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“Strange,” she replies, trailing off.
“Why is that?”
“There is a girl from the legends of my ancestors named Kaela, one who lived in seclusion on top of a mountain. My great grandmother told my mother about her when they came here because the mountain you come from reminded her of the story. My mother loved her grandmother and the tales that she would tell, so much so that she named me after her, Minerva.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” I say.
“Thank you.”
At that moment, Severin glares back at us as though Minerva shouldn’t be talking with me so casually, so our conversation comes to an abrupt end. My eyes return to admiring Sanctuary, which is now so close that it hangs over us like a giant reaching up into the mist.
The canyons here are higher than the ones I traversed with Wade, folding into Sanctuary and allowing me to see the mountains of Kalepo to our west. They turn northwest suggesting that they have reached their end. I always wondered if the mountains went on forever, and it seems that they don’t. Instead, more plains stretch into distant hills to the north.
Early in what
I presume to be the afternoon, we hear the rumbling of something closing in on us from behind. Severin quickly brings his soldiers about to face it, pulling me by his side and having the soldiers form two lines across the narrow path before us. Images of the dead from the fortress flash through my mind, and I start to panic, though I try to tell myself that the soldiers with me will be able to protect me.
To my relief, a small band of soldiers wearing the same uniforms as those with me comes around a bend in the path a few hundred yards away, and Severin gives the order for his soldiers to stand at ease. He then walks through them and rushes back to speak with the soldier at the head of the band. After a brief exchange, he yells back our direction.
“Go on without me. Tell Anastasia I will return before the darkness sets in.”
One of the soldiers next to me, a shorter one who has been by Severin’s side ever since we began our march, nods his head as though the order was directed specifically at him.
“You heard him, let’s move,” he says in a scraggly voice that matches his thin frame.
Once we are out of Severin’s sight, I start talking to Minerva again.
“What you said makes it sound like your ancestors are from somewhere else. Why did your people choose to come here?”
“I don’t think anyone chooses to come here,” she replies, then quickly picking up on my confusion at her answer. “Wade didn’t tell you much about the plains, did he?”
“No,” I bemoan. “He said it would be best to wait, that the truth can be a bit much to hear, whatever that means.”
“I can relate,” she reassures. “I was born here, too, without any memory of anything else, so at some point I had to have it explained. But I think it’s more than that. Most people here don’t like to think about where they come from. It’s easier to survive day to day in the world you know, I guess. That’s what makes Sanctuary different. The idea there is to not forget where you come from, but to somehow draw peace from it.”
“You don’t sound like you want to tell me, either,” I tease.
Minerva chuckles, which draws attention from the soldier now leading us. The look he gives us is much like the one from Severin, but Minerva doesn’t seem to take it as seriously and keeps talking, at least to finish what she is saying.
“I’d rather you hear it from Anastasia. She’s the leader of Sanctuary. It’s probably best you go to her with a clear mind.”
We march in silence for a little while after that as I try to put everything I’ve heard together. The seed of doubt that the Necromancer planted in my mind makes that difficult, leaving me to question just what I can trust, from Minerva or anyone else. Despite Wade’s conviction that the Necromancer meant to deceive me himself, Wade didn’t exactly seem to have much confidence in Sanctuary either. I wonder where he went.
“Is Wade dangerous?” I ask.
“Depends on which stories you choose to believe,” Minerva answers. “Wade’s true nature is clouded, just like all of the other rangers who have managed to survive.”
“Rangers?”
“That’s what they were called, long before my people came to this land. There used to be many more of them, hundreds if not thousands. They were once a force for good, men who kept the land to the south of the Aspros Wild safe, or relatively safe, for centuries. Many villages dotted that part of the plains back then, but now they’re empty, left in ruins. Only the great fortressed cities remained intact after the rangers disappeared.”
“What happened to them?”
“That, too, depends on who and what you believe. The only thing I know for certain is that someone, or something, preferred chaos to the order that the rangers provided. Whatever it was, it hunted the rangers one by one for years until they were all but extinct. Those who survived… well, I think that you can only be hunted like an animal for so long before you transform into one yourself.
“To answer your question, it is likely that Wade was once an honorable and good man, but I can’t tell you what he is now. I like to think that goodness is always to be found inside the souls of those who were once good, no matter what they do, but this world has a tendency to prove me wrong.”
To my surprise, this actually makes me feel much more at peace with the thought of Wade. The way he acted toward me, what he described as being two-faced, makes much more sense given the history that Minerva has described.
