Delwyn in the Temple

Concordia, Six Hundred and Eighty Years Before

“This is…” Harry sat on a rock and pulled off a boot shaking out stones and dust. “Ridiculous. You mean that a lot of your people make this walk annually?”

“Traditionally,” Thaelen sat beside him and looked down over the city. Memories overlaid a green, lush land of grass and forests, in which the fortresses of the vampires were islands of stone and wood. Now it was the green that was an island amongst the stone and soaring towers of the castles. Both memory and present were beautiful in different ways… except the present was marred with smoke, fire, and destruction.

There hadn’t been another attack since they’d begun the walk to the temple, but the land was not peaceful even in the absence of the flying machine. The burning wreckage from recent attacks, the movement of light through the city, and out to the bobbing ships in the bay.

Thaelen sighed heavily. “Traditionally, it was a journey taken over several days, no one walking faster th