After years spent in North Africa, Koenraad Akermann had to confess his defeat and a grave stain on his Belgian pride: he didn’t have an appropriate wardrobe for Whitby’s autumn, let alone winter. Since his life has almost exclusively taken place in a Mediterranean climate for the last three years or so and his body had been getting through a lot of changes at the same time, Koerd had just discarded whatever was no longer of use, preferring to travel light.

There was also a more obscure reason for it: since he had contracted malaria, his body had changed a lot and the few survivors of his cleanse just didn’t fit that well anymore. He had known for a long time he was coming to Whitby, of course, and that should have informed his decisions, but somehow the intermittent sickness had eaten away not only the energy he would have needed to actually get a tailor to make him the right clothes but also to even remember that had been the plan all along. It was amazing, really, how many things unplanned illness could do to a person.

However, Koerd desperately wanted to take a walk on his own today, so he had resigned himself to wearing the only thing fit for a September day in Whitby: a black mourning suit. 

That was how it came that Koenraad Akermann found himself looking like a melancholic man in mourning clothes close to the site of a funeral that had been disrupted by the absence of one of the participants, a young man with rather bad health and notable stature that was currently strongly sought by half of his family, distant or otherwise. A good chunck of them had also never seen the man as a fully grown man, so the risk of confusion proportionally increased.