------------- Tales of The Raptors – Father’s Footsteps

Persia had returned to Xanthius with the Dagger of Gahnimah Xanth. It had made a long route, a trek through unknown treasure stashes, stolen by thieves, rescued by heroes, and conquered by warlords, until it ended up in the vaults of one of Vorhing’s Condors. It didn’t take long after that adventure for Persia to ascertain the dagger’s identity, and soon after that, she graduated Kar’Dhaer and went on her way, Professor Persia Montgomery Fawcett. She had used the dagger to clear her name with the Guild and even arrange for Jarah al’Durran to negotiate reopening the Temple of Isis in Xanthius.

But that wasn’t the end of it. It was only the beginning of her adventures, and her tangled relationship with the Xanth Guild. She was allowed to return to her home, and to begin piecing back together the life and death of her father, another famous Professor Fawcett. She tried to pick up where her father had left off. For it was his personal quest to find the lost treasure of Gahnimah Xanth, not for personal gain, but for the betterment of history and the glory of the find itself. He was, at the time, still attached to the Raidon Royal Museum, and his funding came from the Kingdom of Atheae. That wasn’t something that had sat too well with the leaders of the Guild. It didn’t help that Professor Fawcett had fought against the Guild, insisted that the treasure therein belonged in a museum, not in some Guild boss’s vault. In the end, he was killed under suspicious circumstances. A dozen of his diggers died with him, and the Xanth Guild told everyone it was because of Professor Fawcett’s negligence and incompetence, an unfortunate accident. Persia knew better, but in a place where there is no law but the law of the knife, she could prove nothing.

So, here she was, decades later, trying to follow the same dusty clues her father had followed, only her scant memories of those childhood days to guide her. She’d managed to piece together a few things, minor clues, but the main clue that had eluded her father still managed to elude her as well. Worse still, as a member of the Guild her father fought against, she was sworn to turn over the treasures to her bosses. Things were looking bad.

Then she got a message from an old artifacts dealer on the upper east side. He had known Persia’s father, but more importantly, he had known Persia. Long ago, when Persia was a young half-elf on the streets, clawing for every last bread crumb and learning that she’d have to fight her way into the Guild or die, she had saved a young human boy from being mercilessly beaten by her gang. That boy, seventy years later, was the merchant who now held the clue to Xanth’s treasure. Now, she would step out of her father’s footsteps and make her own legend.

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