We’re nearing that moment.
Turning his eyes to the scroll once again Mandrean read aloud.  “So you left Valia and returned home just prior to my spy’s arrival.  With you back in Fraylic there could be no doubt the staff and key were in Grithinshield Manor.  Linvin established himself at the head of the Grithinshield commercial empire and entered Society.  Even during a gala held at the estate, our agents could not search the grounds thoroughly.  We needed someone inside. “It was about that time Linvin moved out and opened a store in Missandor of Sartan’s Elvin County.  Eventually one of the assassins was hired on to the house staff at Grithinshield Manor where she began looking for the items.  Once they were located, it was decided his mother must die so as not to alert anyone of their theft.  Without wanting to attract attention, it was decided to slowly poison her so her death would look natural.  In the confusion of her demise it would be possible to confiscate the items and bring them to me. “When she finally passed on, however, the staff and key were gone.  Her only visitor since the items were last seen was Anvar Greenlith.  After ransacking his home the assassins followed the next logical link in the chain.  They paid a visit to Missandor to find Linvin Grithinshield.  When they arrived, his tree was unoccupied.  Another search ensued and nothing was found.  A local elf mentioned they’d left town heading south and so the team did so as well.  After finding no other reference to their trek to the south they turned north to the next nearest relative, Caritha Greenlith and her pathetic sons Bander and Rander. “They’d guessed right.  Linvin and Anvar had indeed gone there.  They recruited the Greenlith boys and set out for the Territory.  My agents once again just missed their query.  It was clear from local accounts and the information the team already knew the quartette was searching for the Red Sapphire.  Necromancer told me one of the uses of the staff was to lead its owner to the gem.  
Since I had the prize in my possession it would only be a matter of time before the staff and key were brought to me.  I recalled the assassins and alerted everyone between here and Sartan of a bounty on you…alive.” Again Mandrean addressed Linvin.  “Why you would take up with this lot is beyond me.  Your uncle, I can understand.  He at least is powerful and reportedly wise.  Why choose the Greenliths?  Your entire life was spent at odds with them.  You reportedly despise one another and it has led to fisticuffs on more than one occasion.  You would have been better off leaving them out of this, Linvin.  Then again, my people would have simply tortured them to death for information even if they were left out of the discussion.  It was a wise move to send your aunt away.  It saved her life. “So how did this pathetic, nonfunctional party defeat two goblin patrols, Blixor’s men and if I am informed correctly, a dragon?  I simply cannot believe you made it this far.  Now that you’re here with your goal in sight, it must be tearing you up inside knowing I will master the Red Sapphire and you will die immediately after.” Linvin folded his arms and set a wicked glare upon Mandrean.  “I have been given up for dead, wounded repeatedly and threatened by greater opponents than you,” Linvin said at last.  “I am still here.” “Good,” said Mandrean.  “I hoped you would not grovel for your life.  It would have done you no good, but I at least wanted to believe you could stare down death.  Now watch, as your prize becomes mine.  Necromancer, give me the key.”

Today we see the cost of all the years of war and their effect on Linvin.  It’s one of my favorite scenes because it really shows Linvin as just a man with the same flaws as any other.

The next question was whether to bring armament.  Linvin looked at the wall and beheld his long sword from Valia.  He smiled widely and took the weapon from its hanger.  The silver scabbard was decorated in elegant scroll work.  Near its opening, was an inscription.  It read, “Bestowed to General Grithinshield, by the people of Valia, for his relief of the Siege of Sarice.  May his hand never falter!” Linvin drew the sword that had served him well on many occasions.  It was the finest blade he had ever seen, short of his father’s.  Perfectly balanced, it sliced through the air with grace, rarely seen in a weapon. He swiped with it and then drew back in a defensive stance.  He then lunged and spun toward his imaginary target, finishing with a thrust of the pommel, followed by a downward stab.  The tip stuck in the floor for a brief moment before Linvin withdrew it and slashed behind him in a circular motion. Linvin was pleased to see that he had retained his fighting skills.  The movements brought memories flowing through his mind of far off days when he was known as the Defender of Valia.  He smiled again.  The expression however, was to be short lived. Out of the corner of his eye, Linvin spied a black area on the blade.  A sudden panic overtook him as he pulled the blemish closer.  He rubbed it with his finger and it did not change.  Panic turned to horror as he realized that it was dried goblin blood.  With ravenous speed he took a towel to it and scoured the blade as though his life depended on its cleanliness.  After several frantic moments, he stopped and looked for the stain again.  It was still on the metal.  The wiping, as it turned out, had spread the area across the length of the sword. “No!” cried Linvin.  “This cannot be!  It must come off!”  Try as he might, the more he worked on the blemish, the more it coated his prized possession.  Sweat dripped from his brow as he began to pant from the effort. Then he noticed a smell enter the room.  It was not a pleasant odor, but rather the sickly stench of goblin blood.  Its pungent aroma brought vivid images of death and murder to Linvin’s inflamed mind.  He could see the faces of the enemies he had slain.  One after another, they screamed as he cut them down in every conceivable fashion.  Their fallen carcasses spraying blood on Linvin like an ocean wave. He dropped the sword and screamed as visions of slain goblins filled the room.  The walls melted away and he found himself in the swamp again surrounded by living and rotting goblins. “Get out of my head!” he shouted as he grabbed its sides, but the sights persisted.  He tried to cover his eyes, only to find that his hands were drenched with the hot, viscose fluid of the fallen. Linvin stumbled into the wall of the tree and he was back in his room again, though still surrounded by enemies who drew ever closer.  “I must get it off!” he yelled, while dousing his hands in a nearby wash-basin. Stubbornly, his hands remained black.  He scrubbed with a towel until his skin began to tear from the strain.  Still, he found no reprieve. His body shook and he neared convulsions. Crawling on the floor, Linvin wedged himself against the wall.  The goblins had their weapons out and were ready to strike him down.  Linvin folded his hands under his arms to both hide them from sight and try in vain to stop his shaking. “There is no blood!  There is no blood!  There is no blood!” he wailed while rocking himself back and forth.  His enemies were practically on top of him. Linvin closed his eyes and said aloud, “I can control this. I can stop it.  There is no blood.  There is no blood.  I know there is no blood!” He opened his eyes again and he was alone in his room.  His sword lay on floor without as much as a hint of blood upon it.  Linvin withdrew his hands from under his arms and saw only his own blood coming from where he had broken the skin in his attempt to cleanse it from something that apparently was never there to begin with. He rested his head on his knees in relief.  After a considerable amount of time, he picked up the sword and placed it back in its scabbard on the wall. “I thought I was through with these visions,” he thought, as he sat on the bed.  “Will they never stop haunting me?”

A very disturbing thing just happened.  I was checking my email before writing this as I usually do just in case someone finished a book review or posted an interview to their blog and was informing me.  To my surprise there was an email sent to me and some of my contacts from my alter ego.  It did not give the email of the sender, just my name.  Then below it asked, “How are you” There was no question mark or period or anything.  It was simply written as you see.  Afterward it had a link to follow. And then underneath had my name written again.  It was addressed to me at several different servers as well as my contacts.  I didn’t open the link.  There are not many things I am sure of in this life but one of them is that I didn’t send myself an email under my other name and to multiple addresses.  I looked at it for a long while and began to get a horrible feeling.  I think I was hacked.  The first thing I did was forward a copy of the email to everyone on the receiving list and tell them not to open the email.  I don’t know what will happen but I can’t believe it’s going to rain Skittles.  Then I changed the password on my email account.  Now I’m paranoid.  Should I change my other email account?  Nothing was accessed from there.  Still, someone found my other name and used it to possibly try to hurt people with whom I associate.  Fortunately, none of them have ever heard of my alter ego.  Is there someone I should tell about this?  I reported it as phishing to Microsoft under one of their headers.  Let us assume for a moment that the person sending the fake email had a malicious intent.  I don’t think that’s much of a stretch.  They must have gone through a lot to get hold of my other name and then use it to entice my contacts to click their likely dubious link.  Why would they do that?  Why not send it as Rival?  That is clearly the name I use with these people.  Maybe they thought using the other name would give more credibility?  If that were the case then why would they send it to me?  The only reason I can think of is that the person doesn’t know that is the name of my alter ego.  It would be like sending Bruce Wayne a letter from Batman.  So where did this person get my other name?  The more I spin this around in my mind, the more it frustrates me.  Why would someone do this in the first place?  Do they want to implant a virus?  Perhaps it would be a Trojan horse to get into the person’s computer.  Who knows what they could do from there.  I feel violated and angry.  There is that part of me that says I am blowing this all out of proportion and it is really nothing but right now that voice is being drowned out by the one saying I was just hacked.  

It’s raining again. Why does it seem the weather waits until I have a day off and then rains?  It’s not all bad though.  I happen to like rain.  There was a winter I spent in Vancouver and it rained at one point or another for 28 straight days.  It was an inconvenience but a welcome replacement for snow.  When it rains the grass always looks greener and the streets are always cleaner.  As a boy I would take my tricycle out in the rain and put the front wheel in the mud between the road and my house.  Then I would spin the tire until it made a deep impression.  The next day I would go back and see that it had hardened.  When it would rain next (within a couple of days in Michigan) I would make an identical mark next to it and count how many days it rained that month.  Keeping track of it in my head seemed impossible and writing was not yet part of my repertoire.  Back then my mother didn’t work outside the home.  She had seen too many people grow up afraid of the rain and not celebrating it.  There was a huge tree outside our front door that provided a great deal of shade.  We would pack up my little lunch box and a sack for her and have rain picnics.  The ground was almost entirely dry and the rain in Michigan usually just came straight down, sometimes in a drizzle.  That meant the ground under the tree was dry and we could sit and watch the puddles grow or the cars splash the water off the road.  It was glorious.  I would run around under the tree.  All my siblings were in school, so it was just Mom and me.  We didn’t need to go anywhere or spend money or anything fancy.  She helped me appreciate the rain as nothing more than a change in the weather.  Naturally, if there was lightning we would sit inside the screen door and fight the dog for a view through the glass.  Moving to Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto) and living in a fourth floor of a condominium sort of took some of the Christopher Robbin  out of the rain experience for me but I would prop myself up on my chest of drawers to watch the cars travel down Dundas Street.  It was there that I started “Quest for the Red Sapphire” on a rainy day.  My grandparents owned a cottage on the north shore of Lake Erie in extreme southern Ontario where we moved after Mississauga and the start of Dad’s health problems.  The house was only about 20 feet back from the break wall where waves would crash during a storm.  There was a three-season porch facing the lake.   My mother would brew a pot of tea and we would sit on swings and watch wind, lightning and 10 foot waves crash outside.  When the waves hit the wall the water would shoot up like in the air as high as the second floor of the house.  As we sipped our tea she would sometimes sing (her voice was opera quality and her major in college) or I would tell her a part of one of my books.  She was fascinated by the details and always wanted to know more.  Sometimes the rest of the family would join us and then the singing and my book telling would stop.  No one else seemed interested in her singing or my stories but we welcomed them all the same.  Everyone would tell funny stories and occasionally sad ones but we would all marvel at these tremendous storms that must have terrified sailors while we sat on our swings and drank our tea.  So you see, the pitter patter of rain drops outside my window today is nothing more than an old friend stopping by.