I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
It's not just to another world he goes, but another time. He feels it, or maybe he just imagines he does – the faint brush of years rewinding. It’s a wish he’s made himself, many a time – that he could wind back the clock, return to certain places, do it over again.
He looks around, trying to get his bearings. The land has a hint of familiarity, but he struggles to place it – he’s never been to either of the rogue kingdoms, and had only walked through the ruins briefly, had found them unsettling.
The chaos, too, is distracting – he steels himself as a rogue warrior barrels toward him, but in the end the fighter passes through as if Sleaze was a ghost. He feels a brief warmth, and then, nothing. There’s a fleeting relief as he realizes that he does not seem to matter to those fighting – he had been afraid, for a moment, that they had been brought here to fight, a task he was ill-suited for.
The sprites speak, then – tell of the divided world, and the task at hand. Sleaze sighs, for he is no more a diplomat than he is a fighter. Truth is, Sleaze has little going for him, yet he keeps being called – compelled? – on these missions, keeps tiptoeing up to madness as he lives through reality after reality, world after world, waiting for the day when everything fractures. He can feel it sometimes, something sloshing about in him, like water filling a vessel. And yet he keeps opening himself, keeps letting these worlds pour in, and surely soon they will overflow and he will drown in them.
(He had almost drowned, in one of those worlds. The first one, the catalyst. Maybe that had marked him as easy prey for everything that came after.)
They are given a mystery to solve – why the rift?
The others – there are others, but no one Sleaze knows, no one who might have cause to know him – speak. Magic forces, ruler strife, different times. His head spins at it. Why was he called here? No warrior, no diplomat, no sleuth. Just a stupid, stupid boy thrown again into some fractured world.
Around him, they ask questions. Show me this, tell me that. He should ask his own.
He thinks of his father. Of the force that drove so many of his father’s foolish choices.
“Was there ever a time they loved one another?” he asks, finally, “or did someone spurn the other? War is so often fought over a slight to ego.”
He says as if he knows this. He’s loved but once, and that man slipped away, and Sleaze did not fight wars for him, had simply let him go.
Sleaze
