Chapter 5 - The Morning Sun

                                    

                                          

I offered Eskir a bed, but he said he didn't feel comfortable in soft beds anymore.
"We have less comfortable beds," I said.
"I'm sure you have less comfortable everything," he snorted. "Your inn doesn't even have a name."
I gave him a room anyway, and he said he'd sleep on the floor. We were going to spend a day here, rather than leaving at dawn like all the good poems say. He had those fantasies of heroes and a grand quest, but I talked him out of it. He needed sleep, not to make the mistake of travelling in the dead of the night again. He claimed he didn't want to stop and set up tent in the cold, so he powered through. If anything, I had to admire the resilience. Especially from an ordinary human.
We'd stay for a full day and leave the next morning, destined for Bell Haven, though he wouldn't say why. Most likely, he was forbidden from saying it. My guess was the organisation must have held a lot of sway there.
Though we tried, I couldn't pry anything out of him about the nature of the organisation. He wouldn't tell me who they were, what their goals were, or what he meant by it happening again. Would another city vanish? Would it be Bell Haven, or was that the one city that would be safe? Were their headquarters there? He had given me a thousand questions with that answer, and left me in the dark.
It was frustrating, and I was tempted many times to instinctively pin him against the wall until he told me what I wanted to know, but I knew he was as desperate to speak as I was to hear him. The man seemed utterly broken without his voice. Whenever I brought it up, a glimmer of pain showed itself in his eyes.
Besides, those months at the inn had sapped the soul from me. I didn't have the heart for needless violence anymore. Lucian kept telling me it was a good thing, even if it meant I couldn't control the rowdiness of our patrons quite as well as he'd hoped from a Kindred.
The truth was, I was too tired for that anymore. My muscles ached like Senvia had only been yesterday, and I longed for a constant sleep that would never end.
I spent the day packing and saying my farewells, but I didn't sleep that night. Instead, I lay in bed thinking about what Eskir had said. I'd picked up a habit of talking to myself since Senvia had been replaced by cliffs and ocean water. I wasn't going insane, I kept promising myself. No, it was a comfort. I had nobody else there. All of my friends had gone. I'd made new ones in Lucian and Ana, but they didn't understand. They weren't Kindred. They had never lived in Senvia, and they couldn't relate. My conversations with myself gave me a partner to bounce my ideas off of, and ask her opinions.
"So," I reasoned, "there are the guilds. Hired for war. They've had a lot of business since Senvia vanished, what with everyone wanting to hire mercenary Kindred. We can write off the merchant guilds, they wouldn't do this, there's no purpose to it. They wouldn't make any money by getting rid of customers, and Senvia had some of the wealthiest of them. But even the great ancient guilds, Avenfold and Rise of the Dawn and the rest, they wouldn't have the means. Would they? They've been around since the dark times and the Dreadnaughts. But even then, nothing ever made a city vanish, and the guilds can't change what's written in our history.
And why would they? The guilds were no enemy of the empire. They were mercenary guilds of Kindred, and only profited from war. Emperor Alaric's speech had been about his intentions to introduce a new era of expansionism and conquest. That was Senvia's present and history. War. Colonisation. Lyana had reigned for thirty-five years, and those decades had seen more peace than any other time in Senvia's history. Even then, there had hardly been a moment in her life when the empire was not at war to some extent. 
No, that wasn't it either. "Government, then. Let's think, Xera. What government organisations based at least in part outside of the capital would have access to that knowledge? That level of magic? Who would stand to gain from the empire crumbling..."