[ Sometimes X’rhun wonders if he dreamed it all, everything from awakening on a great structure of steel and plastic and materials for which he has no name in the depths of space, to his year on the surface of the planet below, to the odd few months shunted into a new world altogether. When he found himself back home with a full head of hair, his usual clothes, and easy access to his magic, it became difficult not to doubt his memories as perhaps one extended, bizarre hallucination.
But there are scars where there weren’t before, marks of battles taken place worlds away, and a new regret that sits heavy in his chest, settles there with the rest until it has formed but another part of the foundations of his life.
He moves forward because he has no choice, because that’s just how he is. He keeps his memories and his regrets both tucked away in his heart, but his pilgrimage continues. Perhaps it was his experiences elsewhere, the year spent living under the lie that Hydaelyn had met Her demise, that draws him back to Ala Mhigo. Draws him back to the place where he entombed his comrades’ blades ere he put his homeland behind him. X’rhun finds the tomb set upon by grave robbers, and it is only thanks to the intervention of some old friends – students old and new – that he sees the swords returned to their rightful place.
With that business done, X’rhun seeks to depart again, to stick to his oath and continue to be a wandering force for good wherever he may be needed. Mayhap he ought not have started said journey by cutting through the long abandoned royal crypts, tucked into the mountainside near where the Duelists’ swords lay entombed, but he could handle a few dark tunnels and wandering voidsent.
Torches line the walls, kept alight by magic or else by someone with an unfaltering sense of duty even decades after the fall of the monarchy. Apart from the voidsent, it isn’t uncommon to find the odd living soul in the catacombs, seeking to stumble upon something of value from a place long picked clean by the desperate and the destitute. So, when X’rhun’s sharp sense of hearing catches the tell-tale beat of footsteps stumbling over the broken stone and uneven ground of one of the many tombs to line the main passageway, he thinks it to be one of his grave-robbing friends, out for revenge or perhaps lost and cut off from the group he and his students had so handily bested.
The Duelist slows to a stop, hand on the hilt of his blade as he waits. ]
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But there are scars where there weren’t before, marks of battles taken place worlds away, and a new regret that sits heavy in his chest, settles there with the rest until it has formed but another part of the foundations of his life.
He moves forward because he has no choice, because that’s just how he is. He keeps his memories and his regrets both tucked away in his heart, but his pilgrimage continues. Perhaps it was his experiences elsewhere, the year spent living under the lie that Hydaelyn had met Her demise, that draws him back to Ala Mhigo. Draws him back to the place where he entombed his comrades’ blades ere he put his homeland behind him. X’rhun finds the tomb set upon by grave robbers, and it is only thanks to the intervention of some old friends – students old and new – that he sees the swords returned to their rightful place.
With that business done, X’rhun seeks to depart again, to stick to his oath and continue to be a wandering force for good wherever he may be needed. Mayhap he ought not have started said journey by cutting through the long abandoned royal crypts, tucked into the mountainside near where the Duelists’ swords lay entombed, but he could handle a few dark tunnels and wandering voidsent.
Torches line the walls, kept alight by magic or else by someone with an unfaltering sense of duty even decades after the fall of the monarchy. Apart from the voidsent, it isn’t uncommon to find the odd living soul in the catacombs, seeking to stumble upon something of value from a place long picked clean by the desperate and the destitute. So, when X’rhun’s sharp sense of hearing catches the tell-tale beat of footsteps stumbling over the broken stone and uneven ground of one of the many tombs to line the main passageway, he thinks it to be one of his grave-robbing friends, out for revenge or perhaps lost and cut off from the group he and his students had so handily bested.
The Duelist slows to a stop, hand on the hilt of his blade as he waits. ]