"You knew it was coming? You fed off of it? You had a hand in it? I think that's good enough. I didn't build Golben with my own hands, so I didn't create it? Trust me, duckling, I think it's well past time either of us duck responsibility for what we've done." Though, then, there was a little, wane smile. Everything was wane with him due to his physical state but this had an emotional gauntness to it as well. "It was your nature though, right? We can understand it without absolving ourselves. That's my third story though. You'll break yours into three. Intersperse it."
He took the initiative in their walking now. He'd make her stronger in telling his stories, but she couldn't work her magic unless she was telling. He'd shape the tone of this, would encase her stories in her own. She seemed to think that the actual witchcraft she used was what impacted the world the most. He meant to prove her wrong even if it meant letting her tell a story and thus cast a spell upon him. She would tell him her own making and thus he would gain the thread necessary to unravel her story and herself.
"You've heard some of it from Giuseppe, no? From me too. Sold in the womb to a monastery like none even you have seen. Raised to administrate, to be a cog in a machine. Learned of something outside through books, stories. They kept them there as a way to understand cultural trends and their impact on behavior. I was nine when I started reading them, twelve when I ran away." So much of this she'd already heard through one means or another. If not her, then the labyrinth itself as he had told some of it to Audmathus. "The problem was this. I had nothing in my head but facts and fantasy. I had no sense. I knew how people were supposed to act but I didn't know how to act. I jumped at the first sign of adventure. Why wouldn't I? It was what I wanted after all."
His tone was wistful. It was lifetimes ago. Three? Eight? A good deal and he'd been through so much since. "You've seen it in other ways, this tale. The details could be a thousand things, duckling. Selling the cow for three magic beans. I wasn't so much the bumpkin. A map to adventure. The promise of nothing but. I was a boy who had been stifled. The old man, not much unlike your glamour. Maybe it was one of your people? Probably not but it's an amusing thought. He offered it to me for a fair price. I gave what little I had gathered. Then, my life changed.
"I was cursed by my purchase. I would wake up in a different place, would learn of it, would start to put down roots and make friends, and then the rot would show. If I stayed to share their fate, that would have been the end of it, but I saw the signs as an outsider, and I ran. When I got far enough away, doom and destruction at my heels, it all went black. I woke up, a little older, somewhere else." His body had grown and his mind could not, nothing but blackness to go along with the extra inch of growth. "The process repeated. I met such people, the scions of civilizations at their very nadir, so often trying to shine their brightest not realizing that their star was about to be blotted out. Sometimes I tried to turn and stand my ground, to warn them or to work with them." He's shake his head as they walked. "But in the end, I ran. I ran and I ran and I grew two or three days for every one that I was aware of. And eventually, I ran to Myrken, and in Myrken, I learned that surviving and living were two different things indeed."