Eisenstern 1.9
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I gained a lot of weight during pregnancy. Most wouldn’t be surprised, and I shouldn’t have been either. I wasn’t. What I was, is annoyed. It takes a lot of work to keep my weight down into a healthy range, and unfortunately there’s something about my stocky build that makes me look very fat very quick. That’s considering all of the muscle that happens to be under there, which is quite a lot.
Taking morning jogs seemed to be the most logical way of dealing with it. Drake is lucky, he lives on a diet of plasma fruit. Nobody’s ever gotten fat from plasma fruit. Or at least, nobody I know.
While I spend my mornings running around Mt. Komorebi, Drake stays home and keeps an eye on Bryn. She sleeps until mid-morning most of the time, leaving me free to spend my mornings however I want, and usually that’s playing some stupid video game or another. One thing about video games, though, they may not turn you violent necessarily, but they certainly don’t help with attempts at weight loss.
I feel like there’s probably something more concerning to be worried about, eh.
Drake remains quite wonderful with Bryn, and she seems to utterly adore him. It occurred to me more than once, that she seems to adore him more than me, but I’m always rushing off to a class or doing homework or working on a term paper. I don’t like how my schooling eats all of my time up and I have none left for her, but all of this is for her in the first place. I’m laying the groundwork, the bits and pieces she’ll use someday to build something greater for herself and her children after her.
I may still be here to see that. I may not. I haven’t put too much thought into it, but death, for spellcasters, is nothing to be terribly frightened of. It’s a temporary affliction, a momentary bump in the road, and perhaps it’d be best if I stayed. Not as a direct overseer of the line of course, just someone watching out for them from a distance. Perhaps a very large distance…
I still think to myself sometimes, ‘Ezio what are you doing?’ This is really more of Morgyn’s thing than mine. I’m the one burying my head in books and pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist, not the one establishing legacies and laying foundations for the future of another powerful lineage to guide spellcasters. And perhaps the fact that there are so few left should be a hint I likely won’t manage to make this experiment, if you would, last for very long.
Still, I should try. Someone should always try, even if their crazy ideas really do seem too crazy to make it. I often find that the craziest ideas turn out the best. If you think to yourself, ‘that’s crazy, it’ll never work,’ that’s why it will.
Taking care of a toddler is time-consuming and occasionally hair-tearingly frustrating work. But I’ve found, so far, that my little Brynja is about as bright as her dad and auncle. I try to treat her like a little human, because she is. I explain things to her that most probably wouldn’t, because they’re children and won’t understand, or so they think. Kids understand more than people assume they do, but I certainly wouldn’t go around saying that at a PTA meeting.
My life has changed so notably, so jarringly, since I left magic realm, but I don’t have any regrets. I never saw my life going in the direction it has, but I’ve not found that it’s unpleasant to me, or that I feel it unfortunate. Even as I’m out here mostly on my own, I don’t feel alone all the same. I’ve had plenty of people around me supporting me, even if begrudgingly, isn’t that right Morgyn?
There was a time, of course, that I couldn’t have ever imagined my life without Morgyn somewhere in it. But our pathways diverged and went separate ways, and now it feels like we’re drifting further and further apart. I still feel like we’re close, at least in the sense that we’re still twins and no matter what Morgyn does that I don’t, where our pathways lead us, we’ll always be tied to one another. When Morgyn finds a few hours to come by and visit, it always feels like we’ve never been apart in the first place.
But even as I want to believe that, things are so different now, for both of us, that it’s difficult to. Now I’m in the business of teaching small children how to talk and potty on a chair like a big kid. I don’t know how our parents managed to do this before us, but they did, and I am managing, even if it feels like I’m drowning.
I didn’t expect to enjoy being a parent, but she’s become my entire world. Words cannot properly express how much I love my little girl, how much of a better person I feel like she’s pushed me to become, and how glad I am that she chose me. She was quite well determined to be born, given I wasn’t even supposed to be able to have children in the first place and yet here she is.
The only thing to do now is to keep moving forward and hope that I’m going in the right direction. It doesn’t seem like enough. It feels like I should be able to do more than just move forward and hope I’m on the right path, not making the worst mistakes of my or Bryn’s life. But maybe every parent has that feeling at some point or another, that maybe they’re doing things the wrong way.
In any case, knowing that someday I’ll be leaving my descendants to handle matters on their own, I decided to get a kitten. I wanted to get one early, so that Bryn and the cat could grow up together. I had a cat like that once before, a long time ago when I was Bryn’s age. But unfortunately, he disappeared one day. I’ve missed the companionship, but, as that’s proven already, keeping pets in magic realm wasn’t exactly something that was easy to do, unless you were keeping a familiar animal. I was too young at the time to have bonded the cat to me, and it was just as well.
I’ve named this little kitten Diaval, and when I leave, I’ll put the house and the legacy in Diaval’s hands. He’ll be my familiar someday, and when I go, I’ll pass him on to the next in line, on and on down the heirs. There are ways of making even cats last seemingly forever, and I’m not exactly what one would call a stranger to those ways.
There’s just one thing left…
Graduation snuck up on me very quickly, but I’ve finally done it. It was a long and difficult road to get there, but with my new degree (with honours!) I’ll be able to find a very well-paying job and begin at a very high ranking almost immediately. With that, I can further solidify the monetary foundation my line will need to do well in the future, and with any luck, they’ll never need to fall back on savings or anything like that.
But who knows? Maybe my descendants will be entrepreneurs and need a decent sum of money to start a new business or something. That might be nice to see. Gaining an influential foothold into human society as well as spellcaster might go a long way towards bridging the differences between humans and spellcasters, if ever there was a chance of doing that at all. (Truth be told, I’m not entirely certain. There’s bad blood on both sides.)
It’s not like I expect my being an engineer would somehow change anyone’s life, and certainly it shouldn’t make much of a difference in bolstering the spellcaster race. But some things, I’ve found, don’t have anything to do with bolstering or preserving the spellcaster race. Truthfully, I should have better luck fixing what’s wrong in magic realm by figuring out how to stop the vortex, but we’ve been trying to do that for hundreds of years now. I figure if that was going to happen, it’d have happened a long time ago.
On the other hand, it’s possible we don’t have the technology and the scientific knowledge to be able to understand the nature of the vortex yet. In which case, maybe I’m following the right pathway on accident.
I have more time for Bryn, now. She’s never been a terribly finicky child and hasn’t minded my absence as much as she could’ve (she’s quite content to stay with Drake anymore), but it’s nice to finally have more time to spend with her. After all, everything I’m doing is for her, and it seems somewhat counterproductive to spend all that time laying groundwork and foundations instead of spending it with her.
Being a father wasn’t something that was anywhere on my list of things to do. I had no interest in having children, being quite content to stick to my science and research instead. If one had told me a few years ago that I’d be here one day, I would’ve called that individual a liar. I’ll get used to it eventually, I’m sure. Maybe right around when Bryn’s having kids of her own.
Oh, that’s a weird thought.
Drake and I’s relationship has been going unbelievably well. He’s kind, and strangely gentle, still very good with Bryn. He is, in a sense, my centre, and I’m glad I met him. When everything feels like it’s just a little too much to deal with, Drake’s always there to bring me back down and remind me to take things one day at a time and not get too ahead of myself. I wonder from time to time how life would’ve gone, if I’d followed the interest in getting closer to Caleb, but I don’t regret my choices. Drake is good to me, and Bryn, and I can’t imagine life any other way.
Sometimes I think about marriage, and what that’d mean for us, but I don’t think anything would change at all. We’d still be as close as we are now. Marriage is just an official thing to tell everyone else what we already know. However, it’s possible Drake doesn’t see it the same way. He’s not very open about certain things, and the topic has never come up. Maybe I should ask him how he feels and what he thinks. A marriage takes two people, after all, and I can’t fairly make all the decisions for us both.
But, if marriage is what he wants, I won’t mind it. I’ve never been against the idea, it’s just not something I see as necessary.
He’d be taking my name though.
Bryn’s getting too big to play with like this anymore, but I still keep doing it, because she’s precious and I’ve found it’s quite difficult to tell her no. Her gleeful little giggles are contagious. “Daddy, plane!” she’ll squeal, and as we spin around across the floor, her giggling and squealing in delight eventually brings a smile to my face. Even if she’s too heavy to be doing that with and my joints are going to scream in agony for a few hours, even if my back starts hurting and I end up with bruises in places where little elbows and knees have jabbed me, that few minutes of her giggling is worth it.
Yeah… I always regret it a little at the end, but she’s young and delighted by everything, and I don’t want to smother her spirit. I want to grow it.
“Daddy, hug,” Bryn says, her little hands reaching up and resting against my knees.
I smile, kneeling down and hugging her like she asked. My tiny little blessing I didn’t know I was missing.
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