Once more, the survivor’s life focused on the next step, the land before him, and the land behind him. For a while, he traveled with the messenger the advisor had told him to follow.
A few weeks after the attack on their base, the survivor didn’t know if the defenders of the realm still stood. They ran into a convoy. Traders, workers, and other transitories. The latter group becoming more common with the fall of the natural dynasty. They were a bedraggled and dangerous looking bunch.
The survivor had not enjoyed the short time he spent with them. It took less than a week for them to attack. The messenger fought alongside him. The survivor was cut across the shoulder and ribs, shallow but painful.
For a time, they traveled in the sands close to the road, keeping their distance in case they ran into more rabble. Time passed and winter pressed on, pushing even into the desert. There wasn’t enough water in the dry lands to create snow, yet the survivor once more shivered in the nights.
It was in the dark, after they’d doused the lights of the campfire, that she came to him. The first night, they only slept underneath the bedroll together. She was warm and comforting and despite the days of travel staining her; she didn’t smell too bad. It wasn’t long before they shared more than simple body heat.
And so it was they were caught under the covers when the bandits struck. The survivor was immobilized swiftly as the men prepared to take their time. Yet the messenger fought too fiercely, and he saw the opportunity.
Taking from a knife from the bandit holding him, the survivor struck him on the inner thigh. Blood poured wildly, allowing the survivor to slip free. Unable or unwilling to contend with both the survivor and the struggling messenger, they ran her across the stomach from hip to hip and ran away.
The survivor fell to his knees next to her. She was slow in dying, the slowest he’d yet seen. Each minute burning into a fever-pitch brightness within, leaving the world a little uglier. By dawn, she’d been dead for some time. He didn’t know how long.
In the sands he couldn’t bury her, only wrap her in a bedroll and leave her away from the roads.
He continued southward, following the instructions of the letter.
This time, he’d gathered new clothes, and could travel the open roads, and so he moved with a swiftness he’d seen while fleeing Elusria. He ran into more traders and caravaneers, hitching rides wherever he could.
Time passed in a morass, fear and worry for his comrades clouding his mind and bogging his sense of the days. So it was with a surprising heart when the desert thinned into ragged plains and grasslands.
On these paths, he traveled in a hurry. This new and foreign land was no less dangerous than Elusria, yet he was not yet a wanted man. If only they understood what he carried.
The letter didn’t spell out, but the survivor was not a stupid man. He understood fine and well why the advisor would’ve prepared messengers. Sending them to a faraway place, yet not another noble or royal court.
Eventually, the mountains came into view. Farms were plentiful in the foothills surrounding the giants of nature. It was to his surprise that he was called out as he looked for the path detailed in his letter.
“Ho! Traveler!” a voice called out in rough Kisi. “You look worse for wear! What do you seek?”
The survivor folded the letter into a pocket. Two months ago it had been a pristine white, yet now the folds and creases marked fault lines in the paper. Tears and ripped describing the stain of age and travel.
It was a woman approaching him, alongside a much older appearing man. They both wore simple clothes of a fashion as strange to the soldier’s eyes as the Elusrians. The man, father, carried with him a pitchfork of worked bronze, gleaming brightly in the evening light.
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The survivor tried to speak, yet fell into a cough.
“My, you look terrible.” The woman said, still in her thick Kisi accent.
The man spoke something, yet the survivor could not understand him. Foreigner, he thought. He attempted a sneer, yet the move broke the skin on his dry lips and the expression wilted before taking hold. And yet… am I not the foreigner. An invader from strange places in strange clothes. Could it be that they look on me the same as I look on them?
An image flashed through him. A pair of old people, faces frozen in fear as they lay together on the floor.
The survivor looked at the old man, knuckles white on his pitchfork. He is right to fear me. The thought turned his stomach and ached behind his eyes.
The woman seemed not to care at all, approaching and taking his face between her hands. And for a moment, the survivor saw only a bright smile at night and long limbs. Within the soft clasp of the stranger’s hands, the survivor fell apart.
He was injured in more ways than simply physical. The father took his sword, and they helped him inside. The survivor slept long for many days. He ate with the family, learned about their ways.
They were farmers, a simple people. They’d seen more than a few Ankirians coming through these parts after the collapse of the country. And it was collapsed, he realized. All he’d prepared for, the suffering he’d endured, had benefited others’ ego.
One morning, a week after they found him, the survivor awoke to the father handing him a tool. That day he helped around their home as best he could. It was strange work, the survivor’s family having always been oriented around soldiering.
And yet, the survivor found it fulfilling in a way being a soldier couldn’t match. So then he helped them the next day. The father had to patch a leak in the roof; the daughter fixing the chicken coup.
An early morning, a month after arriving at the farm, that the father sat down with the survivor. Instead of farm work, this day they would work on language. In the evening, after practicing with the daughter, the survivor lay awake. On a hide splayed before the low embers of the fireplace, the survivor played with the letter.
Having gone untouched in months. Tentatively, he closed on the fire. With a heavy heart, he laid the parchment — ragged and stained, corners torn and ink rubbed translucent — onto the embers. Yet, as the coals caught on a fresh and dry source, he found himself lifted higher.
“What are you doing?” the daughter asked, stepping into the living room. She must’ve heard him rustling about.
“Saying goodbye to an old life,” the survivor said.
The daughter looked at him and smiled, sitting down next to him and watched the last of the letter burn away. He took his hand in hers and squeezed it tight. “Thank you for saving me.” The farmer said.
----------------------------------------
In the western foothills of the Sankur’s mountains, a passage traveled high into the mountains on the edge of the plane. The heart of winter had a firm hold on this remote range. Snow covering not only the peaks but also down into the land beyond. This was not a place where people lived. The environment to unwelcoming. Humans could sense the limits of the plane and did not enjoy living so near to them. Only small critters and birds inhabited these peaks.
The dust lay undisturbed by the feet messengers, despite a dozen travelers heading towards this narrow path of gray stone and shale. Yet that was not to say it was undisturbed in its entire.
At the top of the mountain, a nook carved centuries ago, an old power stirred. Yet another power, older still, scuffed the dust and stomped loose shale as heavy boots stamped up these roughly carved steps.
The man bore his age on weary bone, taking a long time to reach the once safe house of his family. Inside the stone, the wooden furniture had all rotten to dust and blown caught on webs of spiders long dead.
“I hear you stirring, daughter,” the Sun King said, his heart heavy as he stopped in front of the door to his daughter’s room.
“Daddy?” she whispered, a grown woman’s approximation of a girl’s voice. It grated against his heart. He looked out the window, noticing the darkness that had befallen the mountaintop. Light could not pass through what now sheathed the peak, only the faintest sparks glimmering through the billowing dark could be seen.
The Sun King stepped into her room, sized for a younger girl. Saleema lay in the corner where her bed used to be. “My sweet,” the Sun King said, approaching.
“Will you tell me a story?”
Anything to keep you here longer. “Of course.” He stroked her hair. He took a seat next to her, and she shifted around until her head rested on his thigh and she could look up at him. Like a demented echo from her childhood, their glowing yellow eyes, once the only pair in the world, matching each other. “What would you like to hear?”
She pursed her lips, her legs bent at the knees to fit in the space between him and the wall, her hands on her stomach. “Can you tell me of Daysin?”
“Elder Daysin, the Crystal Light, himself?”
She nodded eagerly. A move so similar to her seven-year-old self, it cut to the heart of the Sun King. “Elder Daysin first studied at the feet of Anirai, among her last disciples…”