Dawn of a Thousand Suns, Book I: Arch De Angels

Haunted memories

Two Years Earlier

It was raining. The chill had consumed his entire body so deeply and painfully that it seemed to be impossible to feel any other pain; But pebbles stabbing through his old, torn, and worn shoe soles, reminding about themselves at every step he made. The hardest and most unbearable pain was yet an unfamiliar one that had settled in him, something too massive and stagnant, but so fragmented and fractioned, that it reached every organ, every cell of his body, burning them from inside. It had not only reached every cell in his body but every minor part of that mysterious thing that Rahail's priest in Lucius' village referred to as the soul.

The ashen sky was hiding the sun as if it did not exist. It seemed as the world was doubtful in the dawn. The thicket forest trail followed the murky horizon through the hills and looked like a mirage of endlessness. For him, something was relaxing and calming about this endlessness...

The commander was wearing crimson armor. One could see his chestnut eyes from the open helmet. He was sitting in the armchair, sipping wine from a red, gilded chalice. Perhaps his eyes seemed brownish because of the fire, and so it remained in his memory.

Lucius had no memory of what happened before the moment, he and his little sister were abandoned in the forest. Before that, he could only recall some noise and frozen, blurred flashbacks. He remembered that gaze seen in the mirror, reflecting sun spells in differently colored eyes. - The one he glimpsed before going into the tavern, or even after having been dragged from there...- there was something icy in that look which had become part of those indelible scenes...

The commander smelled of violets drowning in the wine. Lucius remembered the overwhelming, intoxicating fragrance of violets and wine from the day the commander visited him, with his hands bandaged, when he was injured.

In the far distance scattered bracken-type plants could be seen, swaying with every blow of the wind. They reminded Lucius of himself. Like those plants, he also swayed in the wind, but God knows why he did not fall yet and continued on his way.

The winter was about to end without a single snowflake. Amongst other things, Lucius thought about this while walking on the stones and wondering why he bothered himself thinking of the snowless winter at that such a hard time...

Together with the noise, he was making, the patter of raindrops had quietened down, whereas the wind's whistling stood out amongst the other sounds around him. These sounds were like the roar of the dammed-up sea, of the sea he had never seen in his life but that he had imagined always when his father told him stories about his sails...

Two years before the storm had destroyed a three-sail frigate near Mondelay, together with the exotic plants that should have been brought to Lucius...

"The Red Widow"- what a peculiar name for the ship which had sunk together with his Dad...

This story seemed weirdly trivial now. The time when he was so worried about it seemed so distant and far away, like the time when he could be worried about something.

Space hopelessly waned with each blink of his heavy eyelids and then some vehement force brought the world, lost in the twilight, back to him. The hills gradually faded away with the countless steps and the hilly landscape gave way to the flat valley. The place, once a forest, was turned into the graveyard of the cut-down trees. No matter where Lucius looked, he could only see the cut-down trees, logs, and destroyed dead plants. He could see people leading the wood-carrying oxcarts loaded with wood. The symbols of daily life, of the rotten routine, that started as if nothing had happened and endlessly repeated itself.