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- ii.
- He’d long lost feeling in his feet. Pitifully, Roric dragged them over the ground, too weary and numb to register the first view of cobblestone streets and lit lamps. The outskirts were nearly abandoned this time of night, save the few sailors at the dock who tied up their little ships and made for the inn. His soiled clothes clung to his body, wet and stinking with sweat, dried blood splashed across the front of his once-white shirt. Roric’s jacket was clean at least, navy blue and three sized too large as it hung over his shoulders like a cape, an unfamiliar insignia emblazoned across the back. It had been a rare gift from one of the other passengers that had taken the long boat bound eastward, a proof that kindness still existed amongst men. The events of the past weeks had nearly been enough to make the child think otherwise.
- The cold night air made Roric shiver pull the coat closer. His limping gait carried him down the street, sour bile resting in the back of his throat as he tried to breathe through the fig of exhaustion. The symbols painted on the wooden signposts were unfamiliar to him, drawn in the language he’d only ever seen on old letters hidden in the bottom of his mother’s jewellery drawer. If he hadn’t been so defeated it would have felt like a victory - irrefutable proof that he was in the east now, only minutes away from the safety his mother had told him to seek before their world had come crumbling down. If he stopped to think about how soon he might rest, it all would have come crumbling again. As he reached into a pocket to pull out his mother’s envelope he kept moving, dragging battered legs down the narrow road underneath the now-unfamiliar light of civilization. The hastily inked symbols on the paper meant little to him, but if he held them inches from his face his blurred vision could at least make them out. They’d be on a signpost somewhere. Somewhere.
- There was no joy when he found them soon after, etched onto a little bronze plaque resting on a fence. In the moonlight’s silvery glow he could make out the outline of the little cottage; the pointed roof, the flowers outside, two statues flanking the door with dying lanterns at their feet. He slowly shuffled up the few stairs, transfixed by the coloured light filtering out the nearby window. There were noises coming from inside, muffled and barely audible through the wall but life nonetheless. Back home he could have sometimes heard his parents this time of night - his father home late from the market, his mother half-asleep on the couch but still adamant she stay to see him in. It helped him drift off, hearing the door creak open and knowing they were there.
- Back home. The boy nearly tripped over the doormat, eyes barely open and chapped lips stuck together as he weakly raised a hand and knocked on the door with whatever force he could still muster. His mind was too paralyzed to feel anything but a dull, constant sense of dread. When the footsteps on the other side became louder they did not wake him from is wandering fugue, and when the doorknob turned and the entrance creaked open he scarcely looked up. Swaying where he stood he only managed to glimpse the man that stood in front of him in a long, half-open robe. He could make out glaring eyes and a trimmed, angular grey beard. He heard him bark something angrily in a language he’d only ever heard sung to him as a child when his mother bid him to sleep. With a trembling hand, he wordlessly lifted the envelope up, and presented it to a face he’d only seen once in a photograph his mother thought she’d hidden. Even then he’d look faded and blurred, just like he looked now in Roric’s exhaustion-riddled gaze.
- The old man snatched the letter out his hand and turned it over, eyes widening as they fell upon the unbroken rex wax seal in the middle of it. It had been hastily poured, but there was no mistaking the sigil pressed into the middle of it. The Haitai family signet, left there by a ring he’d last seen on his daughter’s finger the day she abandoned Kugane. Lowing the letter, he stared over it at the shaking mess of a child on his doorstop. Matted black hair fell over his brow, and with his tanned skin he looked more like that gods-damned merchant trash than her. The boy buckled in the faint wind like a broken reed, barely able to lift his head and greet his grandfather’s face. Hazel eyes, the old man saw. Hazel eyes just like her.
- Balling his hand into a fist, he crumpled the envelope between his fingers and let his voice raise into a roar. He said the same thing to the stain on doorstep as he’d least said to her some ten years ago, punctuating his command with the final slam of a door.
- “Get out of my home.”
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