. Her simple sunflower dress stood out in from all the pompous fashion of the Top, but she radiated an aura of beauty, grace, and confidence that none here could hope to match.

I started moving to meet her, taking more care to navigate the crowd than she did. Tabitha carelessly bumped into a man wearing fine robes as she kept her eyes on me, a grin on her face the whole time. He threw up his arms in anger.

“Hey! Watch where you’re going, Bottom feeder!” the man yelled.

Tabitha immediately stopped and rounded on the man. “What, you’ve never seen a Halfling in a hurry before?” she snapped, taking a step towards him. “Come down here and call me a Bottom feeder to my face! I dare you! Yeah, you better walk away!”

Her mood changed back in an instant as she scared the mage off and met me in the crowd. I met her green eyes and couldn’t help but smile.

Taking one of her hands in mine, I reached up to stroke her pale skin next to a thin scar on her face. It stretched from above her temple down to her chin. She wore her thick, curly red hair in a way that made sure attention was drawn to it, and her grin somehow got bigger as I gave it attention. Long ago, I had been reluctant to acknowledge it, but I had since learned that was the wrong move to take.

Don’t shy away, she always said. It was left there by the slash that made me fall in love with you. I wear it proudly.

Those had been different times, back then, when neither of us knew any better.

Tabitha nearly slammed her forehead against mine in excitement once I removed my hand, and she nuzzled her nose against mine. While I normally wasn’t fond of these sorts of public displays of affection, I didn’t fight against her.

“I’ve missed you, Badger,” she whispered.

“It’s good to see you, Tabs,” I whispered back, closing my eyes as I leaned against her.

We stayed like this for a few moments before she backed up, though she didn’t drop her hand from mine. “Sooooo…” she started, her eyes twinkling.

I knew that tone; nothing good could come from it. “You’ve set up to have a shrine of Cheroske like we discussed, right?” I asked, hoping it was about that.

While the Goddess of Community hadn’t wanted me to enter her service under duress, I appreciated what she had done enough to agree with Tabitha that a shrine to her wouldn’t be out of place in the Bottom’s Up, the tavern that we owned. My wife didn’t know the full story just yet as I was reluctant to speak on it while in quarantine, but she had jumped on the idea with reckless enthusiasm.

“Oh, yes, ages ago,” she said with a wave of her hand. “But that’s not what I’m about to bring up.”

“Then it has to do with Ferrisdae,” I guessed.

Tabitha laughed and nodded as she started pulling me away from the Mage’s Guild. “And do you want to guess what I’m going to ask?”

You want to adopt her, I thought to myself. There was no way I was going to say that out loud, however. Instead, I shook my head.

“We going to adopt her!” Tabitha gleefully exclaimed. “I haven’t talked to her about it yet, but the girls took to her like ducks to water.”

“Tabs, she’s a grown woman,” I said patiently. “And she still has her family. In fact, one of the first things she did was complain about how supportive they were of her decisions.”

“She’s a teenager, Badger, that’s not the same.” 

“She’s 124, she’s old enough to be our grandmother.”

Undeterred, my wife waved her free hand as if dismissing my concerns. “Ferry’s a sweet girl who would do well with a family like ours. Plus, we already know you like her!”

“Tolerate her,” I replied gently. “I can tolerate her.”

“Sorry, you don’t like her but you can tolerate her,” she corrected. “Which is basically the same thing, isn’t it? When was the last time you invited someone from work back home? Huh? Justisius? Millicef? And that one time Brackenhorst came to see what trivia night was about doesn’t count, either.”

“That’s not grounds for adoption, Tabs,” I stated firmly but patiently. “Our family is already enough. It doesn’t need to be bigger.”

Tabitha was always trying to adopt people into our little clan. Kids, teens, adults, even the elderly at some point. She had come from a group of nomadic clans of Halflings known as the Strongheart Tribe. Every family was individualistic to a fault, though they generally got along with their neighbors. City life was perfect for her once she wanted to settle down in one spot, and she took to it naturally.

I was the one who had trouble, at first. Where I had come from, everyone was family. It was a matriarchal society, so generally women had the final say in any matters, but for the most part everyone did the same work throughout the community.

Parents didn’t just watch or teach their own children, but took turns doing so. Everyone was someone else’s brother or sister even if they didn’t have the same mother and father. Familial boundaries were firm in regards to a few things, but for the most part everyone seemed related to everyone else.

Leaving them behind and coming to New Frausta to start a new family had been one of the hardest events of my lifetime. It had been made worse because it came right after my fall from grace as a paladin in the service of Tegril, God of Justice. Tabitha was all I had back then, and I was wary of all the strangers. It had felt like my family had been cut down from hundreds to one, and we were surrounded by enemies.

She never truly understood the heart of the matter, but she always tried her best to empathize with me. We had come from two completely different backgrounds, was all. It was relatively early in our relationship, back when the Bottom’s Up was only a few months old, when she mentioned adopting young members of the community. I had immediately shot it down.

But she kept trying, bringing it up when there were people I seemed to get along with. When I finally asked her what she was trying to accomplish, she gave me a sad look, and I never forgot what she had told me.

With just the two of us, I’d never be able to get you back what you lost, but damn me if I won’t try.

Now, adoption was rarely brought up, but its meaning had evolved over the years. It wasn’t the sore spot that it once had been, and I knew that she was relishing in the small smile that tugged at my lips. This sense of normalcy was good for me, after every strange thing that happened in the Thousand Year Blizzard. Tabitha always knew how to bring me back home.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” my wife said, sighing as though she was giving up. As we reached the stairs that would take us to the Bottom, she leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder.

“Was it, though?” I asked.

“Always is,” she confirmed.

“Just don’t try to adopt Moose when he shows up,” I said with a snort. “He seems fine enough on his own, but he comes as a package deal with Cojisto and that’s definitely not something I want.”

“Oh, but they sound like such an adorable pair of adventurers!” Tabitha whined, looking up at me. Her head didn’t leave its perch, but she walked down the stairs without any trouble despite the awkward angle. “Ferry has just been going on and on about them. You didn’t hear it from me, but I think she’s sweet on him.”

I barked a laugh. “That’s doubtful,” I said sincerely. “He’s got an impressive goal and some skill to back him up, I’ll give him that, but the man’s a buffoon. Way more brawn than brain.”

“If you say so, Badger,” she replied, patting my arm. She didn’t sound convinced, but I had been around Ferrisdae a lot longer than she had and had actually met Cojisto, so I considered myself the expert.

We arrived at the Bottom in no time at all. The buildings here were only three stories tall, and they all reached the ceiling. A few of the towers connected to the Middle directly above us, but most of them were considered completely separate entities. Both the king’s amethyst Royal Tower and the Mage’s Guild were both well known for being nothing but solid blocks of stone down in the Bottom, with the guts of the buildings starting in the Middle.

But that wasn’t our concern. The Bottom was for the working class and those looking to live for cheap.  There was a bigger population of Halflings, Gnomes, Orcs, and Dwarves here than in the other layers. Humans and Elves preferred the Middle, thinking themselves above the denizens below them, while only the truly wealthy or those pretending to be so could afford to live on the Top.

It wasn’t as though the Bottom was a bad place to live, it was just at the bottom of a three layer city and it showed most of the time. Just like the Middle, our ceiling came with large lamps that redistributed the sun’s rays down on us. It wasn’t the same as natural light, but it was better than nothing.

We walked through the lunch rush crowd, still hand in hand, as we followed the flow of traffic. “Also, Sticky has been asking around about you,” Tabitha said. “Said something about wanting to apologize directly for offending you.”

I wrinkled my nose. Sticky was the chosen name of the leader of the local Thieves Guild, the Half-Pints. One of his cutpurses had tried to steal Ferrisdae’s wand before we met up on the Top to go to the Mage’s Guild. While pretending to be a Human child, he had assaulted her by slapping her ass before running away into the sewer system between layers.

He had failed to rob her, but that was something I wasn’t going to let go unpunished. Since the Half-Pints had wanted to open a dungeon in the sewers for some time now, I had sent a message directly to Brackenhorst detailing what had happened. The Chief Dungeon Inspector was a fair man who was very protective of his employees at the Department of Dungeons. I wasn’t sure how he had settled the situation, only that he would.

“Has he been sending people to harass the Bottom’s Up?” I asked seriously.

“After the last time he tried that?” Tabitha asked with a grin. “Absolutely not. He knows better, now. They all do.”

“Just a parlay, then?”

She laughed. “You treat it like it’s going to be a hostage negotiations or something,” she said, tapping me on my chest. “Sticky came personally, had a few drinks, and just mentioned he wanted to apologize. Anything else is between you two.”

“At least he was respectful, I suppose,” I replied.

Then, I stopped. Tabitha lurched to a halt beside me. She could already see what gave me pause.

The Bottom’s Up was near the center of New Frausta, so we didn’t have to travel far to get there. Tabitha and I owned all three floors of the building. Ours was not one of the ones that connected to the Middle, which was good because I would have locked any passages upwards, anyway.

The top was still solid stone with no paint changing it from its natural color. The closer to the bottom you got, the more colorful things got. Paintings done by both professionals and amateurs were spread all over, depicting all manner of things. It was an annual event that Tabitha hosted to bring the community together. It wasn’t the art that stopped me in my tracks, but a pair of people who were looking at it.

Cojisto continually gestured towards the painting of a bear near the front door. His movements were wide and exaggerated, as they usually were, and he seemed to be explaining something to Moose, who was giving him his undivided attention.

“Surprise! Cojisto and Moose are already here,” Tabitha said, waving a hand towards them.

I frowned. “For how long?”

“They arrived earlier today,” she answered.

Sighing, I glanced at her. “I was hoping to relax today.”

“You still can,” she reassured me even as she started pulling me towards our home. “Don’t worry. It’s just a little conversation until the girls get back from school, and then we can head upstairs. You can help them with their homework and work on trivia questions while I take care of the ledgers. Does that sound good?”

“That sounds really nice, actually,” I said, already feeling the tension leaving my body.

“After dinner, perhaps we can ask Ferrisdae to babysit, and then…” Tabitha leaned in, whispering. “You can serve your matriarch. You were gone for a long month, you know.”

I had learned early on that my wife had hated being referred to as the matriarch of our family. My culture always had a woman leading from the biggest community down to the smallest family. I grew up in a matriarchal society and had been happy to bring that into our new family dynamic. Tabitha wasn’t thrilled by this revelation, but dealt with it in her own way.

Calling herself the matriarch in certain situations was one of the ways she had chosen to deal with it.

“As you wish,” I said, kissing her forehead before looking around to see if anyone was watching. There was no one, and she beamed at me before we continued on our way.