not gonna be...

Continued from the previous post: the life and times of Silverlock D'Alestri, post-plot.

After about twenty years, Blaine dies and Silverlock gets a bit wangsty. He hangs around the Temple of Venani a lot, and becomes close friends with the new, non-crazy Avatar. This comes in handy when Theron discovers he's allergic to bees. (I'M A BAD PERSON.)

He spends some time working for the mob, and he goes back to prostituting himself for a bit (as a free person, he can get a guild license, which he does; he maintains his standing in the Guild of Prostitution for the rest of his life, just because it's a useful thing to have, particularly when he's feeling petty and vengeful, or when he wants to make some spare cash).

Two hundred years after Blaine dies, he sees Theron in the slave markets. The first thing he notices is that Theron looks like a pretty version of Blaine; the second thing he notices is that the kid is practically seething with untapped magickal potential.

He spends the next eight years making Theron's life miserable while giving him a thorough grounding in aetherial magick. Because Theron is actually an inhuman and unnatural magickal abomination, he's quite good at manipulating aether, and is a much better mage than Silverlock once he pulls his head out of his ass long enough to learn things. Of course, Theron is also thin, sickly, and apparently deathly allergic to bees, so as long as you punch him in the face before he starts spellcasting, you're golden. Or, you know, force feed him honey.

They have sex once, and Theron never forgives him for it. Even after Theron leaves and becomes the zombie overlord of Radrezaria, Silverlock never stops being in love with him, just a little. And Theron, emotionally stunted little idiot that he is, never quite realizes this.

He spends some time as an acolyte of Joshel, and later some time as an acolyte of Azan (more than any of the other deities, those two are his patrons- he's bound to Venani and Natasha because of Blaine, but neither of them expect much from him, though he does have a brief affair with Natasha- but most people do, at least once). Mostly he does freelance magework and hangs around with the DeLavrey family, becoming a retainer of sorts. The government gives him a job in the arcane researach division of the military towards the end of the Fourth Era (he remains an independent contractor, though, as he usually has several unrelated, private projects going on at the same time as his work for Parliament). When Radrezaria implodes, the Justiciar demands an explanation; Silverlock is one of the few people with any inkling of what might have happened, and that gets the Justiciar's attention.

He changes his name to Rien when the Voyancy is destroyed; those of his associates who survived assume he does it out of mourning and respect for the dead. He actually does it because he knows the Era is coming to a close- and because he thinks Theron is finally dead. (He does stupid things for the people he loves.)

In the Fifth Era, he's still doing freelance work as an independent contractor, but he's also the Justiciar's Shadow- which basically means he's back to being an assassin, but a government sanctioned one. Thankfully, the only members of the Assassins Guild who knew him as a Guildsman who are still alive are Maddel and the Librarian, and neither of them really care that he's broken Guild law. The Guild has a phenomenally high price on his head for being an unlicensed assassin.

The Guild is much smaller in the Fifth Era- free capitalism reigns, and all of the Guilds are shrunken in their powers (except the Guild of Prostitution, curiously enough; that one's stronger than ever). The DeLavrey family is headed by a teenaged boy, and Silverlock has very little to do with him, on the Justiciar's orders.

He meets Orrin when the Dean of one of the universities offers him a position as a teacher; most mages died at the end of the Fourth Era, and the new Era brought an influx of leechmages and magicrafters. They work in related departments, although Silverlock does less "work" and more "irritating the fuck out of his superiors" than anything else. No one at the university can touch him; he's one of the strongest mages left alive, and he finds this hilariously ironic. As far as magick goes, he's very well trained, but not actually all that powerful. Most of his spellcasting is very subtle, ritualistic stuff that kills people very quickly and effectively while giving him enough of a boost to escape. Unless he's got an outside power source nearby, he's actually very limited in the sorts of magick he can do.

Orrin is nothing at all like Blaine, but his soul is the same shape and operates on the same frequencies, and that's enough for Silverlock to get attached. It helps that Orrin is cute and surprisingly well adjusted despite having been born with no soul. Orrin, after growing up in a research laboratory with Faraz, Lorreth, Lindra, and Ravi as his closest friends, has different criteria for "weird" than the rest of society and thus fins Silverlock to be just, like, one of the coolest things ever.

(It also helps that Orrin really, enthusiastically enjoys sex once he gets the hang of it, and that growing up in a research lab means he'll try anything once...or twice, or, y'know, anything is pretty good once you get used to it...)

Silverlock doesn't know if he imagines the pieces of Blaine he occasionally sees in Orrin; he also doesn't know if he likes Orrin for Orrin, or if it's just a side effect of being drugged by his soul. This is, actually, something he loses sleep over; after Blaine's death in the Fourth Era, he became a much colder, much crueler person, but after the opening of the Tower and the start of the Fifth Era, he mellows out and rejoins the rest of humanity as an active participant. (Theron is indirectly responsible for this; his situation is one of the few things in his life that Silverlock feels guilt over.)

More plot happens, but that isn't quite worked out yet. I do know that Theron gets to take down about a hundred dragons by transmuting the air in their lungs into nitrous oxide ("Dragon physiology is curiously vulnerable to nitrous oxide, you know. It puts them down for days- most make a full recovery, but about ten percent of our subjects just...never woke up. A pity, really- we lost so many good specimens that way.") because I have to let Theron be badass on occasion. It's a tragic waste of his character if I don't.

(Interesting point of trivia! Whenever Theron and Silverlock get into arguments, Silverlock usually wins by threatening to sleep with Bren and/or Stella. This is way more effective than it should be.)

I'm not sure what happens after that; he really is determined to live forever, because the world really doesn't get boring. Possibly he'll travel- either planar travel, or I'll expand the Toggle world, since I know there are other continents. I just don't know who, or what is on them. I can see him enjoying the Boffo universe, though, or possibly Uva.