Taylor

The clubhouse was located in the center of the course, surrounded by the "front nine" that everyone could see. Players who finished the first nine baskets received a clue, and, if they solved a puzzle, the secret "back nine" was revealed to them. The safety path led straight to the clubhouse, or as straight as anything ever was in Tanglewood, so the local vendors could come and go with supplies. The town wanted to run special events, using the space to showcase local cuisine and sell Tanglewood-themed gear. Part of the proceeds would go to the designer and maintainer of the course.

More revenue streams were always welcome.

At the moment, the clubhouse was empty except for Otis's assault team. They were shackled and sleeping. By the time Amos was done with them, none were seriously hurt.

Taylor sat in a chair at the far end of the room, his robes turned to green and white, a wreath of fragrant evergreen boughs resting on his head. His mask was made of unpainted wood. His sword leaned against the chair. He looked like some woodland spirit lord in his hunting lodge, ready to preside over a feast.

Otis knelt before him, at a respectful distance, his hands cuffed to a broad leather belt around his waist. Briallen, wearing her paladin squire's uniform, stood over the prisoner. Amos, the Healer who wouldn't fight, stood far to one side, close enough to watch the proceedings but not be a part of them.

"You didn't kill him." Briallen was smiling.

"Don't look so happy about it. I'm not sure yet if I'm making the right decision. And he's not in jail yet."

"It's unfortunate that Knexenk isn't talking to church personnel. Normally, I would get a quest for transporting the prisoners, especially if the case involved fighting corruption, and the experience penalties would be your best assurance that I wasn't doing anything underhanded. I guess you'll have to trust me."

"A quest is a good idea. Let me think." The mask turned aside for a few moments before returning its focus to Briallen.

"Wait!" Otis spoke for the first time since being crushed half to death. He was unconscious while he was being healed and shackled, and he'd only been awake for a few minutes. Some disorientation was to be expected.

"Wait," he said again, lower, "don't punish my men. They trusted me because we fought together in Restoration, and I used my class abilities to keep them in line. Especially on this mission. I'll confess to everything if you let them go."

"This is a surprise," said Taylor. "It almost sounds selfless."

"A civilian wouldn't understand. We served together for a long time. We've been through battles together."

"I understand the bond between comrades in arms just fine. What surprises me is that you care about anyone else at all. I didn't think you had it in you. Especially after what I saw today."

"You were watching the whole time." Otis raised his head. "I used to love the IEF. We wore the same uniform. We fought for the same things. Even after everything I've done … they're my people, and I'm responsible for them. Whatever crimes they committed were on my orders. I used my leadership skills to control them. I thought it would be okay because we'd never get caught and they'd get paid. It would have been fine, but the church got involved."

Taylor sneered through his mask. "Aren't the citizens of Mourne your people? Isn't your family your people? You had a son whose mother died giving birth to him. Where was your concern when he needed you?"

Otis shrugged. "Even if they were more important to me, I couldn't do anything about my family now. Or for the town. But I can do something for them." Otis looked over his shoulder at the sleeping forms. "I know my life is over, but theirs shouldn't be."

"How touching. But it isn't up to me. I'm letting the church have you. Briallen, I offer you this quest. Deliver Otis d'Mourne and his seven conspirators to a Justicar of the Giving Goddess Church within ten days, dead or alive. Failure will incur significant class penalties. Do you accept?"

Briallen read the quest as it appeared in her class, then looked at him in shock. "You're clearing my way to Paladin?"

"That's not really within my power. But by specifying a high penalty … "

"… Knexenk balanced that with a corresponding reward."

"I'm sure there were other factors at play. Knexenk wouldn't offer you Paladin unless you met the criteria."

"But how did you give me a quest at all? The church isn't getting them."

"Good question." Taylor shrugged the question aside. "I'd like to have a private conversation with Otis. Could you bring him closer, please?" Surprisingly, Briallen let the non-answer go without comment and dragged the man forward.

With Otis positioned almost at his feet and a privacy barrier set up by Saria's magic, Taylor removed his mask and set it aside. He watched Otis's expression carefully for signs of increased hate or aggression. If his enchanted prayer beads were altering his mana as designed, then Otis shouldn't feel any more hostile than he already did. It was better to test them on an enemy than a friend, as failure wouldn't cost him anything important. This was the first time in years that Taylor purposely exposed his face to someone susceptible to his curse.

Otis stared hard at Taylor's face.

"Well? Do you feel any new surges of hostility, or is it about the same?"

"You look just like her."

"I know this already. But do you feel any increased hostility?"

"I still want to kill you. Does that count?"

"This is the only time we'll ever get to have a conversation, and that's all you have to say to me?"

The former colonel's face twisted in disgust. "Looking at her face on you is an abomination. I will always hate what you did to her. That will never change, so your curse doesn't work on me." When Taylor didn't move to replace the mask, Otis looked at the floor. "She was the only good thing about me. I knew it, her friends knew it, everybody but Sybil knew it. When I look at you, all I see is someone I want to kill. I've imagined it every day. So if you're holding out for repentance, you can stop."

Taylor surprised both of them by laughing.

"I'm almost relieved! For a minute, I thought you'd grown a conscience." He put his mask back on. "Are you able to check your class with the shackles on?"

Otis frowned in concentration. "Yes." He looked up at Taylor in shock. "What did you do to me? What gives you the right to take my class?" He strained against his restraints, and his voice rose. "What are these titles?"

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I think Filicidal speaks for itself. Don't you? Nobody should ever trust you around children. The other one is … more of a curse, really. It's not easy to tinker with someone's class directly, but for you, I was willing to give it a shot. Do you like how it turned out?"

"Treasonous? Who are you to call me a traitor?" He read the description out loud. "Extreme penalties while attempting to gain another's trust. I'm no traitor!"

Otis tried to stand, but felt himself grabbed by an invisible fist and pressed flat to the ground, cheek on the floor, debased in front of the hated proxy.

Taylor's words ground out in a cold rage. "Name one person you haven't betrayed. The IEF, your teammates, your new wife, even the late wife you supposedly loved: you betrayed them all. The title is pinned, like Oathbreaker." The new title could not be hidden, even from the most basic Appraise Person skill.

"You can't do this!" Otis shouted from the floor. "You don't have the right!"

"You gave me the right when you tried to kill me and failed! Twice! We both know who gets to make the rules, and this is my rule for you: You don't get to live without people knowing what you are!"

He nodded to Saria to dispel the privacy barrier and let Briallen take Otis away. Taylor hoped it was the last time he ever had to see the man.

Later, as the day grew lighter and the snow stopped falling, Taylor and the Army of Lightness sat on the clubhouse patio under magic heating lamps, dining on boxed lunches from Nelis's farm. Spirits cavorted on the snowy disc course. Interestingly, Taylor didn't get any occupation experience for summoning spirits to play on his course, but he did get a small amount for Kasper and Blake, and about ten times that much for Nelis. During the hours Briallen, Otis, and the assault team were on his course, he had received a steady flow of experience.

Apparently, the course belonged to him in some profound, metaphysical way. It didn't matter if visitors played; just being on the grounds was enough. By shaping it, attaching quests to it, and sticking the "Dark Lord" moniker on it, Taylor had declared himself master of the space. Some leadership titles had similar abilities, but only at the third tier and above.

The occupation bonus suggested interesting questions. Were there other possible effects he didn't know about yet? Could he attach a course to his personal dimension? Could he spy on his courses from a distance? Would he get occupation bonuses for building a town and having high-level people move in? How large a territory could he claim, and what determined the limits?

"He's not eating," observed Jalil.

"He's so far away," Tanya whispered in mock awe, "we might never get him back!"

"He's thinking," Saria clarified with a smile, "which is usually a prelude to something strange."

Premi shouldered him. "Come back!"

"Sorry," Taylor said with a smile at his friends, "what were you saying?"

Premi cleared her throat. "I was trying to ask how you gave that terrible human two titles."

"It was pretty easy. While Otis was waking up, I nudged his class with a strong opinion about the kind of person he is. While the titles formed, I tried to make them both unhideable, but I only got one of them. I'm happy enough with the results."

"Right." Premi squinted her dwarven eyes. "Why would Otis's class care what you think?"

"Imagine Knexenk as a mirror. We mostly know what we're going to see before we look in the mirror. It sometimes gives us access to additional details about what our skills can do, or paths we can choose, or quests we can take. It quantifies things that would be hard for us to put numbers to. But mostly, it tells us what we already know."

"So you suggested to Otis's class that filicide and treason were major parts of his personality," Premi followed, "but it only stuck because Otis knows it's true."

Taylor nodded. "Exactly. I pointed out what he already knows. That's why it worked."

"So how did you make Treasonous unhideable?"

"That's a more difficult topic." Taylor felt he shouldn't try to explain the Mi'iri language, or that it let him probe the class system in odd ways. "I'd rather hold off on saying anything until I have a better understanding myself."

Tanglewood

By the next day, the spirits had had their fun and gone home. The first group of disk kin had yet to arrive, so there was a brief window of time when the locals had the course to themselves. They were playing in groups of three and four, at various stages of the front nine. An odd-looking group from Wokehaad Farms took their place at the start of the course.

"Can you hit it from here?" Sakeasi, the local Great Spirit, was green-skinned and had four strong arms. "It's pretty far."

Kasper limbered up his shoulders. It was a long throw, but he wasn't going to let some spirit taunt him, not even a powerful one. "I got it, gramps."

Nelis twirled a disk on his fingers. "I watched him build the clubhouse, so I know it's there. But I can't catch a trace of it."

Blake shaded his eyes against the glare of sunlight on snow and tried to spot a hint of the missing building.

"Heh!" The wolfkin pointed at his eyes and did his best Taylor impression. "Sensory enhancements both strengthen and extend."

He backed up several steps from the wooden line that marked the start of the first basket, but he wasn't aiming for it. "Here I go!"

He charged the line and leaped. When he was two feet off the ground, he threw his disk forehand at a steep upward angle. The disk zoomed up and plummeted, shot side to side across the width of the gulch, hovered, and dropped into an invisible basket.

"Impressive," admitted Sakeasi.

Much that was hidden was revealed. The air acquired subtle colors and contours, outlining the folds of space that made Tanglewood such a challenging course. More trees appeared, and a second course mixed in with the first. The clubhouse was at the end of the first nine holes, and the basket Kasper hit in a single throw was right in front of the patio.

The clue to the second course was the existence of that basket, along with a barely perceptible path of shimmering air extending back to the starting line of the first hole. Only those who finished the first nine baskets could see the telltale path.

In some ways, seeing the course clearly made it harder. Shortcuts and new paths were apparent, but there was too much visual information, and it was easy to get lost. The spatial obstacles on the "back nine" were brutal. One was a thirty-foot-wide vortex that contained five hundred feet of linear space curled up like a cinnamon roll. If a disk fell into it, the player was better off taking penalties than trying to dig their way out.

Some areas folded in on themselves, but could be entered from any direction. The traps only had one or two ways out, and if a person couldn't see them, they could get stuck inside them forever. That's what gave the course a hazard level of two.

Nelis lined up to tackle basket ten, using a special disk made of lightweight fiber. He liked to claim it could fly farther than any other disk.

"No cheating this time," Sakeasi reminded him.

Kasper joined in. "Yeah! Making the grass move your disk is out of bounds!"

"There's no rule against it," opined the maestro, "but I promise not to enchant any plants for the duration of this game."

His disk sailed gently through a narrow torus that added fifty feet to his throw, but drifted into a line where down became up, and his disk came to rest at the top of a very tall tree. With a barely perceptible shake, the limbs dislodged the disk, and it tumbled down to the lowest branches, which made a blatant catch and threw the disk another thirty feet toward the basket.

"You did it again!" Kasper was agast.

"You're a scoundrel, Nelis. I'm shocked." Sakeasi tossed his disk from hand to hand, trying to decide which of the four to use.

"I'm keeping my promise. I haven't given any commands to any plants."

Kasper wasn't buying it. "Yeah, today maybe! But who helped him build it? And who knows everything about trees? Meet any good tree wizards lately? Hmmm?"

Nelis laughed at the accusation. "You know how Taylor is. He gets carried away and starts throwing magic right and left. Weird things happen. There could be a dozen helpful trees on the back nine. It's only natural they would favor the local orchardist. You can't blame me for his unfair course."

"Of course not." Sakeasi's throw buzzed through the air, taking the long but safe route, through a corkscrew that reflected the same patch of sky from a hundred angles, and landed near the basket. "It's mere happenstance."

"Exactly!"

"Kasper!" Taylor appeared from nowhere, with Saria next to him. He had his satchel slung across his shoulder. "I'm heading out."

The wolfkin rushed him and clung to his waist while Taylor rubbed his head. "I should be in Estfold month after next, so we should see each other soon. Do your best in school. And say hi to Tristan for me."

"I want to go with you," mumbled Kasper.

"I know. But I can't teach you everything you need to know, and some of the places I'm going are too dangerous for you."

"Promise you'll come back?"

"Yes, I promise. And I'll have lots of stories to tell."

Blake put an affectionate hand on Kasper's shoulder. "We all look forward to your return, Young Master. If you decide to settle down for a while, please remember us."

Taylor was caught off guard. It was more words than he could remember Blake ever stringing together at one time.

"I won't forget anyone. Say hello to Cook and Chambers for me."

Blake only nodded, having already spent his word allotment for the day.

Taylor and Saria left by crossing one of Tanglewood's dimensional folds. They vanished without a trace, as thoroughly as any dark lord was wont to do.

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