“Feels a little weird, doesn’t it?” Gabriel asked on the way there.
“It does,” Era said distantly. “Nothing feels real anymore. I feel so… disconnected.”
“Yeah, it’s got to be worse on your end. No offense.”
“None taken.” He looked out the window. “Crisilla’s funeral will be in Elsequaire, right?”
“Right. So we’ll just stay in town until then.”
He was silent a moment. “I miss her, Gabriel. Especially since I remember her now.”
“How’d you two get along, anyway?”
“She is… was… nine years my junior,” he said. “I hardly knew her since I was already enrolled full-time at the Academy, and you know their disdain for family visits.”
“Yep.”
“I really only met her after graduation, but… well, I was the Archmage. I was distant. I had ‘no time’ for family.”
Gabriel sighed quietly, readjusting himself slightly. “So you’re pretty upset about that, I assume.”
“I’m just glad I took the time to get to know her now.”
A bump shook the carriage, making them both cling to their armrests before they settled back down. “So you’re…?”
“I’m what?”
“How old are you? I never did find out.”
“Twenty-three,” he said, “if you don’t count my three years with Death.”
“So technically you’re twenty-six.”
“Exactly.” A look of realization crossed his face. “I never did get your exact age, either, Gabriel.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, it tends to alienate the young’uns, especially of the female variety.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” he said with a laugh. “I’m forty-two.”
“You are old!” Era joked. “You weren’t kidding when you said you could be my father!”
Gabriel scowled. “Very funny, squirt.”
Wiping his glasses and smiling, he looked up at Gabriel apologetically. “Do forgive me. I couldn’t resist.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes with a half-smile. “Whatever. I’m just glad to see you smiling.”
“Yeah,” Era said quietly, growing pensive. “I don’t know how I’m doing it myself. I still feel a gaping wound in my chest… besides the physical one, I mean.”
“That’s the fascinating thing about people,” he said. “They can overcome a lot more than you’d think.”
“It’s very true.” He looked out the window. “It still hurts – her death, Jarred’s anger, the terrible memories both new and old – but somehow I’m still smiling.”
“You’re a pretty exceptional kid,” Gabriel said. “You’ve got a real deep positive streak running through you, and that probably helps a ton. Makes me wonder how you were ever such a… well, a jackass, to be frank.”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I suppose it may have been just the experience of going to the Academy – you’re encouraged to act as I did: focused, emotionless, cold. But considering that, when I forgot all that, I acted with Death like I do now, I suppose that this is the ‘real’ me.”
“And you’re all the better for it, I think.”
“Most definitely.”
Some moments later, Gabriel looked at him again with a skeptical eye. “You really graduated Valedictorian?”
Blushing slightly, Era nodded. “Ah… yes. Top of the class.”
“Fucking hell, kid, no wonder you picked up magic so fast.”
“But I didn’t remember anything.”
“So? The magic remembered you. It remembered your talent, and that’s another thing – you had talent. You don’t get to the top of the class without it.”
“True, but I had to work unbelievably hard in the Academy to reach that rank. I’m surprised I made it out of there in one piece after working as I did.”
“No life outside of class, eh?”
“Oh no, never.”
“That’s the thing with me,” Gabriel said with a laugh, “I actually wanted a life. Again, no offense.”
“Again,” he smiled, “none taken.”
Era was surrounded by an all-too-familiar shade of grey.
He whipped around, trying to find a way out, trying to find someone else in the expanse of nothingness. A deep, menacing laugh began to sound all around him. Caine. Panicking, he ran aimlessly, looking for anything that wasn’t grey.
He ran right into his old apprentice.
Caine had come seemingly out of nowhere, appearing right before him as if he had been there all along. To his surprise, though, Caine’s expression was one of sadness – the look of one who was betrayed.
“How could you?” Caine asked him softly. “Look what you’ve done to me.”
He slumped over, suddenly very, very dead. Fresh blood inexplicably covered Era’s robes.
Whimpering and growing more panicked, Era ran away, trying to find an escape once again. The world seemed to spin around him, growing blacker and blacker the more afraid he was. He stopped running a moment, looking back to where Caine had fallen.
Right behind him was Crisilla.
“I love you, Lucien,” she whispered with a smile, grabbing his hand. To his horror, it held a sword – a sword she plunged directly into her heart.
As the sword killed her, he felt as if he was being ripped apart.
Era woke with a start, coated in a cold sweat.
He was still in the carriage, Gabriel and the driver asleep as well. The early morning sky was filled with stars, the night bugs chirping their loudest. He shook uncontrollably, breathing fast as he tried to calm himself.
Just a dream, he reassured himself, it was just a dream. And yet he knew that wasn’t entirely true.
Unable to sleep the rest of the night, he passed the time by casting simple spells of colored light to amuse himself. When Gabriel woke, he feigned sleep, and he kept the dream to himself for the rest of the trip.
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