Aidan had a daughter now.

This salient fact of his existence was the most recent surprise of his recent life, the sixteen eventful months that had elapsed since he returned to the Academy of War for his fourth year of study.

It undoubtedly triggered some of the restlessness that drone him on his night walks through the streets of Kimmelsport, accompanied only by a handful of Gunnar’s scouts.

The Academy was many months in Aidan’s past, many miles to the south, although he had continued training with Pelion and several other Bladedancers. He had liberated the Duchy of Ravenwood. He had freed Kimmelsport. Tomorrow, he was taking the bulk of his army to Khartras to help his friend Sebastian to fend off the Tiberian Southern Army.

He was not finished with his purpose. And his determination to see justice, or vengeance, brought to the remaining men responsible for his father’s death burned as hotly as it had after he first heard the news. But over time, the fire had spread into weaves and swirls of complexity. The birth of his daughter as well as Samantha’s insistence on establishing a real home for his family had birthed a different motivation within him, a feeling he envisioned as a beacon of pure light. A feeling, he knew, that Samantha had deliberately tried to create in him.

Whereas sixteen months ago he cared little about whether his death was necessary to see his task through to completion, now his death would create another young child without a father. His daughter would retain no memories of him, and he would miss every key moment in her life. If he fell in this war, he would not be there to protect her in ten years, in twenty.

But the glimpse of a vision, a possible future, showed him a path where, one day, he might simply walk through a field with his daughter and teach her the names of plants and flowers. After the acts he had witnessed so far, after violence he had done and was going to do, the idea of living in peaceful harmony with nature and raising a family had its appeal.

But who truly lived in harmony with nature? Any organism that could survive took steps to change itself or the environment around it to better suit its purposes. It killed other organisms, often without conscious thought. The purpose—survival, happiness, wealth, revenge—might change for one individual compared to another, but nothing living remained static.

The key to happiness in life, Aidan now believed, was to allow yourself to feel wonder and to laugh at the beauties and absurdities of this world.

A reaction difficult to sustain while walking through a street of taverns in which any number of his soldiers and town citizens were puking, occasionally somewhere near the street’s gutters but not usually. Of course, feeling wonder did not mean you needed to allow someone to destroy your hopes and dreams. For certain problems, violence was a solution.

He did smile when he overheard one soldier mutter: “The dog piss and the good stuff, if you can’t get along, good riddance to both of you.”  The soldier’s stomach’s unhappy invaders splattered and splashed against the nearby wall.

Aidan knew that to achieve his goal, he would first need to survive a walk, or a ride, across some number of battlefields where goats of blood splattered and splashed onto the grass or flowers.

Possibly Aidan was allowing one child, the weight of her reality, to affect him too greatly. Yet according to the troubadours, Emperor Marcus once had responded to a woman flirting with him, who asked him about the type of woman he most revered, the type that he valued, “The one who produces the most children.”

Aidan decided to conclude that the emperor was dead inside in the ways that mattered the most. If one fewer of that kind of ruler existed on the planet, then the life of Aidan’s daughter likely was less at risk.

So sometimes you could hit two birds with one stone, Aidan thought, and chuckled.

He resolved again to bring death to Emperor Marcus as soon as the opportunity presented itself. What was new, though, was that he resolved to try to survive the doing of the deed.

More training. More preparation. More allies. More strategy meetings. More coin spent in the right ways.

More. Of everything. And maybe one day, in the distant future, he and his daughter would walk through a field of wildflowers in full bloom.