Post by Deleted on Mar 27, 2023 18:43:27 GMT -5
[for @rhidian ]
Embric had found a second wind. Where it had come from, he couldn’t be sure, but somewhere between speaking with Elaxi and cleaning up and finding the children and pointedly trying and failing to not think about the two people he couldn’t save, the exhaustion that had plagued his mind since— well, since— had faded away. He thought it was probably because he was up and around and doing things. Things like talking with Elaxi and washing all the blo— cleaning himself and making sure the children were safe. Kasni was talking to him again, which was nice, even if he didn’t think he deserved it. He would take it, though, because Ermir’s daughter and son, Mayda and Lolek, were more comfortable with her than him.
Who knew that a night spent huddling together in fear would bring children who had only occasionally met before close together? Embric did, now.
Embric knew a lot of things now, and most of them were lessons that he wanted to forget. So, despite not having slept in who knew how long, he kept moving. One of the rare, surviving elder Dresmondi needed a hole in the wall of his ramshackle cabin patched, and on the way back, he lingered longer than usual by the soldiers on the market streets as if he might hear word already from the Eldouir Estate about their newest— Well, he didn’t truly expect to, so it really shouldn’t have been that disappointing that he hadn’t.
By design, Embric didn’t know many people in Elderkeep in any capacity more than anonymous acquaintance. Distinctly not by design, the number of faces in Elderkeep whose appearance he welcomed had shrunk significantly. Xanthe had been taken. Ermir was dead. Zevran and Kezia were probably also dead; certainly, it was almost easier to think that they were than to try to hold on to a very distant hope for an incredibly unlikely rescue. Suffice to say he wasn’t expecting to see another familiar face around for quite a while.
If only that were the case.
As he rounded a corner onto a nearly empty side street, Aine spoke up: “Embric, is that Rhidian?”