Arc 5: Chapter 25: A Violent Impulse
The dream began with the sound of fire, and the stink of burning flesh.
I walked through a ruined city. Cracked towers rose in twisted columns into an acrid sky, stretching above pitted streets collecting a slow falling ash. Steam rose from those pits, as though they were openings into some volcanic depth. The ground seemed blistered, raw, ready to grow callouses.
There were bodies. Soldiers, both Ardent Bough and Recusant, and civilians as well. Their glassy eyes followed me as I stumbled drunkenly through them, while their withered lips muttered sullen curses. To me, it seemed as though the very stone of the city whispered its hate, and its pain.
I held a broken sword in my hand — it was fused to my hand — and wore the battered gold-and-green armor of an Alder Knight. Scars disfigured the filigree on my gauntlets, and the visor on my helm had been warped by heat and savage blows so it would no longer lower or lift, forming a twisted mask over my eyes. It made it harder to see, so I kept my eyes on the treacherous ground.
The city was familiar. Kingsmeet, I thought, after it had been left in ruins. Once the crossroads of the Urnic Realms, now reduced to this fuming carcass.
But some details were wrong. I crossed a bridge over a canal full of murmuring fog, and could see the cracked face of Myrr Arthor in the distance. It was Kingsmeet, but it was also Garihelm. The towers jockeyed for space with soaring trees left as blackened skeletons, like shadowy fingers desperately clawing at the burnt sky.
Bits of Elfhome were here, too. Giggling, faceless manikins dressed as nuns watched me from the alleys, quickly flitting out of my sight when I glanced at them. Their mocking laughter echoed at the edge of hearing.
Ash collected across the city, and on me, as I walked. I didn’t have a destination, didn’t know where I should go or what I should do. It took me a long while to recognize myself, and manage to form a thought.
Stopping, I studied the scene around me. I stood in a ruined plaza. Once noble buildings formed an ugly ridge of shapeless rubble encircling the square. This had been the first battle where the Recusant armies had fielded cannons.
They had used Marions here, and worse.
“What sin did I commit here, Dei?”