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Klein had been a weird kid.

In class, most teachers had resented him for scribbling, fidgeting, daydreaming and reading books they hadn't even mentioned instead of sitting still and paying attention all the time like he'd been supposed to, and most students had resented him because he'd still done fairly well academically overall in spite of it. At recess and in gym class, when he'd been forced to compete with the other kids running around, showing off and yelling at each other outside, he'd just wanted to be back inside all by himself sitting still in peace and quiet with a book and a flashlight. He'd found all the superstitions associated with sports a little over the top. He hadn't liked having to pick one side to be against the other side, he hadn't liked having to do what his team leader had said or telling the other kids what to do on the rare occasions on which he'd been selected as team leader, and he hadn't really seen why winning had been supposed to be all that much better than losing in the grand scheme of things, since they were all just going to home to do homework and play after school would be over anyway. His allergies had made him sneeze a lot and, since he'd been a skunk, the spraying taunts had never been far behind.

The other kids may have also resented him for having had clothing industry-owning parents with a lot more money than theirs had, but Klein had been pretty sure that most of them still wouldn't have been willing to trade places with him even for the money if they'd known what his parents had been like. As for them, it hadn't taken them long to begin to worry that they'd never been going to know what to do with him. It'd seemed to them that he'd never have the guts it'd take to raise a family of his own, that he'd been too clumsy to work for their company, too absent-minded to run it and too damned sensitive for his own good in general. They'd tried the stick and carrot to motivate him to become closer to who they'd wanted him to be but it hadn't worked all that well. When he'd been disobedient, they'd ground him, send him to his room or make him sit in the corner, and he'd learned to entertain himself in the house, in his room or in his mind. They'd threatened to withhold or take away desserts and toys they'd known he'd liked, and he'd told them that doing as he'd pleased had mattered more to him than getting what he'd wanted had.

In church, in addition to being taught to honor his father and his mother whether they'd honored him or not, he'd been taught that the reason for which the poor were poor and the rich were rich was that God rewarded good people by making them rich and punished bad people by making them poor, so the only way to really help the poor wasn't to give them money but simply to teach them how to become better people. He'd raised his hand during a sermon and he'd been told angrily that people didn't raise their hands to ask questions while sitting in church pews, to which he'd muttered that they'd let him do that in school, of all places, so he hadn't seen why church should have been any different - inaudibly enough not to have to answer even more for his insubordination, of course.

In the high school he'd gone to, the administration had put up a sign with an arrogant-looking jock on it saying that the money which went into cleaning graffiti would be taken out of the money which went into gym supplies and school-sponsored sporting events. Klein had sprayed on the sign that you could work out on your own just about anywhere but that you couldn't put a price on speaking your mind. He'd regretted having done that when he'd learned after the fact that one of the very few other students who he'd actually gotten along with had enjoyed going to the school gym and to school-sponsored sporting events, and generally couldn't afford to pay for gym membership or game tickets on his own. Although the initial policy itself had still seemed unjustifiably repressive, worth speaking out against and the real culprit to him, he'd had to admit that he wouldn't have liked it if someone else had done something which had affected the school library he'd hung out at that negatively either. It'd seemed like a good idea at the time, he'd just never been sure about whether it'd been one or not in retrospect, and this had become one of the things which Klein would feel guilty about whenever he'd think about.

Klein had had a lot of internalized guilt he'd had to learn how to deal with. During high school, he'd noticed that he'd been beginning to enjoy going to church a lot more than he'd used to. At first he'd thought it'd been because it'd given him the peace and quiet he'd looked for in libraries or because the burning incense had reminded him of the sticks some of the other kids would light during recess, then he'd managed to locate the moment at which his enjoyment had peaked, which had been while the choir had been singing. CDs of it which his parents had been only too glad to buy for him had failed to produce the same results, but they had reminded him of one of the choir singers in his age range, a pious, elegant, talented raven-panther griffin who he'd realized his attention had been naturally drifting to and settling on whenever sacred hymns would resonate throughout the assembly.

He'd begun to think about trying to meet him and talk to him after the sermon to ask him if he might ever want to go hang out somewhere to do something, because after all he'd figured that even angelic choir singers must have gotten at least a few hours off the clock, but he'd been so worried about making a bad impression on him that he'd had to put aftershave on his face, shampoo and conditioner in his hair, moisturizer on his hands and cologne on his tail before having worked up the courage to finally go up to him and ask him. Owen, as he'd introduced himself as, had laughed a friendly laugh and had said that as soon as Klein would have washed all that crap off, sure, he'd have been up for it and glad to do it. Klein had been puzzled but relieved by the unexpected reaction. It'd been the first time that someone had asked him not to try so hard instead of telling him that he hadn't been trying hard enough. They'd ended up spending a lot of time together, getting to know each other, talking together a lot about what they'd believed in, what they'd listened to, where they'd liked going, which games they'd played and what they'd enjoyed doing with their time.

It'd started innocently enough.

One day, after having spent months thinking it over, Klein had walked up to him after mass with an unusually serious expression on his face and had asked if he could talk to him alone because he had something to confess to him. Owen had been concerned, but he'd accepted to follow him outside where they'd been less likely to be overheard. It had been then that Klein had finally admitted to him that he'd seemed to have developed some kind of fascination for him which hadn't stopped at friendship, but he'd added that if friendship had been the only thing the griffin would have felt comfortable sharing with him, then that would still have been enough for him. Owen's initial reaction had been one of shock, followed by a moment of tense quiet introspection, a friendly hand on Klein's shoulder with a smile indicating he'd at least not been excessively offended by the suggestion, a hug which had plunged Klein into confusion, an awkward kiss in a corner behind a wall which had removed it and a tug at his hand to drag him off sacred ground which he hadn't resisted.

The next morning, the sermon had included readings from some sections of Leviticus and Paul which had been so renowned that Klein would have never expected that this would have been the first time that Owen would have heard them, but it had. Owen had been devastated, guilt, shame, remorse and self-hate had begun gnawing on his insides, he'd started having trouble breathing and he'd cursed himself for having almost broken down in tears with everyone looking. It had been all he could do not to walk out on the sermon to get into a confession booth then and there, but he'd forced himself to wait until it'd have ended because he'd thought he'd evidently needed to listen with a lot more attention. Klein had become seriously worried for him by having seen his reaction by then, and he'd had to run to be able to catch Owen before he'd left in a hurry because he'd wanted to ask him if he was all right and if there was anything he could do to help. Owen, who'd lost the ability to contain his tears by then, had slapped his hand away from his shoulder telling him not to touch him and to stay the hell away from him for the rest of his life.

Klein had just stood there reeling, feeling like he'd been hit by a bus, watching his angel storming out of his life for good. It had taken him months to recover from it. Just a few years later, he'd learned that Owen had been studying to become a Protestant minister and engaged to be married to a female Kirin. At first, he'd really resented them a lot and he'd been seriously tempted to tell her some things about her boyfriend that he knew said boyfriend wouldn't have wanted her to know. After having thought about it long enough, though, he'd eventually decided that although he'd felt wronged before, there'd still been nothing left for him to gain from other people's suffering at that time, that any love which hadn't been offered to him freely wouldn't have been worth receiving anyway, that it'd have been just as wrong for him to manipulate others as it'd been when the minister had done it, that a lot of things had been wrong with the world but that an excess of happiness had never been one of them, and that in the end he'd like himself better if he just wished them the best and moved on with his life.

Right then, though, he'd been so heartbroken that even though his parents hadn't known anything about what had happened, they'd been able to tell he'd been feeling downcast. When they'd asked him what had been wrong, since he hadn't wanted to lie but still hadn't wanted to reveal anything he'd been pretty sure they'd have taken wrong, he'd told them that he'd been lonely, which had been true enough. They'd decided that enough had been enough and that they'd been going to do something about that, so they'd sought out and they'd introduced him to Claire, a lioness who'd been a first year law school student. If he hadn't still been feeling vulnerable from what had just happened before, he might have resisted a little more strongly, but since he'd only ever looked at girls before having met his ex and since things had gone as badly with him as they had, he'd figured that it couldn't hurt for him to at least give one of them another shot. It hadn't turned out to have been the only decision he'd regretted having let them make for him.

While he'd wanted to go to a cosmopolitan liberal arts college because it'd seemed to him to be the best possible environment for him to be in, his parents had wanted him to go to a private business school because they'd wanted him to learn what he'd have to know to take over their company. After way more arguing than he'd felt he'd had the endurance for, they'd ended up settling on something they'd called a compromise: he could go to the college he'd wanted to go to, but he'd have to study something there which could be applied to the kind of position they'd had in mind for him. He'd resisted going into the manufacturing, supervision and management branches of their industries themselves because most situations involving machines, people and pressure simply didn't agree with him, so they'd ended up pushing him into marketing, advertising and sales instead. They'd figured that the combination of psychology, storytelling, theatre and sociology they'd required would appeal to him enough for him to apply himself and to do well enough at them to eventually be able to decide which direction the company's image would go in, which they'd always thought had mattered more than its substance anyway.

His relationship with Claire had continued to steadily deteriorate from the end of his high school years well into the beginning of his college years. Claire had become a law student because she'd believed strongly that there were rules that everyone had to learn to follow unquestioningly, regulations they'd had to conform to, conventions they'd had to follow and inherently incorrect procedures which they shouldn't have been able to get away with without having had to face the eternal consequences of. She'd believed that people should have had to wear uniformseverywhere. She'd believed that since most people acted like children, they had to be disciplined like children, and she'd had every intention of bringing up her own cubs to know right from wrong as firmly, memorably and distinctly as her parents had done for her. She'd teach them that society was a jungle and that they'd have to learn to live by its jungle law so that they'd turn out as strong and hateful of weakness as she'd taken so much pride in having made herself become.

Klein hadn't even been sure he'd wanted children. He'd been sure someone would have told him that it'd been implied as having been part of the deal when he'd agreed to it, but no one had, and he'd only learned about just how much he'd signed up for after his blood had already been dry on the contract. Personally, he'd thought the world already had way more people than it needed in it, and if it'd been going to have more people in it anyway, he'd have at least preferred it if none of them had had to be a continuation of his own lineage. Shortly after college had started, his parents had told him that since she'd lived closer to it than he had, that they'd be paying for half of what had been going to become their apartment, and not to expect room and board under their roof until the session would be over. They'd wanted to give him a crash course in marital life because they'd felt that he'd sorely needed one.

He'd never been able to do anything right for her. When he'd given her presents, she'd complained that they hadn't been exactly what she'd wanted and that he'd spent too much money on them. When he'd cursed, she'd slapped him and had told him to watch his mouth. When he'd washed clothes, floors, dishes or himself, she'd always told him that he'd taken too long and that they'd still stunk to high heaven anyway. When he'd taken her to restaurants, she'd been rude to the waiters and she hadn't tipped. When he'd cried, she'd told him to start acting like a man or she'd really give him something to cry about. When he'd been afraid of something or had liked something she'd thought of as garbage, she'd made merciless fun of him for it. She'd refused to meet any of his friends and had kept dragging him to social gatherings he'd never felt like he'd belonged in and had often had to bite his tongue at. She'd told him that he'd have better get a haircut, lift some weights and buy some new shoes if he hadn't wanted to look like a damn fool.

When they'd disagreed about anything, she'd just steamrolled right over his opinion without letting him get a word in edgewise, so he'd ended up resignedly pretending to agree with her about just about everything. When he'd asked her questions she'd thought the answers to should have been obvious or hadn't known answers to questions she'd asked him, she'd growled that he'd been an idiot. When he'd dropped anything, bumped into anything or knocked anything over, she'd snarled that he'd been a menace. When he hadn't seemed to be as angry as she'd been about something which had happened to her or even to him, she'd roared that he'd been a wimp. He'd had to admit that while he hadn't really minded the claw scratches and bite marks at all given the context he'd usually received them from her in and the fact that clothes had been enough to keep most of them concealed, but once, in the midst of one of their most serious arguments, she'd actually gone and punched him right in the face. Klein had conveniently rediscovered during the next few days that sunglasses had made him look incredibly sexy, and that the ancient art of telling stories to people could be useful for all kinds of things.

The only college classes he'd had that he'd really enjoyed going to had to have been his elective mythology and storytelling classes, not only for the show the archaeopteryx who'd taught them had gone to the trouble of putting on for his students every class, but even more for everything the teacher had told him in private after classes had been over and the other students had left.

• Myths and stories are formidable things, Klein. I wouldn't be teaching them if I didn't believe that. Any weapon that's been used to control entire populations for centuries and that it's still legal to use on so many children deserves to be taken very seriously. Don't forget, manifest battles are often only the external aspects of more subtle ones, and those are the ones it really matters to understand. Once you'll have understood myths and stories, you can learn how not to fear them and pass on that fearlessness to others. Fear of myths and stories can bring about everything from discrimination to murder to war. As a general rule of thumb, caution may be your friend, but fear is always your enemy. It's only your friend when you can strike it into the heart of someone who's threatening your life. If you can win the subtle battles before the manifest ones even begin, then, well, some people would argue that that's the only kind of real victory there is.

This kind of talk had definitely made Klein feel better about the built-in warning sign running down the length of his back, but it still hadn't done anything about his fear of Claire's judgement of him, and even his teacher had admitted that unless you were intending to become a storytelling teacher yourself or happened to be part of the infinitesimal minority of renowned storytellers who performed live, published books and CDs and made their living from it, it hadn't been something that there'd been that much money to make from.

Klein hadn't wanted to have to start working before having finished his studies because he'd been afraid that having to balance them with each other would've meant risking damage to his results in both. Claire had given him an ultimatum: either he'd start bringing home some bacon yesterday or she'd walk and take the opportunity she'd represented for him out of his little skunk paws. She hadn't been going to raise her cubs on a pauper's salary, that had been for damn sure. He still hadn't recovered from the fear of abandonment which his previous failed relationship had left him with and he hadn't felt like he'd have been able to deal with the guilt of having disappointed her.

His parents, having seen their chance to teach him the value of a dollar and to give him an idea of how their industry functioned, had dismissed his protests that he hadn't had what it took to do the job right and had pushed him right into a position as a fabric industry supervisor. Grudgingly, faced with what he'd perceived as total disgrace if he'd refused, he'd relented, and he'd accepted the job after all. Seeing the kind of conditions their employees had to work in had made him feel like he must have been living a very sheltered and over-protected life until then.

Just a few weeks after he'd started, a machine had malfunctioned and one of the employees he'd been assigned to supervise had lost a limb in a freak accident.

When he'd asked why the machine had been dysfunctional, he'd been told that they all wore out over time and all had to be replaced or repaired every now and then. When he'd asked why the machine hadn't been checked in time to prevent accidents, he'd been told it'd been his job to hire someone to do that, which of course no one had seen fit to tell him about until after the fact because everyone had assumed he must have just known. When he'd asked what kind of compensation the injured employee had been going to get for what he'd been through, he'd been told that the company's employees hadn't had the right to unionize. When he'd asked who'd been going to take over his position, he'd been assured that someone else had been fired as a scapegoat and that there'd been no way they'd have been going to let a little incident like that bring a taint on his family name. When he'd said that his mistakes may have been mistakes but that they'd still been his and that he hadn't wanted them taken away from him, he'd been given a temporary leave of absence.

It had taken that for him to realize that, in some contexts, accepting a responsibility could be even more irresponsible than turning one down could be, that he'd have rather gone to hell for the right reasons than to heaven for the wrong ones and that his whole life had been built with someone else in mind.

That night, he'd snapped, he'd quit his job, he'd broken up, he'd renounced his religion, he'd been disowned and he'd run away from home and into the woods without looking back.