Following his desperate and traumatic escape from Orion, Kaleth would find himself awakening to the jarring of a rolling wagon. He jumped violently with the bump in his path, causing his arm to slam into the rim. Wincing in pain, he sat bolt upright while clutching his wrist. His eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness in his surroundings, revealing a cold stretch of open forest, its visibility thinning in the twilight. He found himself riding in the back of what appeared to be a steel-rimmed wagon trailer that was just large enough for him to stretch out comfortably within it. His ride was pulled by a pair of maulans running through the forest at full sprint without looking back.
Kaleth shook his head as he took in this unusual sight in a vain attempt to shake a little more sense into his situation. As soon as he sat up, however, the wagon slowed to a stop. Kaleth looked back nervously to the fey who had ceased to run. The maulans in turn, stood in place without looking back at him; waiting for something. For what, Kaleth didn't have to wait long to find out. A rustling of leaves and a soft thud later, the fighter that the boy had met while fleeing the city stood at the foot of the trailer.
"Make room," the elf said as he began clambering over the side of the trailer. "I can only let you hog my cart for so long."
Unable to contemplate any other response, Kaleth drew back his legs, giving the other space to lounge across the end of the wagon. With an imperious snap of his fingers, the new arrival willed the maulans who pulled the cart back into motion. He smirked at the dumbfounded expression on Kaleth's face.
"Let me save you the breath of asking your first question. Me and my friends took you with us when we made our escape. I thought it was a lost cause trying to save anyone back there, but I figured you for a survivor and you weren't exactly out of my way."
"I was going to ask who you were," Kaleth mumbled.
The man smirked and rolled his head back. "My name's Aennin. Not many people have needed me to say so this past year."
Kaleth could never have identified the man by a face he had never seen, but his name was always in the mouth of the boy's father. Like his father, Aennin was one of the Avatars; a man chosen by the Goddess of Death to speak with her voice. This explained his strange control over the maulans who exist to serve her. He had just been rescued by the elf known as Moonstep; the Avatar of Maula.
"I've heard of you," the boy replied timidly.
"Who hasn't?" Aennin shot back as he tilted his head forward to give him a smirk. "The only difference with you, I'll bet, is that you have the extreme honor of having heard of me from someone I actually know."
"How do you know that?"
Aennin sighed and shrugged weakly. "Well, you caught me. I was in town for an errand, you might say, and your father got me to agree that I would check on you."
Kaleth couldn't help but scowl at that moment. "If my parents wanted to know how I was doing, they didn't have to--wait! If you know who I am, why did you almost leave me to die?"
Aennin rolled his eyes as he replied. "Well, it's not like your father and I are friends are anything. We had no agreement for me to risk my life for you. But what does it matter? You're here now."
Kaleth's face fell and he nodded in response. "You're right. Thank you."
Both of them let the conversation drop at that. Still exhausted from the stresses of the day, they had nearly nodded off when Kaleth asked. "Where are we going?"
Aennin sat up and began to look around, smiling as began to spot the snow on the ground roughly a mile away. "We're going to Heron. The sai'mul seem to be mostly avoiding their borders for now. They won't be dropping dead in the cold, but a Heronite winter can't be any better for walking corpses than is for the warm meat sacks."
Kaleth frowned, stung by the morbidity of his statement. But he realized quickly the flaw in Aennin's plan. "Do you think they'll actually let us in? There is only half a human between the two of us."
Aennin rolled his eyes and chuckled. "I'm sure we'll be fine. Your father mustn't talk about us a lot if you can't understand the value of the two lives in this cart. No one would dare to turn away an Avatar and the son of another."
Kaleth sighed as he pondered Aennin's words. His father, Kartal Marle, was referred to by some that he had met as the Avatar of Geos, but he never fully understood the significance of these words. When the voice of the Time God was at home, he was nothing more than Kaleth's father. Once a templar, now a Restan diplomat who worked in Midania, Kartal had plenty more going on in his life than talking of his solitary experience of saving the world in the Gods' name. If his father had ever discussed what it had meant to him to be an Avatar, Kaleth would have stopped listening a long ago, so used to hearing about international relations that he was.
It was part of the reason he had wanted to leave Resta and study in Orion. He was so tired of hearing people whisper about his father, who tried so hard to pretend that he was normal. All of the questions he couldn't answer, all of the comments that placed him in his father's shadow; he wanted to be rid of it all. To imagine the irony, now, of once again finding himself face to face with an Avatar soured Kaleth's mood and Aennin was quick to notice.
"Most people would be thrilled in your shoes. Because of who your father is, you'll probably be well cared for!"
Kaleth looked into Aennin's eyes with a pleading stare. "Can you just vouch for me, please? I don't want anyone to know who my father is!"
Aennin raised his eyebrows and said slowly. "Okay. Not very fond of your father, I take it?"
Kaleth shook his head frantically and elaborated, "No! I love both of my parents! I just... don't like talking to strangers about him."
Aennin sighed and nodded. "After the talk I had with my sister this morning, I get that."
Kaleth looked at Aennin with a look of concern. "You had family in the city and couldn't try to at least save them?"
Aennin scowled for the first time to the boy as he said. "Who says I didn't?"
Kaleth's face flushed with embarrassment. "Oh no! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to--"
"Forget about it," Aennin said with a firm shake of his head. "I tried my best and I wasn't quick enough. But I know better than anybody what's going to happen to her now. It's really not worth thinking about until we're safe."
Kaleth hesitated before asking, "What do you think will happen to her?"
Aennin pulled his knees up to his chin and grumbled. "Believe me. You don't want to know."
The two fell silent as the cart rolled past the tree-line and began to incline upward. The maulans would run them past an acre of tree stumps before finally finding a road again, leading deeper into hills Kaleth could now only assume were part of Heron. As they pulled higher and higher, the cart rolled past foliage Kaleth had never seen before, including a bush with odd, bright red leaves which caught his attention. He had only a moment to reflect on how similar the plant life in Heron was to what he had known back in Resta before he dozed off yet again.
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