Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

I offered Eskir a bed, but he said he didn't feel comfortable in soft beds anymore.

"We have less comfortable beds," I said.

"I'm sure you have less comfortable everything," he snorted. "Your inn doesn't even have a name."

I gave him a room anyway, and he said he'd sleep on the floor. We were going to spend a day here, rather than leaving at dawn like all the good poems say. He had those fantasies of heroes and a grand quest, but I talked him out of it. He needed sleep, not to make the mistake of travelling in the dead of the night again. He claimed he didn't want to stop and set up tent in the cold, so he powered through. If anything, I had to admire the resilience. Especially from an ordinary human.

We'd stay for a full day and leave the next morning, destined for Bell Haven, though he wouldn't say why. Most likely, he was forbidden from saying it. My guess was the organisation must have held a lot of sway there.

Though we tried, I couldn't pry anything out of him about the nature of the organisation. He wouldn't tell me who they were, what their goals were, or what he meant by it happening again. Would another city vanish? Would it be Bell Haven, or was that the one city that would be safe? Were their headquarters there? He had given me a thousand questions with that answer, and left me in the dark.

It was frustrating, and I was tempted many times to instinctively pin him against the wall until he told me what I wanted to know, but I knew he was as desperate to speak as I was to hear him. The man seemed utterly broken without his voice. Whenever I brought it up, a glimmer of pain showed itself in his eyes.

Besides, those months at the inn had sapped the soul from me. I didn't have the heart for needless violence anymore. Lucian kept telling me it was a good thing, even if it meant I couldn't control the rowdiness of our patrons quite as well as he'd hoped from a Kindred.

The truth was, I was too tired for that anymore. My muscles ached like Senvia had only been yesterday, and I longed for a constant sleep that would never end.

I spent the day packing and saying my farewells, but I didn't sleep that night. Instead, I lay in bed thinking about what Eskir had said. I'd picked up a habit of talking to myself since Senvia had been replaced by cliffs and ocean water. I wasn't going insane, I kept promising myself. No, it was a comfort. I had nobody else there. All of my friends had gone. I'd made new ones in Lucian and Ana, but they didn't understand. They weren't Kindred. They had never lived in Senvia, and they couldn't relate. My conversations with myself gave me a partner to bounce my ideas off of, and ask her opinions.

"So," I reasoned, "there are the guilds. Hired for war. They've had a lot of business since Senvia vanished, what with everyone wanting to hire mercenary Kindred. We can write off the merchant guilds, they wouldn't do this, there's no purpose to it. They wouldn't make any money by getting rid of customers, and Senvia had some of the wealthiest of them. But even the great ancient guilds, Avenfold and Rise of the Dawn and the rest, they wouldn't have the means. Would they? They've been around since the dark times and the Dreadnaughts. But even then, nothing ever made a city vanish, and the guilds can't change what's written in our history.

And why would they? The guilds were no enemy of the empire. They were mercenary guilds of Kindred, and only profited from war. Emperor Alaric's speech had been about his intentions to introduce a new era of expansionism and conquest. That was Senvia's present and history. War. Colonisation. Lyana had reigned for thirty-five years, and those decades had seen more peace than any other time in Senvia's history. Even then, there had hardly been a moment in her life when the empire was not at war to some extent.

No, that wasn't it either. "Government, then. Let's think, Xera. What government organisations based at least in part outside of the capital would have access to that knowledge? That level of magic? Who would stand to gain from the empire crumbling..."

I let the silence sit on that for a moment, brushing the hair from my eyes. I used to keep it even shorter than it was, but it had grown out just long enough to be in the way these past three months. It still held itself up high, but there was enough weight to it now to pull it down.

"No. Okay then, religion. The fanatics across the mountains, who believe in the twin gods. No, I don't see that... What reason could they have?"

I kneaded my eyes. My head was hurting. I was tired, but I didn't need sleep. Even with all the rest I'd had, all that time spent recovering from the world, I still felt exhausted. This had been a mental vacation for me, and still I felt like I needed to get away. I wanted to sleep in the same way that I wanted to die. I needed it to all end.

"No," I told myself. "It'll end when I find out who did this. I'll end them, and then I'll get Senvia back. There must be a way to get it back. It can't just be gone. And then it'll be over. I'm Kindred, I can go without sleep. I'll rest when it's done."

Whoever it was, they couldn't have been a government, a religion, a cult, a guild... "A business? Someone who profits from war. We certainly have enough of it now. That could be the guilds. Someone who makes weapons? No, someone who sells war magic. There's too many of those, and none of them are big enough to know they'd win against their competition. Besides, Senvia was a warring empire. The For Peace movement? They are terrorists, after all. No, it's in their name, they want peace. This only brought out more war. Still, maybe their intentions were different, and they had something planned to fill the power vacuum. Something that never worked out."

A knock came at the door. I looked up at the window, but it was still dark. There were hours until morning, and I had seen the fatigue in Eskir's step. I knew it wasn't him.

I opened the door to a girl standing much shorter than me, with tears streaming down what was normally a mischievous smile on a bright, happy face.

"Ana!" I said.

She immediately pressed herself into me, trying to squeeze the life out of me.

"Please stay," she sobbed.

"I'm not leaving forever," I laughed, trying to pry her off. She was only human, but she had a strength to her grip that I wasn't expecting, almost like a small bit of magic was lending her a hand. It would have broken my heart to peel her tiny fingers away.

"No," she said with a pouty voice, still clinging to me. I found myself being forced back into my room. "No, you're not allowed to go. You're my friend." I could hear her voice beginning to crack through tears she was trying to hide.

"You're mine too!"

"If you leave, you won't come back."

I melted into her hug. "I promise, I'll come back."

I meant those words.

I know now why she didn't believe me, but it wasn't a promise I broke. I did go back. I only lived there for three months, yet I still think of that inn at the crossroads as my home. It was warm, and it was a place where I was accepted without responsibility or duty beyond what was expected of me for the wage I was paid. A job, sure, but they were as much my family as Lyana had been. I belonged with them.

"Ana," I said softly. "I have to go. I have to know."

Her legs gave out and I caught her before she collapsed. I had her sit on the bed next to me and cradled her head in my arms.

"I know," she whispered, her voice stabilising somewhat.

My friend's warmth brought me to the last sleep I'd have for a long time. When I woke, she was gone. Probably to her duties, I reasoned.

Down the stairs, I knocked on Eskir's door, but he didn't answer. I hadn't taken him to be a deep sleeper, let alone someone to sleep through the daylight on his face, but Lucian liked to keep the empty rooms open. A closed door meant he was still inside.

"Eskir!" I yelled. It was an understandable late wake, at least. We hadn't slept the night prior until the first rays of light had broken the sky. My work in the tavern kept me on a later schedule, and even I slept in that morning.

I tried opening the door, but it was jammed shut.

"I know it's tempting, but it's not best to sleep through the day. You'll be tired as we walk."

No answer.

"Alright, I'm going to get breakfast. It's blood sausage and mushrooms."

Still nothing, though I was sure he should have smelled it. It was a common comment, or even complaint, that the smell of Lucian's cooking wafted up into the rooms to wake the patrons. Blood sausage was an import from Heldren, and it wasn't the most popular of foods. I didn't mind it, but I did prefer the mushrooms.

"Have you seen Eskir?" I asked Lucian as I loaded up a plate.

"Ah, the man you're leaving us for?" he teased. "No, not at all. Still asleep up there. Ana checked in on him earlier, said he was fine. Fast asleep, even with the sun shining on his blanket, but fine."

"How long ago was this?"

"Few hours?" he guessed.

That was concerning. Sunlight at this hour was a reliable wake-up call. It made the bed uncomfortably warm, enough to wake customers in a sweat if they slept in too long. All the linen was stripped, stored, and eventually washed anyway. We had no magic for that, but we had the spare cotton. The inn had been around longer than Lucian, but I always suspected it had been built in such a way to encourage the sunlight.

I went back upstairs to knock on Eskir's door. This time, I opened my senses up a bit more.

We, as Kindred, have unnatural strength. Speed. Ability for magic. We're not necessarily smarter or more talented, but most of our physical abilities are better. No single human soldier could ever match me on the battlefield.

If we broaden our senses, we can pick up the details. My eyesight is normally no better than anyone else's, nor my hearing, and in fact, I suspect my sense of taste is worse than most, but I can find the otherwise imperceived details if I focus.

Touch. Smell. I had to concentrate for it, but I could feel the door vibrating as I knocked. I could smell the taste of the old oak. I could see the dust in the air, invisible to the naked eye in all but thin strands of sunlight. I could just barely hear the thumping of my own heartbeat. These were as hidden to me as to anyone, until I looked for them.

What I didn't hear was Eskir's snoring. If he snored at all. But he must have been breathing. I should have heard that. But there was nothing. Only Lucian's pattering around downstairs, swearing as he dropped some piece of cutlery.

"Eskir?" I said, quiet.

There was no answer.

I tried to force the door open, but it held its weight against me, even despite my own strength.

Sorry, Lucian. I raised my hand and let Stoneguard glow. With a single, swift pulse of energy, the ring blasted the door down. Lucian yelled in panic from downstairs, and I heard his footfalls thumping up the stairs.

"Eskir?" I called through the sudden cloud of sawdust. The door was only knocked down, but the pulse had left some pieces of it splintered and floating around.

I focused my eyes and gazed through, the room becoming clearer as the dust cleared in the sunlight. The door had been held shut by a chair, seemingly enchanted to fortify its position. Stoneguard had destroyed that too.

Eskir was there, his body in an unconscious tangle in the middle of the floor, surrounded now by splintered wood and chair legs. I could hear his breathing now, ragged, and his heartbeat so incredibly faint.

He wasn't sleeping. He was dying.