Page 45 of The Truth

Darkness was the sky and the world beneath it as Farda walked through the ashes of Orinhale. Each step he took broke pieces from his heart, fragments of his soul chipping away behind him. Black and grey ash clung to the air, whipped up with every passing breeze.

The sounds of the world were muffled as though he were drowning, the soft crunch beneath his feet barely registering in his ears.

Here and there, steel and bone peeked through the charred rubble, blackened from the flames. With every ash-filled breath he took, he refused to believe that his eyes told him the truth.

Two mornings it had been since he’d walked the streets of Orinhale, two mornings since he left Valyianne and Hana with their grandparents. Three nights. He had not been able to endure being parted from them for longer, and even those two days had only been earned by the pleas of Sahira’s mother and father, desperate to see their grandchildren for longer than a few moments.

Farda’s reluctance had not been because he did not trust Launa and Stefflin. They had been as good to Hana and Valyianne as Farda could ever have hoped. It was more so that his life had felt richer in every moment he had spent with the two girls. So much so that he loathed ever being too far from them, too far to hear their laughter or see the joy on their faces.

As images of Hana and Valyianne consumed Farda’s mind, Shinyara reached through their shared soul attempting to fill the cracks. Farda pushed her away.

“Not now,” he whispered as his eyes followed a trail of blackened bone. “Don’t take the pain from me. Let me feel it.”

A low roar filled the sky above as Shinyara flew overhead, her deep golden scales seeming almost pale in the moonlight as though the burned city had leached the colour from them.

Through Shinyara’s eyes, Farda spotted the blackened husk of the statue to Rathnok Veerst that had stood just a stone’s throw from Launa and Stefflin’s home. Were it not for the dragon, Farda would have been walking through a city of ash without hope.

He followed the remnants of the main thoroughfare, the silence setting a chill in his bones, wisps of ash swirling in the breeze, the thumping of Shinyara’s wings echoing. It took him a moment to realise what was so strange about it all: there was no carrion, no animals at all.

The city had burned so viciously that smouldering pits of rubble still billowed smoke into the air, almost entirely blocking the moon from sight. Even Shinyara could not hear a wingbeat for miles. And even beyond the ash, there were no bodies to pick clean. Just bones and rock and steel.

Farda had heard that Aerilon’s armies had razed the city, but never had he expected such utter devastation. This had been more than just fire. The Spark had been used with reckless abandon here. Aerilon had not attempted to burn the city, they had attempted to erase its existence.

For a brief moment he had asked himself ‘why?’ But that question had lived in his mind for little more than an instant before he had cast it aside. What did it matter? Hana and Valyianne were gone. There were no answers in the world that would bring them back. Aerilon would pay. Of that he would make sure. But he cared little for the ‘why.’

A piece of him prayed to Varyn and the other gods that he was wrong, that by some miracle, Launa and Stefflin had brought Hana and Valyianne away from the city. He could almost imagine them miles away in an inn, fast asleep and tucked beneath blankets. But only a small fragment of him was so naive. He had felt the world change beneath him, felt a hollow in his heart the moment word had come that Orinhale had burned to the ground.

When he reached the statue, Farda turned the corner through the market. There he stopped, his heart tightening at the hundreds of skeletons that lay strewn through the ash. Some of the bones were hunched over others, almost melted into place, but many had died alone, unable to share their final moments with another soul.

He swallowed hard, then pushed through, recognising the stones that had comprised the bakery on the market’s corner. The building had been a work of art before, almost nine hundred years old, each stone carefully crafted as though a painting in itself. Torlan had once told him that it had originally been the manor house of the wealthiest lord along the Broken Mountains. Now it was rubble, broken and charred, a thousand years of history obliterated. But beneath the markings of the fire, Farda could still recognise the beauty in the masonry.

As he walked, he let his mind drift into Shinyara’s, let the scents that touched her nostrils flow through him. His soulkin had always had an almost ethereal sense of smell, far more so than any other dragon they had encountered. Even then, through the acrid stench of smouldering bodies and burnt wood, Shinyara picked up the soft scent of strawberries and cream.

The moment the smell reached him, Farda dropped to his knees in the ash, his legs buckling beneath him. He might have been mistaken, but Shinyara was not.

Bergamot, clary sage, strawberries, vanilla… all the scents wrapped around each other, faint but beautiful.

In an instant Farda’s chest felt as though it had been hollowed out with an axe, his throat threatening to close on him. He would know that scent anywhere, through time and across oceans. Hana had picked it out when he’d taken them to Vaerleon not long after their parents had been killed. And every time Farda had been forced to leave them, he had paid that same soapmaker in Vaerleon a visit before returning.

He laughed as the tears burned his eyes. There were more bars of that soap stacked high in his chambers than stars in the sky. It made him realise how much time he had spent away, how many moments he had missed. Every bar of soap was a physical record of his absence in their lives.

Farda shook his head, letting loose the tears and standing. He would be there now. He would not kneel in the ashes of some street, weeping, while they lay alone once more.

Ahead, Shinyara dropped from the sky, opening her golden wings wide and alighting atop the ruins of a large building, rubble tumbling beneath her weight. Again she pushed her mind into his, and he pushed back.

A low rumble shook in Shinyara’s throat, echoing in the empty silence. She shoved again at him, her warmth flowing over his skin.

“No!” His cry rang out, echoing endlessly as though he stood at the foot of a valley. “Please, let me hold it,” he whispered, staring up at his soulkin. “The pain is all I have of them. I know you want to share the burden, but let me feel their loss, let me carry it a while.”

The rumble in Shinyara’s throat dropped to a high pitched pulse. It pained her to watch him struggle alone, to see her soulkin carry the weight of loss that she could share. But Shinyara knew the depth of his love for Hana and Valyianne, had felt his heart fill across those five beautiful years. And she knew that he needed to feel this. And so Shinyara lowered her head and let out a series of sorrow-wrought pulses and pulled her mind back from his, just far enough to show her acceptance, but not far enough so that she could not feel his pain.

“Thirim dir l’uve perindë yanmu.” Farda said, his voice carrying on the wind, his gaze locked on the other half of his soul. “L’uve thair na vröstarínme kirwa. Må umirís du vaera nylme vawle.”

Without you, I would be an empty shell. I would be a ship that drifts mastlessly. May it be that you will never think otherly.

Farda put one foot before the other, his body seeming to grow heavier with every step, the scent of strawberries now so overwhelming he could taste it on his tongue.

When he reached the burned remnants of what had once been the doorway to Launa and Stefflin’s home, his legs threatened to buckle once more, but he caught himself on the stone frames, dust coming loose and drifting into the air. With the sky blackened by the ash, only the palest of light illuminated the burnt out husk of the home. But Farda could see well enough. He stepped through, a shard of glass snapping beneath his foot causing him to catch his breath.