'Lost Sons and Lost Souls' by Alyssa R George
 

It was a truly glorious night when Kiraleen reached the end of her journey.

Half of the cold winter sky was on fire with the Northern Aurora – a seething, rippling sheet of white light, flaring up like glowing smoke behind the town of Escon, her home. Kiraleen sat and watched for a long time – watched the lights of the sky, watched the lights of Escon, and the glow from the top of the Sentinel Tower where its beacon had been lit for the solstice. It was difficult to decide which was more beautiful after so many long years away, and Kiraleen silently basked in the privilege of seeing both.

Then, her grave blue eyes lightened for once, she rode down to the gates.

*          *          *          *          *

Down the Parade of Honour, where the statues of Escon’s dead leaders and heroes were faintly washed in aurora-glow; through the Grave Square, under which the bones of a dozen ancient traitors were buried in dishonour; along a dozen streets each named after a battle or general decades old. Escon was a city founded in war and built on war, the cusp of a bitter frontier, and that history was sunk deep into the psyche of its people.

Kiraleen, one of those very people, noticed only that she was passing by streets and buildings that had not changed in twenty years. Everything was as solid and sober as she remembered, the streets just as even and narrow, and she made her way from memory without any difficulty at all to the Bear and Stag, genuinely smiling when she saw the same shingle swinging over the door, loose on one side so it wobbled and squeaked.

The first real change she found after stabling her horse was inside the Bear and Stage. The tavern itself was still configured in the same economical chaos, with tables and chairs jammed in the limited space for maximum capacity, but the face at the bar was not bald Androck’s – it belonged to a man closer to Kiraleen’s own age, just shy of approaching forty, with the flecks of age starting to show in his dark beard.

Something about his face was familiar, though. Kiraleen stared hard as she took a stool at the quiet bar, and finally found a hint of Androck in the man’s lantern jaw. “Sullan?”

“Yep,” he replied briskly, mopping one corner of the bar with his apron. “How can I help?”

“Don’t you remember me, Sullan? Kiraleen Trebeyan. I used to –”

“-Practically live here.” Sullan’s square face shifted from friendly courtesy to a broad-split grin, immediately sloughing twenty years, and he dropped his apron. “’Course it’s you, Kira! You were one of Da’s favourites – though I guess that wasn’t too hard, since most the others never paid.” He gave what could only be described as a guffaw, then sighed. “Ah, too bad he’s not here now. He’d have been dancing on tables for glee.”

“He’s -?”

“Dead, yeah. Gone these last six years, now.” Sullan smiled ruefully. “Died happy with grandbairns, mind, so it’s not for anyone to cry too long over. When it’s your time, it’s your time, eh?” His smile broadened, and he slapped an empty tankard down in front of Kiraleen. “But he’ll rise up and turn into one of the restless dead if I don’t water you soon! What’ll you have?”

“Oh, nothing for me, Sullan. I’ve just come looking for some information. I’m trying to find my son.”

Sullan arched his brows. “You have a son? Strike me down! What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” said Kiraleen quietly.

The bulky barkeeper looked solemn for the first time. “I see. Left him at the Temple steps, did you?”

“Yeah.”

“That why you left Escon?”

“Yeah.”

“So …” Sullan hesitated for a moment, but he had all the pluck and nerve of his father before him. “I mean, shut me up if it’s none of my business, Kira, but … twenty years. Why d’you want to find him now?”

Kiraleen went quiet for a while, slowly running her fingers through her tight-pulled russet ponytail as she tried to sort out which of all her answers to give him. Because I’m curious? Because I’m guilty? Because he’s mine? Because I’ve finished doing all the things I wanted to, and I might want him now?

Because I want to just … see him, at least, before I die.

“Blood calls to blood and all that, I guess,” she replied aloud. “Even if it takes a couple decades.”

Sullan looked discomforted by her darkly ironic remark, and changed the subject. “I daresay them out at the Temple will be able to help – better than us in town, probably! People round here are pretty distracted by the celebrations. Maybe you’ve heard? Archmage Rohenna has taken an apprentice from our town! Can you believe it? All sorts of visitors have come for the ceremony …”

“I’ll make a few inquiries in town anyway, I think. Just in case. The Temple of Light is too far to visit now.”

“You can’t prowl around doorknocking at this time of night, either!” protested Sullan. “Settle yourself over by the fire. Have a bit to eat and wet your throat. I’ll put you up in one of the back rooms for tonight, no charge. No charge and no argument,” he amended as she drew a breath.

*          *          *          *          *

The stew filled a hole in Kiraleen’s stomach that she hadn’t even realised was there, only strengthening the sense of comfort she had felt since arriving in Escon. As she finished up, leaning back in her chair and suddenly feeling every last day of her long service as a caravan guard, she took quick stock of the other patrons in the Bear and Stag.

As Sullan had said, there were plenty of obvious visitors who’d come to Escon, a variety that the locals would no doubt have found intriguing, but was simply everyday experience for Kiraleen. There were suntanned Southerners, a few short, scholarly types from the Midlands, and even a light scattering of Elves, all ostensibly here to see the splendour of the ceremony for the Archmage’s apprentice.

One small group did surprise her a little – a small knot of the roving Daiathais, the Eyeless, a peculiar warriors’ sect whose affiliates wore grey, were raven-haired to a man, and went about with their eyes bound, even in battle. The Eyeless, it was said, could see into the Plane of the Dead. Some stories claimed that they plucked their own eyes out to gain this power, and dyed their hair the colour of death as a warning; others maintained that looking into the Dead Plane weakened their eyesight, forcing them to screen out light, and sucked all colour from their hair. Kiraleen had heard all sorts of tales about them in her time, and considered most of them utter tripe; nor was she enlightened as to which were true and which were false by the time the small group of Eyeless rose and left the tavern on business unknown.

“Live well, sister,” one said to her courteously as he passed, speaking in the strange, antiquated manner for which the sect was famed, and for a little while she wondered why.

Her thoughts wandered, then, to other things – memories of Escon, and a young life that seemed aeons gone. She remembered all her friends, their time training in the Esconite Guard … and Antayn, that dear, immature fool with the clear blue eyes, who had tried for all those years to make her laugh, not understanding that real life required far more dimensions than that.

So many memories as one aged, and so strangely selective. Kiraleen could clearly remember the expression on Antayn’s face – right down to the wavering glitter in his beautiful eyes – when she’d told him she wouldn’t marry him … and yet she couldn’t even remember what their son had looked like as she’d set him down carefully on the Temple steps and walked away …

I hope he has Antayn’s eyes, Kiraleen thought distractedly as she stared at the woodgrain of the tabletop, then blinked and glanced up as her empty bowl suddenly began to rattle. All around the taproom, voices raised in curiosity and alarm as a strange tremor shivered up from the ground – softly at first, but already growing stronger.

“What is this?” Kiraleen heard Sullan bellow as bottles jittered off the shelves and smashed on the floor. Patrons clutched at tankards and gripped their chairs while the whole room groaned and shook, doors rattling, tables trembling across the floorboards –

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

“Earthquake,” someone suggested in the ensuing silence, but without conviction – if it was a quake, it was the first since Escon’s founding. Kiraleen sat in her chair in silent surprise for a moment, then realised that her breath was now steaming in front of her face.

A deep, instinctive sense of foreboding poured into her gut. Standing up from her chair, she slowly approached the bar and drew breath to ask Sullan if he needed help with the mess of glass –

Kiraleen stopped in mid-stride as she saw two figures behind the bar. One was Sullan, bent over with his back to the room as he gathered up glass shards, but the other … the other stood facing her, the light gleaming on his bald, polished crown, his weather-scarred face arranged in a frustrated, panicked expression.

“Androck!” Kiraleen choked.

“Sullan, remember?” corrected Sullan easily, standing and turning with a ginger handful of glass. As his eyes turned to the other at the bar, however, his square face whitened, and the glass began to shower from his shaking hands like musical rain. “D…Da?”