Chapter 342: Vague Details
Ishtar shook her head gently. "They usually come home tired, and I didn’t want to bother them."
Ethan paused. "True."
That was difficult to argue with.
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Well, I do have another friend...You know Elizabeth."
A smile appeared on his face. "She used to help me with things like this, I’m sure she’d be more than happy to teach you."
Ishtar immediately nodded. "Thank You, Lord Ethan."
Ethan smiled before another thought crossed his mind. "Oh, speaking of which...how’s Rayleigh doing?"
Her expression immediately softened. "He’s fine." Then she smiled. "He said he’ll be coming home soon."
Ethan smiled back. "That’s good."
The question had been intentional. He simply wanted reassurance that the two of them were still keeping in touch.
You know, just to make sure the situation with the boy outside wasn’t some funny business.
"Alright, You can head inside."
"Oh, and I stopped by a few stores on the way back and bought quite a bit of food. Feel free to grab whatever you want from the kitchen."
He smiled apologetically. "And sorry about Francesca. She and Eduardo should both be back soon."
Ishtar bowed politely. "Thank you, Lord Ethan."
She quietly made her way toward the kitchen.
Ethan then slowly turned his head to the ceiling.
Francesca and Eduardo had been around for the last one month.
Both of them had departed after discovering that something about the supposed deaths of Nathan and Irene simply did not add up.
Since then, they had been traveling from place to place, attempting to uncover what had actually happened all those years ago.
It had all begun after Ethan asked Eduardo to recount the story once again.
And just as he always had throughout Ethan’s childhood, Eduardo gave the exact same account.
According to everything he knew, shortly after giving birth to Ethan, his mother had fallen victim to a terminal illness. It was an illness that supposedly could only be treated within the Dragon Continent.
Unfortunately, after fleeing that continent years ago, returning was no longer an option for her. With nowhere else capable of curing the disease, she eventually succumbed to it not long afterward.
As for his father, Nathan Stark...
He had supposedly perished while returning from one of his business expeditions aboard his personal airship. Somewhere during the journey, the vessel had catastrophically crashed, killing Nathan alongside every member of its crew and the other passengers aboard.
That had always been the official story.
Growing up, Ethan never questioned any of it. As a child, he simply accepted what the adults around him told him, and even after reaching an age where he should have begun thinking more critically, the former Ethan Stark had simply been too passive to ever dig any deeper into the matter.
But...
This Ethan was different.
Truthfully, none of it had mattered in the beginning.
Allen’s soul had awakened inside Ethan’s body and, from that point onward, had simply continued living the life that already existed before him.
The past remained exactly where it belonged...
In the past. And there had been no reason to disturb it, until Ethan’s attempt to summon them, failed.
That instantly made the certainty surrounding his parents’ deaths questionable.
There was only one other explanation Ethan could think of. Someone else may have already summoned them.
And in his attempt to determine which possibility was actually true, Ethan first needed to revisit every detail surrounding his parents’ supposed deaths.
That was what prompted him to ask Eduardo that question on the night of his wedding.
But Eduardo’s testimony alone wasn’t enough.
Over the following days, Ethan sought out Francesca and asked her the exact same question; on how his parents died.
And she too had also recounted the very same story Eduardo had given him.
Still unwilling to settle there, Ethan approached the other person who had known his parents personally.
Ms. Bernadette Foster.
Once again, he asked about Nathan and Irene Stark.
And just like Eduardo and Francesca, she had repeated precisely the same account of their deaths.
Only after hearing the exact same story from all three of them did Ethan begin noticing something that none of them seemed to have realized.
The story itself was flawed. Especially once he began examining it against a few very simple facts.
First, Nathan Stark was no ordinary caster. From what Eduardo had once told him, Nathan had even fought him once and survived.
Although, a significant part of that survival had been owed to his demon regenerative abilities, which only strengthened Ethan’s doubts.
A man powerful enough to battle someone like Eduardo and regenerating catastrophic injuries...How exactly was such a person supposed to die from nothing more than an airship crash?
Even setting his regeneration aside, any caster of Nathan’s caliber should have possessed more than enough defensive spell to survive something like that.
His mother’s story proved no better.
The tale of a terminal illness had initially sounded believable enough, until Ethan decided to consult the one person who would know better than anyone else.
Titania.
Being a dragon herself, Ethan asked whether there existed any terminal illness capable of killing dragons.
She had stated at the time that there was one.
Heartflame Rot.
A rare disease in which a tumor slowly formed around a dragon’s heart, gradually consuming its life over an incredibly long period of time.
Titania explained that, from the moment Heartflame Rot fully manifested, the absolute shortest life expectancy ever recorded was approximately sixty-five years.
That was the fastest the disease had ever claimed a dragon. And yet, Irene Stark had only been thirty years old when she supposedly died.
The more Ethan examined every piece of the story, the more impossible the official explanation became.
-
Then, there was the second inconsistency.
All three of them appeared to suffer from strange lapses in memory whenever the events immediately following his parents’ deaths were brought up.
Ethan had asked Eduardo, if he had ever investigated how Nathan’s airship crashed.
If Nathan Stark’s airship had truly fallen from the sky, Ethan found it impossible to believe Eduardo would have simply accepted the explanation and moved on.
Knowing the kind of person Eduardo was, he would have investigated every possible cause until he reached the truth.
Yet, Eduardo couldn’t remember, simply replying, "I probably did."
Uncertainty and Forgetfulness. Those were two traits Ethan would never associate with Eduardo.
The man possessed an almost frightening memory and was meticulous to the point of obsession. If he had investigated something, he would know he had. If he hadn’t, he would know that too.
There should never have been a "probably."
And Eduardo wasn’t the only one, Francesca displayed the exact same problem. So did Ms. Bernadette Foster.
All three of them clearly remembered attending private funerals for both Nathan and Irene Stark.
Yet the moment Ethan began asking about the details, everything became strangely vague.
None of them could remember the exact day nor what time the ceremonies had taken place.
Morning? Afternoon? Night?
Even those simplest details had somehow become blurred.