The Weight of Legacy

It was ultimately the clattering that awoke him—chess pieces hit the floor, scattering. He’d arranged them on opposing edges, given the repurposed table’s lack of a designated area for them. It hadn’t been a perfect solution, but they should have remained undisturbed.

Alaric must have somehow shifted in his sleep—either that, or an earthquake struck. Worse yet, waking up like this had him straightening with a jolt, his arms—numbed from how he’d rested his head upon them—flapping against the table with enough force to unbalance it.

The table began to tip over, somehow both light enough for this to happen, and heavy enough to keep him from pushing it away as its weight sent him and his chair plummeting down. It was the slat back that hit the ground first, all but digging into Alaric’s own back, for all it had spared him a direct hit.

He had a feeling he'd be regretting this every time he stood up straight for the foreseeable future, though that was presently overshadowed by a budding headache.

As he'd gone down, the table's remaining chess pieces had rejoined their fallen brethren, with a single pawn making a pit stop on Alaric's head after flying through the air. He winced, tossing it off before pressing two fingers against the spot it had hit. Though he'd felt it as a sharp blow, his hand came back perfectly dry.

Momentarily assured he wasn't about to bleed out from a head injury, Alaric took deep, steadying breaths. He must have jerked in his sleep, somehow hitting the pieces off the table. Which had in turn cascaded into the situation he currently found himself in.

Falling asleep here had certainly not been his intention, but Alaric wasn't surprised. He'd been tired to begin with after waiting for a whole day, and at some point, he just slumped over the table and dozed off.

Ultimately, Alaric hadn't wanted to miss it if his little sister showed up for the promised chess lesson. He had completely failed to consider she might not be the most punctual, but he'd promised. Leaving the room when she might expect to find him here would be terrible, so he'd even had his meals in this studio, leaving only to take an incredibly speedy bath.

He feared that might have been what led to him failing to encounter Adelheid again—or worse yet, that she might have caught him asleep and chosen not to disturb him. The girl was too nice.

In truth, he often wondered if his family was being unfair to her. Growing up with Bernadette as a stepmother from his fifth year onwards had taught him the new lady of the house had expectations, and even as young as Alaric had been at the time, he'd struggled to believe she was in the right. Nowadays, that could just be the rebellious teen spirit everyone kept warning him about, but he would have insisted he had always thought that way.

With a groan, Alaric pushed the table away from himself. The wood it was made from was not particularly heavy, but the table itself was fairly large. It had to be, to accommodate the chess board someone had attached to its top, which had presumably been salvaged from a completely different, actual chess table. Their home had far too many bizarrely repurposed objects like that, but they never ceased to amaze Alaric.

Freed from the table, he rolled to the side and away from the fallen chair, going on to massage his legs. He feared how, under the fabric of his pants, the chair might have left an imprint on them. Whether they ached because of the fall or because of the position he'd fallen asleep in, Alaric didn’t know.

It could have been worse. Most days, he hated knowing he was on the chubbier side compared to his relatives—even if not by much—but he liked to think that extra cushioning had kept such a fall from being as bad as it could have been.

Once he was satisfied enough with how much he'd squeezed his legs—and despite his regret he didn't have a roller at hand to use on them—Alaric went through the motions of shifting into a crouching position, slowly. He stood up with similar care and stretched, paying close attention to the burning and popping sensations in case he strained anything.

Alaric wasn't paranoid, he was just careful.

Leaning down, he lifted the table and returned it to its original position. Despite his efforts, he found no splinters around, and the table looked fine. The same went for the chess pieces, as far as he could tell. After his own body, those had been what he worried about the most.

His father had a lot of the Champion Saint's journals laying around in what he undoubtedly believed were secure places, but from an early age, Alaric had known of them, courtesy of his eldest sister, Beryl. Nothing in this manor was a secret to her, from the tunnels that coursed under it to the lockets Bernadette hid under her pillow.

It had been from those journals that Alaric learned there had been many objects in Zayden's world—usually old ones—that were unknowingly crafted from hazardous materials, and it was only decades later that this was learned.

Or when they broke.

Learning of that had been among Alaric's formative experiences, and as such, he knew better than to break any of the random old things around the house. That said, he wasn't even sure what he would have done if any of the chess pieces had in fact been broken.

Run?

Good thing it hadn't come to that. Instead, he simply had to clean this up. One by one, he picked the pieces up and returned them to where he'd organized them earlier. Alaric was definitely feeling his back now.

It didn't help that he still felt somewhat tired. While the accidental nap had been ever so slightly refreshing, he could only focus on the lingering shock. That, and the grumbling of his stomach. He hadn't the faintest clue as to for how long he'd slept, and he wasn't going to check.

Alaric resettled on the chair, placing an elbow on the table—carefully!—to rest his head upon. He wasn't blind to just how long he'd waited for Adelheid and, chances were, she had probably forgotten about the chess lesson.

It sucked. Paul was a horribly inattentive student, but Adelheid usually made an honest effort. That was part of why Alaric disagreed with Bernadette’s stance on her being hopeless. He didn't dislike his stepmother, but she had narrow views.

She could acknowledge some things, like the sheer incompatibility of her methods with his and Kristoffer's progress. After a quick and woeful trial run, she'd just gotten governesses for them, and so a large percentage of Alaric's education had come from near-strangers who were paid to teach him, and nothing else.

Bernadette's own children were a different story—Alaric wouldn't be caught dead saying it aloud, but it was like that woman still lived in a fantasy world where passing on her silly noble education mattered.

Even the governesses she hired were a bit loony. He'd had to sit through hours of instructions on the proper protocols and curtsies to greet everything from foreign dignitaries to Princes.

As if Alaric were ever going to meet literally any of those.

The point of it was—beyond the mandatory internal whining that accompanied every time he thought of this—was that Alaric didn't believe poor Adelheid was that bad. She was just a curious girl who, like he suspected the rest of her siblings did, had little to no interest in the particular education her mother planned out for her. And unlike the rest, she could just run away from it whenever she wanted.

Alaric couldn't deny the little pang of jealousy that followed. Like every other mortal, he wished he had been born lucky enough to do that sort of thing. But he loved Adelheid, and it wasn't her fault that she got lucky, especially when Bernadette was the skipped generation as far as that went.

Besides, his father and stepmother kind of deserved to have that additional chaos in their lives.

Unfortunately for Alaric, said favorite chaos of his had yet to show up, and while he sat there, half pensive, half about to doze off again, his hunger was making itself known with increasing volume.

He stood up before he could think better of it, resigned to his fate. He'd feel terrible if Adelheid showed up and didn't see him there, but he was hungry.

As Alaric turned the handle, he found it wouldn't budge. He shifted it with increasing franticness, even rocking himself back and forth to see if he could pull it. Had he kept the door shut for so long as he waited that it had gotten jammed?

Yet as he shook it, the sound of muffled snickering reached him.

Alaric narrowed his eyes, letting go for a moment before growing still. Next up, he body-slammed the door with a growl.

The snickering turned to full-on laughing.

“Wave take you, Kristoffer, you think this is funny? What are you, five?”

His brother's unmistakable voice continued cackling.

Alaric shook the door over and over, finding whatever his brother had done too bothersome to overcome, time and time again. Through gritted teeth, he yelled and started kicking the door.

That achieved little beyond scuffing his boots, and after one final kick for good measure, he slapped the wooden door and stepped aside.

Running his fingers through shoulder-length hair, Alaric paced the room. He wasn't going to give his brother the satisfaction of negotiating his way out of here. But he wanted food.

The thought struck him then, the reminder that he was in that studio. He could always, as the turn of phrase went, pull a Beryl. Had he been a more superstitious person, he would have wondered how come this had happened so soon after he'd been, in fact, reminiscing about his older sister.

The only sound within the room was that of his footsteps as Alaric walked to the far end of the room, to the small space between the last shelf and the corner. He barely fit there anymore—which felt ridiculous, given he was the shortest of the older siblings.

He tapped the wooden panel, just like Beryl had shown him so long ago, seeking a crevice there. So much time had passed that he struggled to remember the exact spot, and it didn't help that he had been quite young at the time. He'd been looking up at Beryl, then.

If they met again under similar circumstances, chances were he would still have to look up to see her, actually.

At last, he felt his finger sink into something dry, almost sandy. With a sigh, he focused on it, accruing[Toll].