Strange Aeons [Book 1]

26. Winds of War [part III]

He remembered it well. The little, comfortable home in a corner beside the Lexington University Arboretum. He had appeared in a dimly lit alley, with clean garbage cans, and walked a bit around the pacific city. Everyone seemed busy with something, but more often than not he noticed people stopping to talk to each other, smiling, or waving kindly to someone on the other side of the street. Maybe the sunny day of spring, maybe that air he had felt since they arrived, Lexington felt just like a very happy place.

No surprises he was born and raised here. He had been the gentlest person until his own passion had destroyed him inside. And then again, nobody would remember him. Not properly. There would have been no plaque on his door's front, saying "Here lived Logan Harrower: Teacher and Hero."

He had lived in that house for many years, coming and going to the Order's Headquarters to teach and to follow his studies. He had been one of the most prominent Elysium experts ever to walk the Order's hallowed halls, and his fascination with the dead and the afterlife was so blissfully balanced with the sunniest of characters, that he had never considered him for what he was, in the end: a necromancer.

The sole thought that Staccato dabbled in the same stuff his beloved teacher did, made his skin crawl. The respect, the awe, and the care Logan applied to his study's subjects and to everything pertaining his research was so delicate and exquisite that seeing the mountain of ill-treated, mangy corpses Staccato had conjured to fight had hit him way harder than it seemed.

He remembered the day he came with Thanatos himself to look for Logan after three weeks of his complete disappearance. They had feared he was somehow dead after some experiment went horribly wrong. They found him drunk on the sofa: his husband had walked away from him three weeks before, and he hadn't set foot outside his home ever since. He even had alcohol delivered instead of going to buy it. He hoped he would come back, and he wanted to be home.

He would have never come back. That's what happens when a Mage marries a mundane who swears he "will endure", and then discovers that Magic is the worst of mistresses: always present and blatantly wavered in your face every day. Nor it helped their desperate and failed efforts to adopt a child. There is just a quantity of blasts a relationship can endure, even a sweet and tender one like the one between Logan and Albert until it breaks. Forever.

Logan's heart had been badly broken, and the remains of his house were the sad witness to that. Clearly, his brother never sold the terrain, but he didn't rebuild the house either. He left it at it had been since the night of the attack, and the fire. Charred ruins of poles and walls devastated by a blast of fire that had consumed even the stone itself. On the little gate of the fence, miraculously left intact by the blaze, still rested the brass plaque: "Harrower-Arlington".

«Are you looking for someone, sir?» asked a voice with a very distinctive British accent beside him. It was a strange voice. Young, very young, but at the same time absolutely monotonous and lifeless. He turned his head on his left and had to lower his gaze quite a bit because the boy who had just talked to him was way smaller than him. He was just one less meal away from plain anorexia but still kept some health on his features. He was very pale, with a nice mane of well-combed black hair, and the proud hope of face hair slightly shadowing his boyish cheeks. He had a very serious look, from the thin uncurled lips to his big, intense green eyes, and wore what looked like an expensive private school uniform.

«What? No, I... I knew someone who lived here, but it was a long time ago.»

«You knew my uncle?» asked the boy, still, without any kind of proper emotion. Not even some usual puzzlement, or curiosity. It was just like he had said something quite obvious. He had seen Logan's nephew coming in, once or twice, but he had been a boy at the time. Now, even if his body wasn't properly fitting for his age, he must have been at least sixteen.