Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘I had the ash dream,’ Mrs Winter said simply. ‘It was the primary building block for most of the common-phrase spells I researched and wrote during my Twinmoons at Sandcliff. It was my strength as a researcher and a teacher, the means for me to send messages to Kantu or Fantus, to lead Regona Carvic away from Riverend Palace the night Nerak killed Danmark and Danae. She ended up in Vienna, if memory serves.’

Mark perked up. ‘Vienna?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Sorry, go on.’ He ran a hand through Milla’s curls.

She did. ‘The ash dream was the way I made suggestions to Mark about his family, how I charted the evolution of your partisan struggle in Eldarn, even the way I encouraged those fire-fighters to block the on ramp to I-70 when Nerak was chasing Steven towards Denver. But that’s it. Oh, I can still dole out a significant blast; I was pleased with my efforts on the beach this morning, but my strength as a sorcerer, a magician capable of levelling a mountain, or whatever legends you might have heard about me in your youth, Garec, was founded on the spell table. I didn’t have the spell table, hadn’t seen it in nearly a hundred generations, so no, I didn’t have the power to subdue Nerak.’

‘So the ash dream, this key element in your abilities, is just the power of suggestion?’ Garec craned his neck, looking for more tea, but found the pot empty.

‘Oh no, the ash dream is the power of knowledge, the one common denominator in any spell. The more one can understand and manipulate perceptions around a body of knowledge, the more flexible and effective his or her spells can grow. If I could have brought one thing with me from Eldarn, well, all right, two, technically, I would have brought my keystone and that book.’ Mrs Winter gestured towards the leatherbound tome, wrinkled from so many dunkings in the past three Twinmoons.

‘And you followed me, followed the portal, instead of going back with the keystone,’ Jennifer added. ‘That’s why you were already here this morning.’

‘I did,’ Mrs Winter shrugged. ‘I followed you, because-’

‘Because you can’t go back,’ Steven guessed, ‘can you?’

‘No, Steven, I can’t. My… my so-called friends and colleagues arranged that in the wake of my disappearance, sometime around the beginning of the second Age, almost five Eras ago.’ She removed her glasses again and ran bony fingers over the lines etched in her face.

A heavy silence fell over the sunlit dining room. Two joggers, bundled up against the cold, passed by on the hard-packed sand near the waterline; neither noticed that the restaurant doors had been forced open. Beyond them, the North Atlantic, glittering gold in the sun, rolled with the tide, unconcerned that it had swallowed an army less than an hour earlier.

Garec, intrigued by the bright colours of the jackets and footwear, watched the joggers disappear into the distance. The world around him slowed, even time seemed to grow weary, trudging along to a soft dirge. They were done. They had won. He ought to feel better about it, but now all he wanted was to go home, to find Kellin and to sleep for a Twinmoon. He hadn’t felt safe for much of his life, not until this moment. He honestly hadn’t expected it, and now he was afraid even to consider what might lie ahead. How would he handle the realisation of everything he and his friends had ever worked to accomplish? The notion of success, hard-fought and harder-won, unnerved him. Garec decided he would go home and he would sleep. Then he would lock his bow and quivers away and ride for the Blackstones and Renna. The thought of his fiery little mare comforted him and he turned from the windows to ask, ‘What do we do now?’

At first, no one answered. The challenges they had met stood taller than those that now lay before them. Saving Eldarn – saving Earth – had seemed so unlikely a battle to win: none of them had ever thought they would live this long. Now, faced with the task of rebuilding Eldarn, of starting over again a thousand Twinmoons later, the breadth of the work ahead was staggering.

Mark, the history teacher, started on their list. ‘Education, public health, decent food supplies, shelter, clean water, working farms, shipping, roads, industry, a reliable judiciary, a set of reasonable laws – formative, not summative, not now, no way – and a representative government, right from the start. It might seem like it would be easier to start off with a monarchy and then switch over after a while, but that’s not the way to rebuild. They have to own it; there have to be some common values, simple – and I do mean dirt-simple – things the people of Eldarn can agree upon; we’re talking about a people with basic literacy, not the crew who spent the past fifty Twinmoons under Gilmour’s tutelage, but the rest of the population. That’s where you start a true grass-roots effort. Holy shit, it’ll take lifetimes to get that place put back together. I don’t… I can’t even get it all straight in my head. It’s too big a problem to even conceptualise without getting dizzy.’

‘Was there any beer in that fridge?’ Steven whispered to Hannah. ‘He works better after a beer or two.’

‘I’m sure the school board would be interested to know that little factoid, and no, there isn’t any beer back there. You’re home now; you can’t be drinking beer at ten o’clock in the morning.’ She slugged him playfully in the arm.

Mark ignored them. ‘And the Larion Senate, the independent states of Gorsk, Praga, Rona and Falkan, even Malakasia. There’ll be civil wars, border disputes. The shipping industry will probably come near to collapse before it rights itself again. People will starve. There’s no army to speak of, no one to police the populace. Jesus, it’s going to be a mess.’

‘What about Gita?’ Steven said. ‘She can probably help.’

‘Yes, her, certainly, we’ll need to find her,’ Mark said. ‘Man, this’ll take weeks.’

‘Weeks,’ Hannah said, ‘that’s not so bad. They can hold together for a few weeks.’

‘I mean weeks just to get it all written down, just to get the problems outlined and the resources listed. That’ll take weeks. We’ll all be old people with see-through skin and brittle bones before Eldarn gets to the stage where people are living healthy, productive, free lives.’

‘Oh,’ Hannah said. ‘Sorry, I misunderstood.’

‘Mark-’ Steven sat next to Mrs Winter, ‘Mark, is this truly what you want to do? Are you suggesting that you’re ready to go back, to take up the mantle of some leadership position you never asked for?’

‘Look at me, Steven. My own family aren’t going to recognise me. And what about you? Do you think there’s a place in this world for a sorcerer? You’ll be grossly misunderstood, or exploited; you’ll either be dead or locked up inside a year: prison, maybe, or some psych hospital.’

‘You’ve been through a great deal, Mark,’ Garec said. ‘Perhaps you ought to take some time before you commit countless Twinmoons of your life to Eldarni cultural reconstruction.’

‘It has to start somewhere,’ Mark murmured, not to anyone in particular.

Steven said, ‘But we’ve only been home for a couple of hours. We came a long way to get here; can’t we just enjoy this for a while? You can take a break: a month or six or whatever, get used to your new… self.’ Steven avoided looking at Mrs Winter. He hadn’t expected to feel selfish, but he couldn’t deny the sensation suffusing through him at the moment. His desire to protect Mark was equalled by his need for a few days’ of normalcy, some fried food and maybe a real mattress. He knew he would be returning to Eldarn if the opportunity arose, but bringing Mark along hadn’t crossed his mind, not since he’d been taken in Meyers’ Vale. Trying hard not to sound condescending, Steven added, ‘This is supposed to be where you ride into the sunset, cousin. I hadn’t thought about what we would do after today, but I promise it didn’t involve dragging you, or Hannah, back to Eldarn. That’s one mistake I prefer to make just once in a lifetime.’