There once was a poor man who had no hope. His name was Loctrean, and he lived in an old, dilapidated house in the city of Guhnavra, which lay on a narrow peninsula on the far side of a great desert. He lived with his father and mother and sister.
His father was a dreamer, a teller of tales who was very popular at the local tavern because he always had a story to tell and always had enough coin to buy his audience a round, and if they disbelieved his adventures, the free drink bought their complaisance.
The father claimed to have been a sailor on board the ship if the infamous Captain Sindebad, to have walked in exotic lands, seen impossible monsters and sailed to the very edge of the world and back. At home he told the same tales to his children, filling their heads with dazzling images, breathtaking adventures, and often promising that one day they would all be terribly rich; but when he was off fishing, their mother would say, "The truth is, your father hasn't been anywhere at all. The only place he's sailed is inside his head." They would have preferred not to know, but they were children and at the mercy of the adults. Loctrean in particular wanted his father to be the adventurer of the stories.
His life might have gone on like that forever, except that one evening his father didn't return from the day's fishing, and no one knew at first what had befallen him. Eventually, other sailors found his father's boat and dragged it into the cracked and broken courtyard of the house. The keel had been shattered as if upon a sharp point of rock, and the sailors left it overturned there. Of his father they had found no sign. Loctrean overheard the superstitious sailors whispering that God had killed his father for all of the lies he'd told, and Loctrean burst upon them, shouting, “He didn’t lie! He did travel far, he did have adventures!” But despite his defense, he was ashamed, though whether for himself or for his father, he didn’t know.
It wasn't long after that before his mother succumbed to a wasting disease, a lingering, slow, and expensive disease. Paying for her medicine cost the family nearly everything they had. Before she died, she clutched her son close and whispered that she'd lied about his father because she was jealous. “He never took me on a single one of his adventures,” she said. “They all happened in his youth, and he said he was done with that, and that I was pestering him when I asked. He hurt me, but he didn’t lie to you.” Now, she said, she was embarking on her own adventure, her last. Then she closed her eyes and died.
In short order then, he lost both of his parents and found himself suddenly an orphan with a sister to care for.
Loctrean inherited his father's house and the fishing boat, which is to say he had inherited his father's many debts. The house fell into further disrepair. He couldn't afford even to replace the wine-colored awning over the door, which was too threadbare to keep even light rain from spilling through.
His father's boat remained in the courtyard. Its smashed planks grew so rotten that it would never be seaworthy again. He felt like that boat, as if a hole had been punched through him, never to be healed.
He could not repair the boat in order to fish, which was all he knew how to do, nor could he afford to buy a new one. There were few fishing crews in the town and none of them would hire him, either, as they believed he was the same as his father, a dreamer who would be a danger to the others in their crew. Even the kindest of them explained to him that they couldn’t take a chance on him.
The only good news came when his sister married a neighboring grocer. The grocer who made just enough money for the two of them and had nothing left over to help with the debts their father had left, but at least his sister was looked after, and Loctrean took solace in that.
He accepted that he was going to lose his father's house and there was nothing he could do about it. He determined that he must sell the property for whatever he could get, pay off all the debts, and use whatever was left over to start again somewhere else.
The night he made this decision, however, Loctrean’s father appeared to him in a dream. "You must close up the house," said the ghost, "but not sell it. Then travel to the city of Perla. There you will find your fortune."
"So, it’s true and you are dead,” Loctrean said sadly.
“I drowned. It wasn’t any fun.”
“And how is mother?" he asked.
"No longer in pain," his father's shade replied. "You were a good son to her. A good brother to your sister, too."
"Thank you," he said, and a longing to embrace his father welled up inside him. He wanted to reach out and hug his father, but in the dream he seemed unable to do anything but stand and observe.
"Never mind all that,” his father admonished him. “Just wake up and go!"
....