In the 1210's, the young baron and Head Tutor of the Mages found himself wandering around the Leithe picking herbs and obsessing to himself. He was not faring well in battle and his own history was beginning to fray around the edges.
One day, his beloved older mage, Jalice, called him over to visit her home in Parrius. "I have something to tell you," she said. He rode his white dragon down the highway and joined Jalice, now the Guildmaster of the Enchanters Guild, for a lunch. When they finished eating, Jalice gently relayed her own story,
which included a shocking revelation.
It sent Algernon into a tailspin. His beloved parents had not been his real parents, and his real parents were long dead and unknowable to him. His mother an animist priestess, and his father an enchanter, both murdered right in front of his older sister, Jalice. As much as he rejoiced, he also felt betrayed and orphaned all over again.
The bitterness expanded to his own guild, whose oldest and best warriors retired into glorious sunsets leaving younger mages behind untrained and uninspired. One day, Algernon found the great Magelord Tragnarion's moose wandering the streets of Mercinae - and indication that the great one had popped in, probably to buy cooking oil or other provisions from the shops, and then go back into hermitage. "Here I am, cleaning up moose shit and protecting his steed," Algernon thought with irritation. "Where is he?"
His counsels with India showed him that she, too, had been underestimated and left behind by the great mage fighters. She was an excellent administrator and teacher of youth, and a good friend to him, as well as a full-hearted mage who frequently apologized for not being a better warrior and teacher for him at the level he reached. Teylos faded back into retirement. Briefly, Alkadar returned to the land and prepared himself to re-enter the fray as the great mage warrior he once was, only to shrug it off and return to the glorious sunset from which he visited. And he rarely thought of Fistandantilus anymore - the mage who had most inspired him at the beginning.
There were many rough days, with an emboldened necromancers guild attacking Mercinaeans, and his old friend Furion growing into a powerful and deadly sorcerer, and Algernon realized as he gazed at his mashed-up face in the Leithe one day that he had been broken. He could not be a mage anymore. He tried to resign as Head Tutor, and India turned down the resignation. He spoke to Apollo, his patron, and Apollo urged him to stick with it. These entreaties did not carry far, and one day in the year 1213, after he was woken from his sleep by a Thakrian team and savagely beaten, he cursed all of the mage heros who had taken their trophies and their knowledge and vanished, leaving nothing behind when their city needed them or at least their wisdom and teaching.
And he stopped for a drink, in a daze, at a tavern he had rarely visited even though it was right there in his own city. Kiri, the serving girl, made a face but served him a beer. And Algernon took a stool next to a crowd that was quietly chatting there. August, his fellow baron. Silk. And Narissa.
August asked him how he was doing and Algernon said, "Well, I am unemployed."
Narissa arched an eyebrow and said, "Unemployed!"
The cold beer felt good. He said, "I suppose I should open the paper and start looking for an honest profession." He took another refreshing quarter of his pint. "But you know, I'm not sure I desire an honest profession."
And everyone else in the pub smiled.
