"The King is Dead, long live the King!"

In many ways, the Quest started with the death of my father. Our relationship was emotionally brutal, with endless attempts to demean who I was in a cruelty of humor.  Despite this, he had supported me with his wealth, supporting me with housing and a meager stipend to pay for basic expenses.  When he died, he had used his brilliance with finance to provide for his family in the only way he really knew how, granting us each a sizeable inheritance of one million dollars apiece.

I didn’t have full control of the money.  It was dispensed to me, the result of an intricacy of investments within the labyrinth of finance of which he was a master.  I felt a Prince of the city suddenly thrust into the position of King.

Yet I was not a King.  I was not even truly a Knight.  I was untempered chaos, drowning in the rampage of shifting qualities that was my blessing and burden.  In this I remembered a line from the movie “Dragonheart”, the one be a better King than their father.  At the time, I had no idea what that meant.

It was here that I made a crucial decision.  While I had loved the roleplaying games as a childe, I longed for something deeper.  I was not content with simply envisioning myself in a magical world, I wanted the real thing.  That magic was real I had no doubt for my existence had been defined by the uncontrolled shifting between the very pages of reality itself, yet I strove for something deeper.

Like the paladin I had played in the worlds of story, I longed to be in service to a noble cause.  To something larger than myself, using my powers as they were in service to something larger than myself.

In that moment, I left the tabletop, letting go of the roleplaying of an imagined reality, and committed myself to the journey to find the magical world.

And I was determined to be a greater king than my father.

Yet I was not a king. In so many ways i’d felt like some kind of hidden seer, a prince gifted with madness and majesty who lived in a tower.