“Now, I want you to try to forgive that person.”
Laruna’s nostrils flared. Fury rose within her like a wave, but she was as a seabird, floating atop the rage as she watched it rise, and crest, and tumble away into nothing against the shores of time. “I am not the anger,” she whispered.
“Remember, forgiving that person doesn’t mean you like them. It doesn’t mean you have to talk to them, or be their friend. Though I do hope we can be friends, Rilard.” There was a gentle smile in Matron Yen’s voice.
Laruna heard the boy mutter something and shuffle his feet.
“It means letting go of the anger, of the hurt. You still know you felt it, and you still remember it, but you won’t let it control you. Because hanging on to the pain keeps hurting you. It holds you back. Releasing it sets you free, and freedom is power.”
As the only adult in the class that wasn’t teaching it, Laruna initially surmised that the task of letting old hurts go was more challenging for herself than for children. Then again, she realized, when she was only six, she had already known what a monster her father was, and Jek Trullon had given her plenty of pain to contend with. How long had it festered in her? How different would her life have been had she let that all go when she left the old fool behind?
How different would it be from now if she released it today?
Forgiveness is an act of iron will, and it takes a strength of mind and heart that Jek Trullon had never mustered, a fortitude that had eluded Laruna Trullon for all of her years. But here and now, the fourth time learning the lessons of Basic Command and Control, with the memories of those she had scared and hurt swimming in her mind, with the distance she had rent between her and… well, everything, Laruna found the strength. And she let go.
“Did we all do it? Did we try?” asked Matron Yen.
“Yes, Matron Yen,” recited the children. Laruna could not speak.
“And how do you feel?”
A cacophony of mixed emotions rang out in the class.
“I feel better.”
“I’m still a little sad.”
“Like I don’t need to stay angry.”
“I want that cookie!”
Laruna smiled, silent tears bubbling from her closed eyes and streaming down her face. Her anger was still there, as were her memories of pain, but they were distant, far below her; she had left them behind as a seabird lifts itself from the surf and soars toward the burning sun. She was no longer the rage, the fury. The fury was a tool, no, a fuel, and it would come when the fire needed it.
She whispered her answer so low that nobody could hear it over the cacophony of eager children.
“I am the fire.”
“Yet the flames that burn the brightest fade the fastest,” said High Priest Athelan. The Elf nodded at hundreds of ivory candles beside him, arrayed in a candelabra as massive and glittering as an inverted chandelier. The massive fixture gave off as much light and heat as a funeral pyre, but without the unpleasant smell. In case his metaphor was not obvious enough, the Tandosian patriarch added, “So it was with their Majesties Johan and Marja, for cruel fate has taken both Andarun’s mighty king and beloved queen far too soon.”
The former rulers of Andarun lay in state on either side of the blazing candelabra, or rather, Marja did. Johan’s casket was empty save for a jewel-encrusted broadsword and a red cloak. The box reminded Weaver Ortson of the king’s armor; covered in gold, ornate to the point of bad taste, and lined with crimson velvet. Marja’s casket was true to its honoree as well; draped in elegant silks, beveled with silver inlay, and built double wide.
“Crueler still, our monarchs had not had time to produce an heir to succeed them,” the priest continued. “Pray for wisdom and guidance for all as we navigate these uncertain times.”
Ortson rolled his eyes. In these uncertain times, the one thing the guildmaster could count on was that the nobles and dignitaries gathered in Andarun’s throne room needed no primers on recent royal genealogy.
Tradition held that there were twelve days between a monarch’s death and the royal funeral, with no dancing, music, or drink. This period of abstinence was ostensibly for mourning. More practically, the cessation of dances, revelries, grand balls, and other social obligations gave the nobility a chance to scheme and maneuver before official talk of succession began. The Duke of Dunhelm and Duchess of Waerth were spreading rumors of bygone trysts to undermine each other’s lineage. Houses Tyrieth and Bethlyn were dropping distinctly unsubtle hints about the ages when Elves ruled. Several Gnomish clans were trying to unite around pushing for a Halfling king. It was like watching the opening moves of a game of thrones, only played between several dozen sides and all at once.
Ortson had neither concern nor patience for the identity of the next monarch. Nearly a fortnight of mandatory sobriety had sheared away all vestiges of the guildmaster’s blissful ignorance, honing his mind into a diamond-tipped point that was leveled squarely at the king’s empty casket. Johan’s last messenger sprite trilled in his memory, playing out the last moment of the Golden Dawn like a tiny, grim mummer. Every repetition of the macabre performance brought new questions with it.
How had the king, moments after his final, anguished cry, managed to send the messenger sprite? And why did the king only speak at the beginning and end of the message? Why was he silent as the rest of the Golden Dawn fought and died?
Or was he silent at all?
The guildmaster’s mind kept going back to the horrible cry of whatever creature had ended the Golden Dawn’s short career. Weaver Ortson had fought drakes, griffins, abominations, dark cults, demons, owlverines, and every manner of dire beast before he hung up his sword and took a job in the guild’s administration. But he’d never heard any sound like the hideous roar that the sprite had imitated, burbling and screeching and thunderous all at once. Yet despite the unique and alien nature of the shriek, something about the call tugged at Weaver’s memory. There was a familiar cadence beneath the warped call, less like a bestial snarl and more like—
“Ha-haaaaaa!”
The last note of the trumpeting laughter hadn’t faded before the gasps and screams of the mourners drowned it out. Ortson attempted to wheel about in his seat, but the Duke of Dunhelm fainted dead away and fell into the guildmaster’s lap. By the time Ortson had deposited the limp noble on the floor, Johan the Mighty was already limping up the steps before the great candelabra.
The king shrugged aside the attentions of concerned bannermen. His golden armor was grimy and dented, his hair a tangled mess, his face a splotch of soot split by a white crescent grin. “I have returned, my good people! I nearly lost hope, as my journey home took every ounce of… my… my…” Johan’s triumph faded as his eyes fell on the second casket at the foot of the throne. “My queen!” he gasped, rearing back in shock. When he rocked forward again, momentum sent him stumbling toward his wife’s coffin. “How? How can this be?”
Looking back and forth between the weeping king and the doorway he had entered by, Ortson was inclined to wonder the same thing.
“She could not bear to live without Your Majesty,” cried Athelan above the astonished whispers of the assembled mourners.
“No! Marja, no!” sobbed the king, falling beside the queen’s coffin. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his belt and draped it over the ornate cover. “I swore… I brought it back, but I was too late, my love! You were taken too soon!”
Weaver’s gaze swiveled to the back of the room again. Behind rows of stunned mourners, several bannermen stared with slack-jawed confusion back at Ortson. Weaver surmised the guards were also wondering exactly how the king had managed to travel from the dungeon to the funeral without word of his emergence preceding him.
“Now this cursed dragon has taken everything from me!” Johan sprawled over Marja’s coffin now, his hands and face pressed against its top, his pauldrons grinding into the wood with every pronounced sob.
“Our joy at your return is eclipsed by this tragedy,” said the High Priest of Tandos. Weaver’s eyes narrowed. Athelan was a famously taciturn man, preferring to communicate via thin-lipped grimaces over speeches. The priest’s reluctance to spare a word for his fellow man went beyond a desire for a frugal tongue; the old Elf was a miser of words. And here he was waxing poetic about Johan’s return and Marja’s death with such force, such precision, such timing, that it seemed almost rehearsed.
The guildmaster would have mulled over this point longer, but the king suddenly pushed himself up to his elbows and looked around the room with wild, red-rimmed eyes. “Where is Guildmaster Ortson? Weaver Ortson?”
Ortson’s mind flashed back to a quest early in his career, when he had been creeping around a small hill that had suddenly opened a huge, yellow eye right next to him. Then, as now, his instincts froze him to the spot. But back then, the Balemound had gone back to sleep, whereas the king kept calling until every eye in the throne room had turned on the paralyzed man.
