In the fifth week, Rask had begun to feel that he achieved some level of normalcy and he didn’t like it.
It came to him as he accepted a hot cup of tea from a village elder. It was given to him without him asking as he’d accepted one every morning since he arrived in Sansre. The people there had been kind - too kind, since he was given an entire house to ‘settle’ in. The house had been recently vacated since the owner had died when he joined a fight against the Unseeing in a neighboring village. There were probably five or six people who would benefit from having their own house and have lived in Sansre all their lives, but the elders and the chief have all unanimously told him to stay there as long as he liked.
Perhaps the right thing to do would have been to refuse it, but Rask had been traveling for months. Waking up to a solid roof over his head was something he had a hard time refusing. It also had a clean fireplace and a door that locked so he didn’t have to constantly worry about his belongings. However he found that living in an actual house reminded him a lot of things he would much rather forget. While he roamed the lands belonging to the empire, he could almost forget. His father used to say that Freerunners could have short memories and still do their work.
And although he would never admit it out loud, it became even easier after Ral insisted on staying with those Yscians back in the Issvak desert. Rask spent a long time deliberating over if it was the proper thing to do, but he thought that perhaps the boy needed it. They could and should spend some time apart. Ral wasn’t going to be a little boy clinging to him forever. Over the years after they parted, Rask could almost feel like his past in Caelis was just a very long dream.
He knew denial wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t like he was lacking the proof that it was all real. Months before arriving at Sansre, he received a message from Professor Camaz that Aris had left the Academy and that her whereabouts were unknown. The message came to him from the innkeeper of a passing inn he stayed at out at the far reaches of the Heart. He had no idea how Camaz would know he would be there - spymaster of the Academy indeed.
There was no context as to why this message was sent to him. Did Camaz expect him to do something about his wayward ward? Aris’s signature ability was being able to hide from people and only Nilda was really the only one able to handle her when the princess was younger.
It wasn’t like he was lacking work - it felt like Gates were opening increasingly frequently in the eastern part of the empire and a significant number of people needed help. Without the presence of the Caelisian kingdom, smaller villages had no military help against the crisis. The emperor wasn’t going to send his own imperial soldiers so far and close to Yscian borders to help. Sansre, being the western most village of what used to be Caelis and being an established and large trading post, became a destination for people seeking help or escaping from a Gate-torn village.
Rask wanted to avoid the place. He was recognizable as the old Captain of the Solaris and so of course certain things were expected of him. He was immediately asked questions as if he knew the answer to them. People spoke to him as if he still had the ear of the Solaris and the aid of all his soldiers. No, most of his men died that day when assassins with Kuvanian accents caught them unawares and eliminated the royal family… except nobody told the story that way.
It didn’t matter to the people of Sansre or anyone else in the neighboring villages what happened that day, only that they no longer had the protection of the Solaris. The sun no longer shone on the land supposedly blessed by the celestial bodies. Gates were still opening on their land and they needed someone to save them.
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His father once told him that Freerunners were not heroes. They roamed the land carrying items and information and were by nature free of affiliations and country. Some might even call them glorified errand boys. Rask tried to reclaim the identity of a Freerunner just so he could say the same: he wasn’t a hero. The people of Sansre shouldn’t think of him as one. However the amount of people who have confronted an Unseeing and lived to tell the tale were few and far between and he could not turn his back on them. These were Caelisians. If Ral and Aris returned, forsook their names and reclaimed their titles, these would be their people. Rask couldn’t abandon them.
And so he carried the Freerunner identity quite poorly as he stayed in Sansre. He had people start tracking Gate openings. A portion of the village was set up to accept survivors and those seeking shelter. Most egregiously, he went out to fight monsters.
He had no intention of staying. Freerunners shouldn’t settle in one spot - their solute belonged to the open roads and flowed with the Solvent. And of all places, he shouldn’t be settling here right at the cusp of Caelis and memories. Except that he stayed. Days turned to weeks. He spoke with the people of Sansre every day, planning, doing, helping, then he rode off to neighboring villages to do the same.
Rask threw himself at the otherworldly sun-cursed demons as if he had nothing else to live for. He used his staff, one specially made in Caelis with etching that allowed the wood to appear and disappear and the metal to form into a deadly blade or a dull knob at will. He would return ‘home’ to the house given to him by the people of Sansre and try not to think of how Nilda would have loved to live there. He would light up the fireplace even in the heat of summer to try to banish the ghosts of memories that never were.
And he lived like this, unaware of the time that passed. By the fifth week it had grown into a pattern that he would have enjoyed if he didn’t call himself a Freerunner. Even if he wanted to leave and break the pattern, he couldn’t. He took the cup of hot tea offered by the elder and sat around a long table with other villagers to speak about building more temporary structures on the outer fringes of Sansre.
Tlatt, the village chief, spotted Rask and hastily stood up muttering something about a note. The chief was a middle aged man with a barrel chest and a bushy brown beard that desperately needed a trim. Like many tradesmen in the area, Tlatt had a background in carpentry and had expected to spend his life building houses or furniture. Due to the previous chief of Sansre falling victim to Unseeing in a neighboring village, Tlatt was promoted unwillingly to fill a spot he had no interest in. Rask thought it made him all the more fitting for the job. There was no ego involved, just a man wanting to make things better for the people around him. Rask had told him that when Tlatt confided in him about his doubts of being a village chief - it was an answer the man reluctantly accepted.
“This came to me last evening,” Tlatt said, reappearing from another room to show Rask a small slip of paper. Frowning, Rask took it from the chief. “A messenger handed it to me and told me to give it to the Freerunner. I asked if they meant you but they didn’t know your name.”
Rask didn’t recognize the writing. The note simply said ‘the sky turns red over the desert.’
“I’m sorry, but I read it,” Tlatt said sheepishly, scratching his beard. “I’m not sure if I was supposed to. Just wanted to make sure it was for you.”
“Yeah, it was for me,” Rask said, slipping the note into the folds of his cloth belt. “Thank you. And it’s fine that you read it but please don’t tell others about it.”
“I see. Is it something important?”
A sky turning red usually meant the sun was rising or setting - somehow, someone was telling him Ral had left Issvak.
“Yes it is,” Rask replied to Tlatt. “Thank you.”
Rask didn’t really know what it all meant, if there was any meaning behind both the twins leaving their prospective places. The son and daughter of the celestials were on the move and it only meant things were about to happen. The only thing Rask knew was that his days of normalcy were about to end.
A small part of him was relieved.