Elemental Thief Part I : Child of Calamity

A Promise

Verana walked out of the keep and into the early evening air, taking in a slow, steadying breath, feeling the presence of her two escorts like weights on her shoulders. Her soul was bruised for them and she was having trouble sorting through her own thoughts and emotions as the rain continued to pour in a steady shower and thunder rumbled overhead.

"Before you even think of apologising, sprite, don't." Anzael said finally, tilting his face up into the rain, letting it soak him through, even as Lianza stood on her other side, his wings covering him from most of the water. "It was our idea. And it worked."

"Anzael and I have had plenty of time to work through all that history before, but war isn't a game these humans think it is. Their history of skirmishes that last a few months don't prepare them for generations of war. And this tiny nation would have trouble standing on its own, let alone standing while it was fractured and falling apart. I'm surprised that someone hasn't swooped in sooner than this. Clairval is a disaster." Lianza offered, his words not reassuring, but they were measured, trained appraisals from his years of studying foes and weaknesses.

She absorbed their words, before nodding and glancing at both of them, offering a slow nod. "Is it odd, for the first time, I feel like I know this really doesn't fall to me? It does, this part does, but whatever's coming, the battle, I don't feel the conviction that I have to race headlong into it."

"Your family will be thrilled to hear that you will not be flying off to meet an empire that thinks it can take on Rulin, Vayana, Clairval, and the rest of the world, on your own." Lianza said drily, his expression blank.

Anzael snorted and shook his head. "Wait for it. It'll come." He grinned, drawing a grin from Lianza, nodding. "Even I've become less of a troublemaker as I've gotten saddled down with all this... responsibility stuff. But I know it will come. "

The two men smirked at one another, drawing her to sigh and shake her head.

"I need to go into the Wild." Verana said finally, knowing these two wouldn't believe her, even if she threw her swords and armour into the forge, when she said she was out of the fight.

She barely believed the lack of the draw to be in the middle of things herself.

The two men glanced in that direction but didn't immediately answer, and the three of them walked along the ramparts of Keepsal, looking at both the wild and the human side of the island that had changed so little. The politics of the nations had shifted and changed, the short-lived humans and their even shorter lived memories had changed so drastically, but the land, be it tamed for farming or the home she had always known, still pulsed in the same ways it had before.

Verana knew this wasn't her battle, but she also knew that she was feeling the first powerful gusts of the maelstrom that would form around her and most of her world as the fight built through their worlds.

Her path, it seemed, was to go into the Wild. It was pulling her now, though she only half-expected why.

Less than an hour later, Darya and two fighters, their three human messengers that held the fate of Clairval in their hands, walked out of the Keep and toward where horses were being brought out for them.

All three of the group were women. Another change in Morningside, at least.

This change didn't cause her heart to ache, though.

Verana took wing off of the ramparts as another idea came to her.

"Lianza, can you spare three of the Guard?" She glanced at him curiously.

She could read on his expression that he didn't trust where they were enough to spare any of the Guard, but he looked at the three women and nodded slowly, as if understanding.