Wherever It Drew

Irec had never shown much interest in the circumstances of his own life. 

He lived well, on high in Peyr, he came from a good family. He married at a young age, just as his herbalism practice was rising to the forefront on the upper decks of the city. His wife was named Estrid, and she was not anybody he had known well before pulling her up to be courted but she had an insistent way about her and he had not needed much convincing. They had a baby, and named that baby Mepka. All the while, he followed along the pull of obligation wherever it drew.

More often than he would have liked, it drew him in the direction of the temple. He was a conservator. Devout, in his own way, though he had not considered with any particular clarity what it would be like to be any other way. His father had urged him into a position as a steward, and so he bore the iron axe when it was required of him.

It was not so bad a detail for him to take, walking priestly nobles through the muck. The swamp was surely as repulsive to him as any other conservator, there was no doubt to the fact that he preferred his greenhouse, but traipsing through gave him time to muse on his work and the opportunity to scout out new growths from which to harvest for his alchemy. Poultice and potions, elixirs and brews. Herbs to heal and herbs to cure. He would pass the time, cataloguing them in his mind. In those rare moments when the fen would rise up, ambush them, he flailed wildly and prayed that the others would take care of the threat. They always did.

He’d return home to Peyr in those days, in Mepka’s childhood, and find himself in an entirely new world. Estrid was her usual excitable self, but his daughter seemed to grow in the blink of an eye. She was often surprising to him, not because he held her adolescent mind in any particularly high esteem but rather because the spans between which he took the time to engage her grew long.

Foraging was the exception. Mepka took to the swamp young, and after the first time he brought her out to collect herbs with him he could not stop her from begging to come with each time he did.

He was happy to meet her on the ground he felt solid on. She was a font of questions, and so by those excursions he would pour his singular knowledge out into her. Leaves and berries, stems and roots. Herbs to heal and herbs to cure. He never felt closer to her than during those callow days, stomping around the swamp.

She passed them quickly, though, or at least it seemed so to Irec. First she would just leave his sight momentarily, drawn away by a hook of distraction while he was busy inspecting one specimen or another. Then she was showing intentionality, gone for an hour or so at a time, taking in the surroundings at a pace of curiosity that he could not match. It was not long before she was tracking off for excursions entirely of her own, days where he was in the city and she had her quarterstaff in hand ready to face the swamp unescorted. She could defend herself if need be, she had done it before.

He didn’t worry. He didn’t feel about it at all, really. She was his daughter, and like his wife and his church and his city and every other comfort in his life he supposed that she would stay as she was forever.