Pondering

Merkan sat on the side of a dune and thought. The desert around him was silver in the moon light, as far as he could tell he was alone tonight. He missed the city, especially his temperate home of Juche filled with craftspeople and the Mountain Folk. Del’Roh off in the West had been almost as good, a place right out of the First Age, none of the ruin of Nexus or Chiaroscuro. This place, he didn’t like too much. Dry, bright and hot enough to cook eggs on the sand during the day, only a bit cooler at night, and the darkness was total. Luna and the Maidens did little to illuminate the endless sea of sand. He could barely make out Archides. Less then 100 paces away, the Strix had become just a bump on the ridge’s silhouette.

Thinking of home and all the places he’d called home, Merkan knew he should be sad. He wouldn’t return to the Blessed Isle for years or decades, if ever. And when he did, he could expect no welcome. Not for an ally of the Anathema. Not for him. But, for some reason, the sadness didn’t come. He just knew the fact and accepted it. Mountains, he told himself, do not feel sadness. Neither, of course, do they feel joy. That was not a comforting thought. He sighed.

For maybe the hundredth time since starting to come here, Merkan closed his eyes and linked his senses to the Earth around him, feeling each of the tiny particles of sand, the entirety of the desert around him for quite some distance. There, on the edge of his senses, was what he came here for every time. Somewhere under the gateway that had brought the Rohan refugees here, there lay a Manse, a tomb. For reasons he didn’t understand and hadn’t figured out, the ancient Solars of the First Age had incorporated this tomb into their network of gateways between libraries, yet from what he had learned, this tomb was that of a powerful Dragon Blooded of the Earth.

Under all that sand, there was a repository of information about who his people had been all those centuries ago. Merkan desperately wanted to uncover it. The Sun had said the Realm would fall and given him the duty of leading the Dragon Blooded back to their original purpose. And he had only the vaguest of ideas what that purpose had actually been. They had, of course, served the Solars they now hunted as Anathema. They had not ruled the world, or even the Realm. How was he to tell the people of the Realm they would return to that? Admittedly, it might be easier to tell them that if the Realm had fallen and they had no other course. But at times, especially when Balthasar and Illhousen were making and carrying out decisions he considered less then ideal at best, Merkan questioned if he even wanted to.

He hoped, very much, that the tomb would tell him something to get him past these doubts. He watched the Earth around him, and the moonlight-washed desert for a while longer before returning to Nei’Roh. He’d be back soon, and he’d start looking for the answers he hoped were here.