Esar, Age 19

19 Years Ago

“Oh—oh, no—” the student stuttered, hands shaking as he backed away from Esar.

Esar wrenched the symbic apparatus off his head, breaking the connections and setting off a symphony of alarm bells and flashing lights on the console. The student jumped and Esar pushed by him.

“Right!” the student said, regaining enough of his wits to follow Esar. “The speaking line—”

“Who was sleeping just now, you or me?” Esar growled. He seized the transmitter and activated it with a jolt of vitricity. “This is Esar Semfrey. I’ve got an urgent message for the Ethereal Guard. Can you hear me?”

The voice that responded was too thin and distorted to make out over the clanging alarms.

“Would you turn that damn thing off?” Esar bellowed. The student fumbled with the controls for a moment before the bells blessedly ceased.

Esar took a deep breath and spoke again. “I didn’t hear you, please repeat that?”

“This is Suzari Naira. I hear you, Esar. What’s the message?”

“Dhanlir,” Esar said. “The construct in Dhanlir is going to break loose. You don’t have much time. The vision was very clear—very close.”

“Got it,” Suzari said. She spoke to someone else, repeating Esar’s message. “Get Danthan on the line, and you, get to the station.” She addressed Esar again. “I’ll take it from here. Thank you.”

The silence after she broke the connection weighed on Esar like a heavy blanket. He looked over at the student, who was cowering behind the console, looking like he might cry.

“I’m sorry,” the student said. “I—I guess I just panicked—”

Esar sat down on his bed. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Go home.”

“What?”

“I saw what you needed me to see. That was the whole point of this, wasn’t it?” Esar said.

“Oh, I almost forgot!” The student picked up a notebook and pen, dropped the pen, picked it up again. “You need to describe it to me. What you saw.”

Esar slumped, closed his eyes. Now he had to remember all the details of the dream. He recited all that he could, from the woman’s strange eyes and blue tunic to her death at the construct’s claws.

“And the man?” the student asked when Esar fell silent.

“I don’t know. Probably dead, too.” And who knows how many others? It was so close.

“Are you going to go back to sleep?” the student asked after they’d sat in silence for a few moments.

“Could you go back to sleep after that?” Esar asked.

The student shuddered. “Probably not.”

Esar got to his feet. “I’m going for a walk,” he announced. “Go home, or whatever, I don’t care. We’re done for tonight.”

The trolley from the University to the city didn’t run this late at night, and the walk home was going to take nearly two hours. Maybe that would be long enough for Esar to feel like himself again.

He’d done everything he could do, but he still felt as helpless as he’d been in the dream. Had the linecar departed yet, carrying his stepfather and the rest of the Ethereal Guard south to Dhanlir? Even if it had, it wouldn’t reach the town until at least midday tomorrow. How high had the sun been in his dream? He couldn’t remember. Damn it, he always forgot something, didn’t he?

The sky was clear that night, but the lights from the city were too bright for Esar to see many stars. You want to see what darkness is, you need to get away from the city, Esar remembered. But he was walking towards the city, not away from it.

He was going home.

The light was on in the parlor when he finally arrived. Esar reached out a hand to the lockplate, letting a flicker of vitricity identify him as someone who belonged in this house. It remembered him, for all that he hadn’t slept there in almost two years.

This was still his home. He knew that from the moment he stepped through the door. The feeling wasn’t entirely pleasant, but it was one of belonging. Esar shut the door behind him and went to the parlor.

His mother sat on the sofa, her infant son asleep on her breast. Esar’s grandfather was asleep in a chair on the other side of the room, but Alzyn’s eyes were wide open.

“You did well, Esar. I’m proud of you,” she said softly, like a teacher praising her pupil.

“I hope it’s not too late to do any good,” Esar said.

“I’m sure it isn’t.”

Esar’s brother made an odd sound, not really a cry, more of a grunt. His mother lifted him to her shoulder, arranging her robe to cover herself.

“I haven’t slept deeply enough to dream since Raen was born. It’s been very strange,” Alzyn said.

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Esar almost asked if it had been the same when he was a baby. Had his mother ever been so reluctant to put him down, or let him out of her sight? He doubted it. But it didn’t matter, Esar told himself. That was all in the past, it didn’t matter anymore.

Raen turned his head and yawned. He looked so familiar to Esar, with his full head of black curls and scrunched-up eyes. But then, Esar had seen him for the first time years ago. He never told anyone but Kelsam about the dream predicting his birth, but that dream had given him plenty of time to get used to the idea of having a brother who would be loved and wanted.

Raen wouldn’t be a Tresuan, luckily for him. There was always only one in a generation, though the line did sometimes skip sideways, as it had from his great-uncle to his mother. And one day Raen could have a child who inherited the gift. Esar owed his brother a debt for releasing him from that burden.

Why hadn’t Kelsam replied to his letter? Maybe it didn’t mean anything to him anymore. Maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe there was a new stranger by his side now but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Esar had no claim on him.

Esar went to his old bed and managed to fall asleep, somehow, eventually. He woke up having made a decision; he didn’t remember exactly when or how, but he knew what he needed to do. He reached for his dream journal, but there wasn’t one in its usual place on the nightstand. Fortunately there was a new one full of blank pages in the drawer, along with an incand pen, though the sun was shining through the window and he didn’t need the illumination. Esar recorded a perfectly ordinary dream. His hand cramped—he hadn’t recorded his own dreams in a long time.

He dressed, ate breakfast with his grandparents while his mother and brother slept, and set out for the linecar station.

He would go and see Dhanlir for himself.

***

An arm snaked in between the doors of the linecar cabin just before they closed. All eyes focused on the man who stepped in through the gap at the last minute. He was as rumpled as if he’d just rolled out of bed—hardly the sort of person one expected to board the first class cabin. But he showed his ticket to the conductor as he made his way up the aisle, confirming that he had paid his fare and did, indeed, belong there.

Thavis Yasoh settled into the seat opposite Esar with a tight-lipped, apologetic smile. Esar had to update his estimation of the man—he didn’t look like he’d rolled out of bed, he looked like he hadn’t slept at all, with shadows under his eyes. Neither of them said anything—what was there to be said? They were both headed to the same destination for the same reason.

Esar rested his head against the cool glass of the window to soothe his headache, watching the city slip past beneath him. Sitting still made him feel trapped, even as the linecar was getting up to speed, far faster than any human could run. But there was something tranquilizing in watching the landscape blur, something that took him out of his own head and the passage of time. Then the linecar would slow and stop at a station for interminable minutes, and Esar’s head would ache again.

“Thank you,” Thavis said, three stops south of Thaliron. They weren’t even a quarter of the way to Dhanlir.

“Please don’t thank me,” Esar said. “I—I don’t think there was enough time.”

“Whatever happens, it would have been worse without you,” Thavis said.

Had the Ethereal Guard made it to Dhanlir yet? Had the construct already broken loose, destroyed the town, killed the couple in Esar’s dream? At least the Ethereal Guard’s linecar didn’t need to stop at every bloody station between here and Nalla-Bidharac.

They transferred from the Spine to the Nalla-Bidharac line in Bulrisa. Esar watched with a pang of regret as the linecar from Thaliron continued south. By tomorrow morning, that car would arrive in Norana.

Esar shook his head. Why was he still thinking about Kelsam when there were people fighting, dying in Dhanlir?

The Nalla-Bidharac linecar had just two shabby cabins. Esar and Thavis sat on hard benches instead of plush seats, and the stations they passed were little more than platforms with overhanging roofs.

“We’ve been left behind,” Thavis said, again speaking out of nowhere. He flexed his fingers after clenching the iron armrests too tightly for too long. “Anyone who can leave does. They don’t see any future here. And I had my eyes closed for so damn long . . .”

Lake Bidharac sparkled on the horizon, and the track soon curved south to follow it. Ramshackle houses spotted the landscape, some of them obviously abandoned, but in other cases Esar couldn’t be sure if anyone still lived there or not. There were prosperous manor houses, too, though, three stories high with slate roofs, fresh paint and walled gardens. A few of the plantations grew olive trees, and sheep grazed here and there, but more of the farms grew grain or karpasa.

They finally arrived in Dhanlir later that afternoon. The thick clouds above threatened rain, but had yet to make good on the threat. Esar climbed down from the platform and his heart sank into his stomach.

It was a scene from the age of warfare, but played out on the stage of his own time. Homes had been torn asunder, splintered wood and blackened stones scattered across the landscape. The construct had taken a tornadic path, leaving some houses untouched while others were reduced to rubble. A family picked through the wreckage of their home to save what they could, and an old man cried into his hands on a porch that was all that remained standing of another home.

But Esar didn’t see any bodies among the wreckage, not even any wounded, as he and Thavis followed the dirt road to the town center. The damage all seemed to be structural. Thavis stopped to talk to the townsfolk, but Esar kept walking, looking for Danthan, Gerimon and the Ethereal Guard.

He saw their red tunics gathered beside the town’s small Sanctuary, counted them, breathed a sigh of relief. But he saw only one red-haired person among them, Suzari Naira. Where was the Prince Ethereal?

Esar jogged in their direction, and Danthan raised a hand in greeting before sprinting over to meet him halfway.

“Well, fancy meeting you here,” Danthan said.

“Where’s Prince Gerimon?” Esar asked.

“Resting in the Sanctuary. Sealing that beast took a lot out of him, but he’ll be all right.”

“What happened?”

“We got the warning out through a speaking line to Vargady,” Suzari said, naming a larger town not far to the south of Dhanlir. “They were able to sound an alert, order the evacuation and get most everybody out before the bastard woke up.”

“Most . . . everybody?” Esar repeated.

“A few holdouts refused to leave. There were a few casualties because of that. But it could have been much worse.”

“We’ll need to install a direct line from Thaliron to Dhanlir,” said Thavis. Esar hadn’t heard him approach. “I’ll see that it happens as soon as possible.”

“We’ll need a lot more than that,” said a female voice. The woman who spoke up was as tall as Meliand, and she wore a calf-length tunic that was almost too dusty to tell its original color had been blue. If Esar had any doubt about her identity, it vanished when he saw her striking hazel eyes.

“I know,” Thavis said.

“I understand that we have you to thank for our lives,” she said, addressing Esar directly.

“I saw you die,” Esar said.

It was, he realized immediately, not the right thing to say. The woman took a step backwards, raising her eyebrows. She let out an uncomfortable little laugh before turning back to Thavis. “We need to talk,” she said, taking his arm and leading him aside.

Esar’s world spun. His dream had been wrong. It hadn’t come true.

“You made quite an impression on her,” Danthan said.

“I made a difference,” Esar said. “I actually . . . made a difference.”

For the first time in his life, Esar felt worthy to be called Tresuan.