Page 432 of Of Empires and Dust

“Good.” Fane looked from the Praetorian to Rist. “It appears, Rist, that our stars are aligning. I will find you in the morning. There is much to talk about.”

As Fane stood, Rist couldn’t help but ask the question. “Do you find there is power in a name, Emperor Mortem?”

Fane looked at Rist with a raised eyebrow.

“I only ask because you used mine four times.”

The man stared back at Rist for what felt like an eternity before giving a half-laugh and pulling the curtain closed behind him as he left.

Rist sat up straight, his heart thumping. Calen’s words replayed in his mind once more.“Your mam and dad are alive…”

“Mam and Dad,” Rist whispered. He flicked through the letters in his mind, falling all the way back to the first.

‘We hopethey are treating you all right up there. A mage? Your father had to read that part of your letter to me four times before I stopped calling him a liar.’

“Father…”Rist whispered. His mam rarely used the word ‘father’, only when she was mad at Lasch or Rist. The thought had come to him when Fane had said that ‘a mother and father like that are worth holding on to’.

His mam had signed off the letter with‘All our love, Mam and Dad’.But then she’d used the word ‘father’… It was a small thing. Possibly nothing at all. But… it niggled at him.

He found the letter amongst those scattered across the table. Then something else struck him, and he lined up all the pages next to each other. In his mind he placed letters atop one another. ‘A’s and ‘P’s and ‘F’s from each letter.

His heart stopped and every hair on his body pricked.

“She never wrote these…”

Rist’s throat suddenly felt dry as sand. How had he never seen it before? The writing was almost identical to his mam’s, but as close as it was, each letter was just slightly different to the last. The inflections and subtle sweeps of the ‘W’s and ‘R’s… everything. The more letters he layered over the other in his mind, the deeper the chill set into his heart.

These letters had not been written by his mam, but by someone who had spent a long time learning to imitate Elia Havel’s hand. Within a single letter, it was completely unnoticeable. But when set side by side and atop one another, the minute mistakes were obvious in their differences. Each attempt was near perfect but a failure in a different way.

Rist’s hands began to tremble, and his breaths grew short. “No, no, no… I…”

He inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself, then exhaled slowly. He should have seen it, but he had been too distracted.

A part of him wanted to go to Garramon, to confront the man, to find one last shred of hope that he was just seeing something, that he was delusional.

But he didn’t need to. Rist knew he was right. In his bones he knew. But one thing he didn’t know was if Garramon knew.

Rist settled himself as best he could, folded each of the letters neatly, and placed them into his satchel before sprinting from the library.

Chapter 99

The Hanged Man

26thDay of the Blood Moon

Lake Berona – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom

Not a single cloudblemished the pure dark sky as Eltoar looked over Lake Berona. He stared into the depths of the black water, seeing Lyina’s and Karakes’s broken bodies in his mind. Behind him, Helios lay with his head resting by the lake’s edge, a sorrow like no other drifting between them.

Everything they had ever loved in the world was dead or dying, the dragons themselves on the edge of extinction. And it was Eltoar’s actions that had put them there. He could tell himself – as he had for centuries – that he was only doing what needed to be done, that he had made a choice, and that he had known it would never be easy.

But for a long time, in the depths of his heart, Eltoar had known he should have fought harder, should have convinced Fane there was another way, should have made Alvira see thetruth. Fane had always had a way with words, a way of making his own path seem the only logical one. The truth was, the day Eltoar’s blade took Alvira’s head, it doomed the dragons as well, it doomed everything.

Everything had changed with the stroke of that blade. The entire world.

He could hear Salara in the back of his mind.“She loved you, and you murdered her.”

Eltoar stared down into the dark lake, the light of the Blood Moon reflecting on its surface.

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