Alyra Arrives

Concordia, Nine Hundred and Forty Years Before

Thaelen stood by the window and watched the sun rise. He had been restless through the night, despite being physically and emotionally drained. When he had drifted to sleep, his dreams had been broken and uneasy, frequented by ghosts. He had had dreamt conversations with both his parents, which had seemed intense and important in sleep, but the content of which had vanished upon rising, and had swum with Gera in the bay of the past, only to lose him in the water, waking gasping into the darkness, sucking in the air that his lungs had been denied in nightmare.

It was only natural that his mind would be on the past and his many losses, he told himself as he squinted against the glare of the bright sun as it speared over the ocean with sharp flares. He was grateful to have spent the night in Gunnar’s stronghold rather than making the journey back to his own. Sleeping in his bed without Gera would have been harder.

He had ruled for one and a