Regon
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 117084
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His name was Regon, and his home was a dark little hut at the edge of town. People always spoke of him in low tones, and Henry did not like his pregnant wife's interest in working with him one bit, but Fred pinned him with a rousing speech—"I will not sit by and let the beast that killed our children go on to destroy more families"—and he reluctantly acquiesced. She stood before Regon at their first meeting, and he evaluated her at the same time she evaluated him. He was clad all in black and had a terrible scar on the side of his face his hairstyle could not quite cover. He seemed to be in his late forties or so, and he squinted as he looked at her. "You're really not what I expected or hoped for," he said at last, bluntly. "What business has a middle-aged mother like you got getting mixed up in work like this?" The grief was still too fresh for Fred even to take offense at the term "middle-aged," and she said through gritted teeth, "You have no idea what it's like to watch children you carried and raised burn alive." He chewed the inside of his mouth, and said at length, "S'pose I don't. Beggars can't be choosers, in any case." And so they got to work. Fred spent only a couple hours with him most days in the early evening, and most of her duties involved going in to town to fetch supplies he needed. As the weeks passed, and she proved herself a reliable worker, Regon began giving her simple research tasks. He was working to develop a spell that could bypass the dragon's magic, seeing as it would easily be able to counter the standard stone-to-flesh spell, and, according to him, it was like reinventing the wheel. Fred never really felt like she was getting to know him. He wasn't a talkative fellow, and she just couldn't get a good handle on him, the knowledge he had, or even whether he was a good man. But he seemed to be her best chance to serve her kingdom, so what could she do? During the day, she just tried to be a good mother to her remaining children. The eldest two had taken up jobs in town to put bread on the table, and she was so proud of them. Regon didn't pay her much, but he did pay, and it was the first wages she'd ever earned as Hannah. She still missed the life she'd had with Henry and their entire family. She mourned her seven lost little ones every day, and often found herself weeping without warning. Months passed, and at last the city began to feel, if not like home, familiar to them. They began to make friends with their neighbors. Their eldest son began to court a girl. The family continued to talk of Hannah's pregnancy as if it were advancing normally, and she was well past exhausted on this front, but she had long stopped fighting the enchantment that kept her from pointing out the halted nature of it. Nobody else acknowledged it either. She had practically forgotten what it was like to move around with ease by this point. The pregnancy had gone on for seven years, and they had been in town for many months, when she walked into Regon's hut for work one evening, and it was darker than usual, all the curtains drawn. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust, and as she did, Regon's voice hissed from somewhere within: "Shut the door!" She did, and after a few seconds, he lit a candle, holding it near his face as he approached her, expression intense. "Hannah," he said, "you are not to make a sound. It is time to begin testing the spell. I have to know that it works before I throw it at the dragon. I have to know that it will last." Fred's nervousness mounted as he spoke, and at last she noticed what was different in the room: a squirming figure on the floor. She stared, eyes wide, and her mouth opened, though she didn't know what was about to come out of it, but Regon said sharply, "No noise, I said! He's a thief. A lowlife. Knifed a man once for a sack of coin. I got him through some of my, ah, connections. I've mentioned them before. He won't be missed, trust me." Fred was horrified all the same. The man on the floor looked quite young. "You want to test the spell on him? Can... can you reverse it?" "Most any spell is reversible as long as you understand how it was cast. There's a small chance there's some error in the coding that I won't be familiar enough with to reverse, so he may be stuck petrified, if I can even petrify him in the first place. But it's moot really. We have to finish developing this spell to save the kingdom, and we have to test it to finish developing it. And we have to have a test subject to test it. There's no way around it." The words made sense, but Fred knew this was wrong. But at the same time... if it was true that this man had stabbed someone before, had thieved, that was grounds for execution in some places anyway. Perhaps this was justice. What was his life, against the whole kingdom's? The guards probably wouldn't even care if they knew about this. But... but she couldn't help but fear that this would become a slippery slope... And she didn't entirely trust Regon. She had only his word to go on. What if this man was none of the things he said he was? At last, Fred said,
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7/15/2021 5:22:09 AM
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