Ni'Srilan: The Desert: I'll tell you stories of a better time, and a place that we once knew; ANY

I used to roll the dice
feel the fear in my enemies eyes
listen as the crowd would sing
Now the old king is dead - long live the king!
One minute I held the key
next the walls were closed on me
and I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

They walk in a line, three of them, with the others presumably to follow.

All abreast of each other, there is the falcon of quicksilver, devoid of that passionate and vehement determination which has been replaced instead by a certain benumbed quietude. Alongside him is a flaming and less familiar chestnut, like Alshain in all but color, and Kyprioth’s eyes are withdrawn. He deliberately matches step with the small white figure beside him, who cloaks herself in swirls of wintry gusts and directs her sapphire gaze to the sand in front of her. Alanna objects to coming to Ni’Srilan – it is Baraqel’s home, and Baraqel is gone.

Kyprioth and Alanna found Alshain as he was evacuating Solira. Alshain had been shocked to see Kyprioth and not Kratos returning with his daughter, and Kyprioth explained the reason for that. Kratos and Baraqel were dead. Cyan, Baraqel’s son, was gone. Connor’d gone, too, and so had Aquila.

They wanted to go to Ni’Srilan. All of them did except for Alanna.

Alshain has faced his own mortality and has spent a great deal of his life denying it (even when that denial became impossible at one point.) But he is at this point challenged by an insurmountable, inexorable demon – the mortality of those he cares about. He cannot influence their actions and cannot always ensure that they won’t get hurt.

“It’s too hot here,” Alanna murmurs at last, as they stop on the top of a sand dune.

There is the Oasis, before them, a circle of palm trees in the vast wasteland of a desert.

“It’s a desert,” Alshain points out tonelessly.

Alshain hopes Saphira gets there soon. He wants to console her. He hasn’t seen her since they heard the news that Baraqel died. They stop at the Oasis – a group of refugees, sea-birds lost out of place and their flock dreadfully halved. Kyprioth ambles over to the side of the pond and dips his muzzle into it to get a drink. He recoils at once as a stray bolt of Lightning leaps out of the water and strikes his muzzle.

Suddenly, Kyprioth’s not so thirsty. Alanna blinks once, then turns away. She finds a shady patch of sand beneath a palm tree and curls up beneath it, focusing unblinking sapphire eyes on the ground ahead of her without seeing.

Kyprioth wanders over to his father’s side and stops abreast of him. “What now?”

“I’m sick of trying to figure that out,” Alshain mutters, shaking his nimbus-cloud head, “Changing the world isn’t as easy as the stories make it seem.”

“You’re in some of the stories,” Kyprioth points out – a meager attempt to rally Alshain’s spirits, because that is just what Kyprioth does. It’s either that or sit around and think about Kratos, which might kill him.

“Achilles was in his stories, too.” Alshain glances at his son with an ironic shade of a grimace. “That went well.”

And with that, there is silence. Silence of the refugees, and Alshain, for the first time in his life, has to face the possibility that maybe there’s not going to be a last-minute glorious victory, and that this time a hubristic pseudo-hero just isn’t good enough.

SLV. A L S H A I N;
BURY ME IN ARMOR WHEN I'M DEAD AND HIT THE GROUND;
SILVER WARRIOR || AIR III || TWISTERBLADE

THAT WAS WHEN I RULED THE WORLD