“Quickly,” Vaasurri intoned yet again from several strides ahead, an undertone of annoyance in the killoren’s voice causing Brindani to grit his teeth in anger. “Keep up. Stay alert.”
Cursing quietly, Brindani forced himself to move faster, though his gaze drifted from house to house, corner to corner, the details of a former village coming into sharper focus even as his body seemed to fall apart. His mind placed ghostly figures and candlelight in each dark window, families hurrying to board their doors and hide from the coming storm. Turning a corner, he paused, his attention caught by the remnant of an old smithy sign squeaking in the wind.
He rocked back on his heels, staggering in the intersection of two narrow streets. Agony ripped through his stomach, and he bent double, kneeling as phantom cries and shouts echoed in his thoughts. The memory flared to life as he tried to breathe despite the pain in his gut. He placed his hands in the soft mud and wet grass, gulping for air.
“What is it?” Vaasurri called out, running back to join him, “Have you found something?”
Brindani stared blankly at the old street corner, his pain fading though his throat burned with the faint taste of blood and bile.
“Faldrath… He died here,” the half-elf muttered, shaking his head and recalling the bloodied face of the once talkative soldier, silenced with no last words to pass on. “He was just a boy.”
Vaasurri laid a hand upon his shoulder, at first reassuring then forceful. Shoved hard, Brindani landed on his back in the mud, squinting at the killoren as tiny drops of rain stung his eyes.
“Focus!” Vaasurri said sternly, gesturing with his sword at the empty town. “Otherwise just stay here, out of my way… out of everyone’s way.”
“I’m trying!” Brindani began angrily.
“Try harder!” Vaasurri shouted, shaking with anger. He turned away, back to his tracking, calling over his shoulder, “Fight it or die! Make a choice! I’ve no time to coddle you now.”
Brindani stood, indignant and furious, drawing his sword before taking hold of himself and calming his wounded pride. He closed his eyes, lest some familiar building or patch of ground remind him of more deaths, more long fights, and the people who had once lived in Caidris.
Torn between self-pity and inexplicable rage, his only focus remained on the silkroot.
“Just once more,” he whispered to himself. “Once more and I’ll be fine. I can do this.”
He laid his hand upon the leather strap of his pack, slowly, as if at any moment a fresh surge of resistance might save him from himself. But the pain kept his hand moving. Vaasurri had stopped and knelt at the end of a short street, as Brindani searched through his pack, briefly hoping he’d lost the last bit of the drug. His hand closed on the soft lump of silkroot just as the strident clash of steel on steel rang through the air.
Vaasurri stood and charged toward an abandoned house on the next corner, but Brindani hesitated. Time felt stretched as he warred with two compulsions, and he recalled yet another memory from the battle in Caidris, Uthalion’s voice, as darkness had fallen over the town, echointr in his mind.
“Keep moving, don’t think, and do your job,” he said under his breath as a low growl rumbled from in between the houses ahead of him.
Prowling into the overgrown road, the dreamer bared its tusklike fangs. Its thin gray coat was soaked with rain, and its claws were covered in mud. Haunting roars and raised voices erupted from the house on the corner, galvanizing Brindani’s will to resist the urge that gripped him. He left the silkroot to its hiding place and raised his sword, stifling the pain in his stomach and advancing on the beast between him and his friends.
Uthalion stared at the old basement in a daze, seeing nothing changed since he’d closed the door at the top of the stairs behind him six years ago.
Empty bags of stored food were thrown in a corner, some torn at the seams to serve as blankets. And in the darkened space beneath the stairs, the one real blanket they’d found during that time concealed a pile of discarded weapons, cast aside and, with whispered oaths, never touched again. Uthalion imagined that beneath the smell of dust and time, a scent of blood was still on the air. Surely its crusted stains still adorned the abandoned blades.
He stood at the bottom of the stairs and saw them all, each soldier in their place, trying not to listen to the raging storm that had brought no rain. Their faces and names were burned in his memory, sellswords from all walks of life and parts of the world, gathered together under the banner of the Keepers of the Cerulean Sign. A banner of war against the aboleths he had not seen since Tohrepur, nor ever desired to see again.
“We did what we had to,” he whispered, his breath quick and his pulse erratic. A sudden anger clenched his fist as he cursed the road that had brought the soldiers to Caidris. “We cleaned up the mess.”
“And left a fair mess behind, I would say.”
A swift breeze rushed down the stairs as Uthalion turned toward a voice as much a ghost as the phantoms he’d been speaking to. He backed away from the dark figure standing at the basement door, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Khault?” he said, trying to reconcile his memory of the man with the hunched silhouette at the top of the stairs.
“I am surprised you remember my name, Captain,” Khault replied smoothly, a humming edge in his words that cut like a saw through Uthalion’s skull. “Though I am not surprised to find you here, moping in a dusty basement, speaking only to ghosts.”
“Not just ghosts it seems,” Uthalion muttered, unable to tear his eyes away from the old farmer. Thunder rumbled as lightning flashed through the upstairs windows, giving him a glimpse of dirty white robes and a ruined, scar-laced visage that bore only a faint resemblance to the man he’d known.
“I was here once, like you, talking to the past, trying to sort out what had gone wrong first,” Khault said. The basement door creaked ominously on its hinges; a sound like nails being dragged through the old wood echoed down the stairs. “But I found myself alone. Within months my sons had left me, along with everyone else; but I stayed, unable to leave my wife’s side.”
Uthalion pictured the simple gravesite and recalled lowering Khault’s wife into the soil, burying her in silence as plumes of oily smoke rose from the fields outside town. Hers was the only body not burned that day, the only grave that bore a marker instead of soil darkened by ash.
“I spoke to you a hundred times down here, pleaded with you to leave, thinking I could change the past somehow. make it right,” Khault continued. His shoulders shook as he spoke, and his voice rose with a growl that clawed painfully through Uthalion’s thoughts. “I killed you a hundred times over as well, Captain.”
Casually drawing the first handspan of blade from its sheath, Uthalion stepped forward, bracing his boot on the bottom step. Pity drew him toward the brave man he had once known, the farmer that had sacrificed so much to do what was right, but Uthalion let anger grip the sword at his side, to wield against the thing Khault had become.
“I am no captain,” he said sternly, slowly taking the first step. “A dying man handed me a sword and ordered me to lead a retreat. Nothing more.”
“I found your Tohrepur, Captain,” Khault spat. The single thrumming word slammed into Uthalion’s chest like a thrown brick, briefly stealing his breath. He fell back, coughing as Khault continued, “I had sought only another answer, some reason for the battle that had come to my doorstep. Instead I found bones… and singing… and in the ruins of your foolish battle, I found what you left behind.”
“No,” Uthalion whispered, breathless as his mind raced. He wondered where the Keepers had gone wrong, fearing the horrors they’d left alive in Tohrepur. As the powerful vibrations of Khault’s voice shivered across his skin, he looked upon the old farmer with new eyes, seeing the trapped man beneath the tortured flesh, and the work that he had left unfinished.