Fragments on the Road

Fragments on the Road

by Lysi'ander El'rorion Vae'Khyll
Thoughts in transit. Autumn aspect. Moving north toward the Open Hand.
 

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I. The Garrison

The Gate of Ilthmar — Geister, 3023
 
The gate captain was named Arthas. He took everyone's papers without incident until he reached mine, and then his whole demeanor changed. That was not surprise on his face. That was a prepared response being executed. My name, or something tied to it, was already flagged before I handed him a single document.
 
He told me someone was coming to ask me questions, and that it would be best if I answered honestly. He offered me a drink. I declined. He asked again. I accepted the second time, because refusal beyond once signals guilt or paranoia, and neither serves me in a room I do not yet understand. I treated the cup like a third person at the table. I did not drink deeply.
 
Then the Dragonborn came in. Eight feet of him. His voice filled the room like a war drum, and Arthas bowed without ever once meeting his eyes. I followed suit. That detail told me everything I needed to know about what kind of place I had walked into. Arthas did not look up because Arthas had learned, through consequence, what looking up costs in this man's presence.
 
He dropped a picture of Dawnseeker on the table and asked if I knew this woman and her Covenant.
 
I gave him architecture. A wall with a window. Enough to satisfy a surface inspection, not enough to walk through. I answered in half-truths and let him believe he was getting somewhere.
 
He told me to bow again. I complied. He came around behind me, cut the back of my clothing, and smelled my hair. Every trained instinct I have locked down at once. This was dominance, yes, but it was also identification. He was trying to place my origin, my nature, my allegiance through scent alone. I kept my breathing measured. I gave him nothing useful to read.
 
When the questioning stopped producing what he wanted, he tried to choke me unconscious. It failed. He struck me hard enough to put me on the floor. Then he told me to strip.
 
My weapons were already gone. My clothes were not armor in that room. They were pride, and pride is recoverable. What I carry in my head is not. So I set pride aside and complied. An unseen servant restrained me from behind. They blindfolded me and escorted me deeper into the stronghold, into a cell five feet by five feet.
 
And then, silence where Zephyr lives.
 
The severed connection was worse than the cell, worse than the floor, worse than the strike. I allowed myself exactly one breath to feel it. Then I began.
 
Titania and Freyja did not speak in that cell. But the silence had a quality to it that was not absence. It was more like held breath. As if they were watching to see whether I still knew who I was once every symbol of their presence had been stripped from my body. I knew. It was not a comfortable knowing. But I knew.
 

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II. What I Carry Is Not Mine to Lose

Inside the Stronghold
 
I could not stay. The information I carry is too dangerous for me to remain captive for any length of time. This was never about me. This was mathematics.
 
If they broke me, or read me through means I could not prevent, the Covenant would be exposed. Dawnseeker would be exposed. Every thread of intelligence about the Land of Faerie, everything I have built over a year and a half, would become a weapon pointed back at us. I am not the priority. What I know is.
 
When the area cleared, I cast Elevated Sight to map the structure, and then I moved. Fey Step, level by level, fast, no hesitation. I moved through that building the way a melody moves through a composition. Exits, guards, sightlines, all of it catalogued beneath thought. The map built itself in my mind.
 
On one transit I emerged mid-stride into an occupied chamber. Guiding Bolt. I was gone before the man could process what he had seen. My Winter Aspect did the rest. The terror on his face when I vanished was genuine. Perhaps he will not speak of it, for fear of retaliation. One can only pray.
 
Then I found a large abandoned chamber with a direct portal to the Astral Plane, open and active. I nearly walked into it. Someone built that and left, or was removed from it. The Covenant needs to know this exists.
 
I cast Elevated Sight again from the outer walls, hoping for thirty feet of solid ground I could step to. There was nothing. Astral Plane in every direction. This structure was built to be inescapable for anyone without a means of planar movement. Whoever designed it knew what they were containing, or who. A portal that opens to other realms is a door dragons can walk through.
 
Three doors on one level, and behind them, crying. People being hurt. Titania pulled me toward mercy. Freyja pulled me toward war. I made myself a promise instead of a decision. I will come back. With numbers. With a plan. A dead Lev saves no one behind those doors.
 
I climbed to the top, came out on the north side, and started east toward the treeline. And then I saw it. A black dragon wing expanding from behind the northern wall. The whole picture assembled in less than a breath. The Draconic glyphs at the gate. The Dragonborn soldiers. The executed Ilthmarian loyalists burning at the entrance. The Astral portal. None of it was an Ilthmarian military installation. This was a forward position, and that dragon was no accident of geography.
 
I reversed course to the south wall, pushed through the severed quiet, and found Zephyr again. The connection snapped back like a bone set right. I sent her what she needed. Attempting escape. Top of the complex. Moving east, then north once clear. Stay away. There is a large black dragon here. Stay away. Her relief at hearing me was a warmth I could not afford to hold. I sealed it away for later.
 
By Titania's grace and Freyja's love, there was a rope already secured on the south wall. I tied it off, descended, and ran east with everything I had.
 

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III. Zephyr

Outside the Garrison — Hours Later
 
I made it clear of the fortress and found him in the dark, where the tree line thickens and the shadow runs deep. Fifty-eight years between us and he came to me like I had never been gone. His small weight settled on my shoulder with the precision of long habit.
 
I told him everything. Quickly, quietly, the way you debrief when you do not know how much time you have. The garrison. The gear. The declaration that I am an enemy of Lankmar. My focus gone, the portal, the dragon, the doors I promised to return to. And then I told him the one thing that mattered most. Find the others. Bring me their location.
 
He went. He has always gone when I needed him to go. Fifty-eight years and he has never once made me ask twice. I was still stripped, still without my symbol, still raw from the cell, but he went into the dark for me because that is what we have always been to each other.
 
When I woke, the bond was gone.
 
Not faded. Not distant. Gone. The way a candle goes, not the way a fire banks. The thread I just felt snap back into place like a bone set right, severed again, and this time nothing came back. No warning. No final image through his eyes. Just silence where Zephyr has always lived.
 
There are three explanations and I have forced myself to hold all three. He is captured in the same fortress I just escaped. He is dead. He has been pulled back to the Land of Faerie, which would mean Titania knows something she has not told me. My Wisdom demands I weigh all three equally. My heart refuses every one of them.
 
He went into the dark to find my people. Whatever stopped him from coming back came from that fortress. Which means I have walked out of something my oldest friend has not.
 

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IV. Laura

The Search — That Same Stretch of Dark
 
I went looking for him. Stripped, bonded to nothing, undone, and I went out into the dark to find a fairy dragon across a severed connection with nothing but instinct to guide me. That is not strategy. That is grief wearing the shape of purpose. I knew it even as I did it. I did it anyway.
 
She found me instead.
 
She seen me from the road and spoke with the particular calm of someone who had already assessed the situation and made a decision about it. Her name was Laura. She told me without being asked, which meant she understood that a stranger offering gifts in the dark to a naked Eladrin needs to establish trust quickly. I read her aura the way I read all auras now, reflexively, without announcing it. What I found was divine. Not arcane. Not fey. Divine, and oriented toward something benevolent in a way that did not read as performance.
 
She gave me boots. Clothes. Two days of food. A dagger.
 
The dagger is what I keep returning to. Clothes and food are kindness. A dagger is assessment. She looked at me, stripped and bonded to nothing and visibly coming apart, and decided I needed a weapon. That requires a specific kind of reading. Either she understood the environment well enough to know what I was walking back into, or she understood me well enough to know I was not someone who should be unarmed regardless of circumstance.
 
I asked her why she was helping me.
 
She did not answer. Not evasion. Something more like the answer existing in a register she had decided not to translate for me yet. She had the manner of someone operating on a timeline that does not require my understanding to proceed.
 
I owe Laura a debt, and that is not nothing. A divine aura, in that exact place, at that exact moment, does not happen by accident. My Wisdom does not believe in coincidences of geography. When I have a copper wire and a holy symbol and hands that work the way hands are supposed to work, I am sending her a message. Wherever she is, whatever she is doing, she deserves to know that what she gave me was not wasted.
 
I do not know why she was there. I intend to find out.
 

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V. Eleven Days

Karja Tal Docks — An Unknown Date in Geister, 3023
 
There is a gap in me where eleven days should be.
 
After Laura left back in her carriage, I kept moving, and I kept spiraling. The bond's absence grew louder with every hour until it was the only thing I could hear. My Wisdom is supposed to protect me from that kind of collapse. Apparently grief for a fifty-eight year bond carries a weight that Wisdom cannot fully counterbalance. I lost my grip on the present somewhere in those hours, and then I lost everything else.
 
I came back to myself on the Astral Plane.
 
Not crashing into it. Not pulled through a door. Simply there, in the grey-silver quiet, with no memory of crossing and no sense of how long the crossing had taken. Total reverie. The Eladrin trance turned so far inward it became erasure. Eleven days, by the reckoning that came after, in a place where time does not run the way it runs here, with no body to anchor me to anything happening in Nehwon.
 
What finally brought me back was something solid. Not a surface. Something I struck with whatever part of me was still moving through that grey, some resistance that the reverie finally exhausted itself against. And then I was standing at the Karja Tal docks, in Laura's borrowed clothes, with Laura's dagger on my belt, and eleven days simply torn out of my life like pages from a book.
 
I sent Dorian a Sending before I had finished understanding where I was. Alive. Karja Tal docks. Lost time. Do not know how long. Zephyr still missing. Where are you. Are you safe. Planar portal at fortress. Twenty-five words, the most important twenty-five words I have spoken in months.
 
The Astral does not take eleven days for nothing. Something in that reverie was either protecting me or processing me, and I do not yet know which. The portal inside that fortress burned with a blue cold fire, the color of something that should not burn at all. I was not lost in the Astral. I think I was stored there. That thought is not comforting. It is clarifying, and clarity is what I have instead of comfort right now.
 

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VI. The Farmhouse, and the Weight of What Is Coming

The Road North, Between Karja Tal and the Open Hand — Night
 
I found the farmhouse by smell first. Char, and beneath it the particular cold that blue fire leaves behind when it has gone out. I knew the smell before I saw the source. I have stood inside that fortress and felt that exact cold move through the Astral portal, and I recognized it the way you recognize a voice before the words resolve.
 
The fire had not burned at random. This was not a raid. Not panic. One creature, working with method, moving through the structure in a pattern that spoke of purpose rather than destruction. The family was flushed out and taken, not killed where they stood. The fire was not vandalism. It was a signature. The same blue cold fire as the portal. The same hand, or the same kind of hand, reaching into the world at two different points and leaving the same mark on both.
 
I found the shoe near the threshold. Small. A child's. I do not fully know why I put it in my pack. My Wisdom says to know what you carry and why. My instinct said the child who left that shoe deserves someone to keep it until there is somewhere to bring it back to. If I make it back to Open Hand we can possibly use magic or scent to track this child. I have learned to trust that instinct even when I cannot justify it.
 
And running through the dark with that shoe in my pack, the larger shape of all of it presses down on me, because I am one of the very few who can see how the pieces fit.
 
The Starcrow spoke a prophecy over Mirla's buried child, and Cathlynn translated it for all of us. The White Witch is about to split the world. She is pregnant. Her child must not be born. When next the sky cracks with black lightning, return to the Temple. Those words have not left me since the day they were spoken.
 
And Keesha confirmed the rest of it to me directly, across a Sending, in her own words. Tara is pregnant with King Edwynn Werrish the Second's child. Once that child is born, dragons will be permanent in Nehwon. Every dragon we have seen so far is temporary. The black dragon behind that fortress wall, the wyrmlings fed on stolen children, all of it is the temporary version of a permanence that one birth will lock into this world forever.
 
That is the gravity I carry north. Not a town in crisis. A world standing at a threshold. The blue fire, the Astral fortress, the dragon, the prophecy, the witch, the child, the king. They are not separate horrors. They are one horror seen from different angles, and the window to stop it is measured in weeks and the obstetrics of two pregnancies I cannot reach.
 
I am Autumn right now. Bronze skin, chestnut hair, eyes that pass for mortal. Anonymous. A traveler with no reason to be looked at twice. I chose Autumn because it was strategically correct, and I still believe it was strategically correct.
 
But Zephyr is gone, taken into something I walked out of and he did not, and every mile I run in this aspect that hides what I am, I feel the Summer pressing against the inside of my chest like heat behind glass. Not anger. Something colder than anger. Resolution. The kind that arrives when you stop calculating odds and start calculating what you are willing to become.
 
I know what Summer looks like. I have seen it in reflections and in the few moments the membrane between aspects thinned enough to let the heat through. Jet black hair. Cardinal red eyes. Warmth radiating off my skin like a banked forge. No alias. No disguise. No patience for the kind of patience that leaves a fifty-eight year companion in enemy hands.
 
I am not there yet. I am still Eloryn. I am still moving with enough caution to reach the Open Hand, to make my report from only what I witnessed with my own eyes, to do the work that has to be done before I make a decision I cannot walk back.
 
But when I find him, and it is when, not if, there is going to be a moment when Autumn is no longer sufficient for what the situation demands.
 
I am still running. Four hours before dawn. A steady military pace, the rhythm that covers ground without spending the body. I sleep four hours when the light comes and climb the tallest tree I can find and keep watch while my strength returns and my hands heal. The Open Hand is ahead of me. The farmhouse is behind me. The shoe is in my pack. And somewhere in the dark between me and everything I still have to do, Zephyr is waiting for me to become enough to come and get him.
 
— Eloryn (Lysi'ander El'rorion Vae'Khyll)
Autumn Aspect. Moving north. Geister, 3023.