The Protagonist Speaks

Dear readers, tonight with us is a learned temple divine and sorcerer — and the chaos demon he possesses. They are here to tell us about their complex relationship, as Penric navigates a world — and an occupation — he wasn’t prepared for, and Desdemona tries to keep him alive.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

Penric: I was born seventh child of my family at Jurald Court, in the valley of the Greenwell in the Cantons.  My father was the baron there.  Someone once offended me by calling my home a fortified farmhouse, but, really… he wasn’t wrong.  Looking back, it was a rather idyllic childhood, running all over the mountains, learning to ride and hunt with a bow or traplines, haying in the summer—everyone turned out for that, from the lord on down.  Butchering livestock in the fall, which proved oddly useful later when I came to teach human anatomy to the Mother goddess’s medical students in Martensbridge. And, ah, to certain tasks in support of Des.  Not many books at Jurald Court, though.

Des, as a chaos demon of the Bastard god, how would you even answer that question?  I mean… can you remember being born as an elemental?  Is it even being born?

Desdemona: [the sense of a snort—if you can call it that in a bodiless demon]:  Of course I don’t remember emerging from the Bastard’s hell.  It’s a place of chaos.  Neither memory nor any other kind of form can exist there in the roiling white boil.  I suppose my earliest memory is of being in—or being, hardly a difference at that stage—the wild mare in the peninsular mountains of Cedonia.  Her death, now, that I remember, and jumping to the lioness that killed and ate her.  Then the first human, brave Sugane the village woman, who speared the lioness and gave me my first human language to think in.  And a fear of heights.  Then nine more women after her.  All their childhoods are but borrowed memories.  Their deaths, though… in two centuries, I had twelve deaths, and no births.  Think on that, my sweet holy necromancer.

Pen: Oh, I do.  Or you do.  It’s getting harder to tell our thoughts apart, anymore.

Des: Welcome to my world.

What did you first think when you two met?

Pen:  I was bewildered.  Nineteen years old, riding to what I thought was going to be my betrothal.  I mean, I didn’t realize this dying old woman on the roadside I’d stopped to try to help was a Temple sorceress.  I’d never even met a sorcerer before.

Des:  We thought you were the best human in range to jump to—though there wasn’t much choice in the moment.  The least rigid mind, which mattered… well, you know how much it matters now.  Incandescent wits, trapped under the stone of your benighted rural life.  Also [the sense of a slight, embarrassed cough] by far the prettiest.

Pen: [Ignores this.  Though somewhat flattered by the “incandescent wits” bit.]

What do you do now?

Pen: As a youth, I certainly never expected to become a learned Temple divine, seminary trained.  Five times over, counting my own training after I contracted Des, and that of four Temple sorceresses who had her before me.  And three times trained for a physician, mine and two learned women likewise, though that… did not go well.

Des: [snorts, but charitably makes no comment.  Some wounds do not bear touching.]

Pen: The five new languages Des gifted me with from her prior humans have allowed me much comfortable work as a translator.  Beyond that, whatever tasks my Temple superiors or my secular authorities request.  Or my god, Fifth and White.  As a sworn servant to the god of mischance, I never know what distressed persons or problems may next be given into my hands.  “No Hands But Ours”, as the motto of my Order says.   

Des:  Me, I try to keep this fool alive.  He—and the Temple and the secular lords and most of all the god—don’t make it easy.