Rask

On the fifth day of travel, the princess decided on a name: Aris. Within the hour, the newly minted Aris named her brother Ralos. Casually, they acquired a name and casually they discarded any royal nomenclature.

Rask had honestly thought that the two of them would be adverse to a name. Caelisian royalty purposely didn’t name their heirs or their ruling siblings as they were supposed to represent the sun and the moon to serve the people. The lack of name and calling themselves their role reminded them of that. But now it wasn’t as if they had a role anymore.

Rask clenched his fist and forced out the tension with a long exhale of breath. Just thinking of… everything that happened made a terrible anger broil in him. He should have known that Nilda wasn’t planning on escaping but…

The princess had jumped off his back without warning and ran all the way back to Nilda. Rask wasn’t quite sure what happened because when he finally caught up to them, the princess and Nilda were lying in a bloodied heap on a rubble of rocks and three other bodies lay strewn beyond this makeshift wall Nilda made. The assailants were dead, their faces all twisted into terrible expressions of horror. One had his leg trapped under a rock. Rask had no idea what killed them.

He could have sworn Nilda was still breathing when he got to her. But then she closed her pretty eyes and -

Another long exhale. The grief rolled through him. Finding the princess alive was a relief, of course, but the girl took two days to get out of shock. He had to carry her as she simply stared in a daze, her limbs moving as if in a dream. The bastards had cut down the governess right in front of her eyes. He wept when he wiped the blood off the girl’s face - Nilda’s blood.

He had to leave her corpse behind, along with the corpses of many of his men and of the Solaris and Taurin back at the castle. Rask briefly thought the sun would become angry that so many bodies were left unburied, but upon reflection, he wanted the sun to be angry. He wanted the sun to see what had happened. The people who worshiped Him were senselessly killed, His avatar in Gaia murdered. He wanted the sun to know.

On the third night, the little prince broke down into huge, wracking sobs and Rask wordlessly held him as the princess stared into the fire. After a while, hearing her brother cry must have affected the girl, because a few minutes later she seemed to shake awake and wordlessly joined her sibling on Rask’s lap to embrace them both. Slowly, over the course of the fourth and fifth day, the princess drew herself out of the daze and when she named herself and her brother, she seemed to return to normal, albeit quieter.

Not once did Aris cry.

Rask guessed that Aris was the one to kill the assailants back in the valley. Watching Nilda’s murder must have unlocked something inside the girl - she had Inner Eye abilities and he’d heard that it sometimes included abilities to warp the mind. Evidence of Aris having these abilities was more the reason for them to go straight to the Academy, just as Nilda heeded him to.

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He was grateful for having a destination, grateful for the travel. Rask felt like he needed to move. He wondered if it was the calling of the Freerunner’s blood, but he shook off the stupid thought. Just because his father was a Freerunner, it didn’t make him one as well. He just needed to focus on a task in a world where everything had fallen apart. Rendering the days into simple tasks made life more palatable - keep everyone fed and watered, travel a certain distance, find a place to camp, repeat.

The most difficult part was when they approached a village or town. As they headed east, they became more common as the population boomed closer to the coast and closer to the Heart. Rask managed to procure less Caelisian-like clothing for all of them and bought a hood for Ralos to hide his hair. He called them his son and daughter to strangers, which was believable for Aris because she had dark hair like him, but Ralos’s red hair would be harder to explain.

Days stretched into weeks. Rask quickly learned to avoid the smaller villages as people were too nosy and talked too much. He was sure he spotted a Kuvanian man in a small village northeast of the Heart, asking questions. Just hearing the clink of armor was enough to alarm him and he fled with the children into the night.

The twins had each other - Rask thanked the sun for it. They curled up next to each other like cubs when they slept and Ralos constantly clung to Aris’s clothing. All the better when Rask needed to step away to grab food or supplies and had Aris hide herself and her brother. As long as they could rely on each other, perhaps they would find some peace in the future.

What would they even do when they grew older? Would the princess really seek revenge? Would Caelis have its sibling rulers once more? The further east he went, the less he heard about the fallout of Caelis - all most people knew was that a coup of some sort occurred and the Caelisian family was no more. Why did it feel like the Emperor didn’t care? Were they that far removed from the rest of the empire? Where was the Lunaris in the midst of all the chaos?

He recalled what Nilda told him on the night right before she died. She had told him about the man who killed his king had the same step-pattern as a man who was the Lunaris’s own guard, but his face had changed and spoke with a Kuvanian accent. Was it true that the Lunaris conspired to murder her own brother?

The more questions he thought of, the more Rask wanted to return. He wanted to demand answers from all those who dared to wear the colors of Caelisian guards to deceive them. If what he feared the worst had happened and the Kuvanians had arranged the hostile takeover along with the Lunaris, he wanted to fight back. But then it would spell out certain doom for the children. Perhaps they had to grow older, stronger before they could take back anything.

Previously unnamed royalty of the ruling family of a small kingdom, now Aris and Ralos. Nilda had died to protect them. She made him promise he would protect them too. Rask closed his eyes against the grief again. He would have done anything for her. He wished he could have told her that.

So Rask took the twins west and headed towards the Heart. He would cross the Aortic Strait and find a home for the children in the Academy.

After that… perhaps then they would think about revenge.