Chapter 40 Faron
FARON
D oremy. Armane. Rudou. Perche. Valois. Forez.
Etne. Vivarai. Cevenne. It had taken ten months, but the combined might of western Kaus now numbered twenty-five thousand soldiers in total.
All of them, gathered together in the province of Olado to march the road leading through the Sapphire Mountains, smash through the Twin Gates, and emerge upon the grasslands of the Astral Kingdom. And Leliel’s chosen would lead them.
“A force anyone should be fearful to engage,” Isabelle said as she and Faron looked over the maps and numbers in her command tent. “Though I’d have preferred we received more soldiers over the coin we salvaged from Kanth.”
“It will have to do,” Faron said, and he tapped Kanth on the map. “Healing the damage the royal family inflicted upon the population will take years. I pray you do not forget them once Racliffe falls and Kaus is united under the banner of the protectorate.”
Isabelle sent a mild glare his way.
“Do you not know me by now, Faron? None of this is for personal glory. All of Kaus will benefit from my rule. The corruption of Kanth will not be forgotten, I promise you that. I would see its forests healed and its abandoned villages once more vibrant with life.”
Faron smiled to counter her glare. “Forgive me, but I sometimes have trouble trusting those in power.”
“Even me?”
He laughed. “Especially you. Those I wish to trust are the ones I should doubt the most.”
She waved him away.
“Go and help prepare our soldiers for the march. We can’t afford to linger in the mountain pass. Each day we spend there is another day Mitra’s forces can ambush us with the terrain to their advantage.”
Faron bowed low, to the point of exaggeration, and then exited her tent.
The sun shone down on him, still warm despite the approaching winter, and it lifted Faron’s spirits.
Iris was waiting for him outside the tent, and she stirred, flopped her head side to side as she stretched, and then looked up at him.
He scratched behind her ears, then looked out upon the sprawling mess of tents marked with banners from the various kingdoms vassalized into the protectorate.
“Still hard to believe we did it, Sariel,” he said.
It had taken almost a year, but a conquering force was assembled, its entire might ready to crash down upon the walls of Racliffe and end the Church of Stars.
And throughout every conflict, they had guided Isabelle to victory. Not once had she lost.
It was enough to think she might have actually been chosen by a goddess.
“Where are you hiding anyway?” he wondered.
Sariel had stuck with Faron and his group of friends for most of the journey eastward, but come this morning, as they prepared to launch the invasion against the Astral Kingdom, he was nowhere to be found.
From the moment Faron awoke, Sariel’s tent was empty.
It was far from abnormal for his brother to be a loner, but this felt strangely sudden.
“I hope you’ll forgive me this breach of privacy,” he said, and closed his eyes.
He let his mind sink into the ground beneath him, flooding the land with his presence.
He ignored the teeming mass of humanity, thumping around in armored boots and trampling grass as they folded up tents and kicked out campfires.
They were faint little stars in his mind, no brighter than fireflies.
What he sought was the blinding sun that was his brother.
Nowhere in the camp. Strange. Faron pushed his presence out wider, expanding the miles while fighting off a worm of worry squirming in his stomach.
There. Two miles out, to the east. Faron breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t even know why he was nervous. Did he think his brother would abandon him now, at the start of their final victory?
“I suppose it’s time for a walk,” he told Iris, and together they trudged the gentle hills eastward.
Faron found his brother standing atop a steeply sloped hill that seemed to roll for hundreds of feet in all directions. A royal whitebud tree grew at its apex, and it seemed as lonely as his brother standing there with Redemption resting upon his shoulder.
“Wait here,” he ordered Iris at the bottom of the hill. The coyote reluctantly obeyed. Faron climbed the gentle slope, unsure of what he would say when at the top. It did not help that Sariel did not turn at his arrival. The wind blew across him, teasing his hair. The chill made Faron shiver.
“Took a bit to find you,” Faron said by way of greeting.
“Perhaps I did not want to be found.”
“Then you should have said so before slinking off and making me worry.”
He looked around, trying to understand the importance of this place.
They were a few dozen miles shy of the entrance to the mountain path.
The nearest towns were miles away. For as long as Faron remembered, no major battles had been fought here, no forgotten cities or major treaties signed beneath the shade of the whitebud tree to lend it importance. So why had…
And then he knew.
“This is where you and Eder dueled,” he said.
Sariel stabbed his sword into the earth.
“I used to tell myself here was when everything went wrong,” he said. “But that’s not true, is it? A wall had grown between us long before I demanded the duel. This was not the start, but the culmination of my every failure.”
He shook his head.
“I think on it more than I should, Faron. What I did wrong. How things could have gone differently. What might have happened had I won instead? Would I have been as cruel? As broken and bitter? Or was the reign of the Heartless King fated to rise and fall no matter who won our battle?”
Faron put a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“Do not dwell in the past, lest it drown you,” he said. “We all have our faults. We all have our regrets.”
“Perhaps,” Sariel said, and he looked to the sky. “But they are not equal, are they?”
Faron withdrew his hand.
“No,” he said. “Not if one is determined to measure the weight of a sin, I suppose. But that is not my place, nor my desire. You’re here with me, looking to fix what Eder has broken. That’s enough. The past is set in stone. It is this lifetime alone that you can control.”
“And so we march to war,” Sariel said, and he ripped his sword free.
“At the head of a union of nations, I come to tear down the walls of Racliffe and storm the Tower Majestic in search of my brother.” He laughed, so tired, so bitter.
“Things do not change on Kaus, do they? On and on it spirals, ever burdened by this bloody cycle.”
“That’s why we took our vows,” Faron said, feeling them itch upon his arm by merely mentioning them. “To stop that cycle.”
Sariel rested Redemption upon his shoulder, and he glanced one last time to the tree.
“No thrones. No crowns. If only Eder had shared in the vow. We might have all been spared this second tragedy.”
He descended the hill, returning westward to join Isabelle’s camp.
Faron waited, feeling wrong for having come here.
He truly did feel like a spy, crawling in somewhere he was never supposed to be.
This tree. This hill. It meant so much to both Sariel and Eder, but to him, it was but a place in a story told to him centuries ago.
Faron glanced at the tree, and he saw the earth near the trunk was freshly dug.
Deciding he had already overstepped multiple lines, he let his curiosity get the best of him.
The disturbance was small and shallow, the dirt easily parting to his fingers.
Buried beneath was a beautiful silver pendant decorated with a lone sapphire.
Faron held it in his hand, confused by its significance.
Then he flipped the pendant about and saw, carved into the sides, a single name: Agnes.
“You’re not who you were,” he whispered to the phantom face of his brother.
He returned the pendant to the earth. Down at the bottom of the hill, Iris barked, starting to worry.
He ignored her as his fingers curled into the soil.
The weight of the past threatened him, and the air felt heavy.
Of the days of the Four Heroes. Of his time as Barron the Wild Rage.
The old war raged in his mind, and the slaughter delivered by his sharpened sword.
“None of us are, and I pray none of us ever become them again.”