Chapter 31. Dust and Ashes

he water’s voice became the cold wind that soughed over the ruins of Ascalon as he surveyed the ruins of his home. 

I should have gone to them…  I should have died with them…
 
He walked through the twisted wreckage wrapped in a ragged traveling cloak, his boots scuffed and dusty from his long journey back to the place of his birth.  He had been away on a journey to Lion’s Arch enjoying the life of a noble’s son, no need to work and no reason to apply himself.  Clarissa had wanted to go with him but she was heavy with child and he had promised to return well before the expected arrival of their firstborn.  There were rumors that the charr were gathering upon the borders of the eastern frontier and she had begged him to stay with her.  Selfishly he had put his own desires before hers, discounting her fear and leaving her alone in her time of need.

And now he had only dust and ashes, small tokens of his parents: a hair pin his mother had worn in her silky auburn hair, a shattered saber that had belonged to his father.  The charr had thoroughly picked the ruins over and the remains of his family were little more than fragments of bone unfit even for the hungriest devourer. 

Ghoulishly he pried through the wreckage, finding the tuning key of his harp which he slid it into his pocket even though all that was joyful in him died that day along with his music.  Clarissa’s memory was now sustained by a tiny locket he found buried under the fragments of her vanity, too small and dulled by fire to attract the eyes of the charr.  He removed his wedding band and strung both on a fine strand of harp string and wore it against the dark clot of pain that that had replaced his heart.

He sat upon the low remains of a pillar that had once supported the grand vaults of Caradec Hall and stared in shock and horror at all that was left of those he had loved.  His past and future were now reduced to dust and ashes.  For perhaps an hour he sat there unmoving until at last he rose, turning wordlessly back to the mercenaries he had hired to ward him on the long dangerous journey.  He used his training to shove his pain down into the crack that had formed in his heart, pushed it down so hard that the crack widened and became an abyss.

In ruined Ascalon he turned to his most feared and powerful teacher.  She lived alone near the ruins of the royal theatre in a hovel made from shattered fragments of the walls.  The statue of the twin goddess Lyssa loomed nearby, strangely untouched by the calamity.  As he drew near, Golda Tunnoke rose like a forlorn ghost as if she had sensed his approach from afar.  Steel gleamed upon her face, cold and inscrutable.  She was clad in a tattered dress, her long white hair flowing about her shoulders like an aura as she held up her palm to halt his approach. 

“A monk will tell you that a mended bone is stronger where it was broken,” Golda said bitterly, “You resist mending and so choose weakness.  I will not teach you now.  Go from here and do not return until you understand the meaning of these words.”

Alone. 

He drifted like a lost spirit across the ruins of Ascalon, a wasteland that paralleled the one that grew inside of him.  Destitute, he sold the wedding band and the locket, the hairpin and finally himself, sold everything for the pale shadow of intimacy that he found in the beds of strangers.  He chose pain over gentleness.  And when pain and sex failed to make him feel alive, he used theft.

 “You could have honored the loss of everything you loved with tears,” Clarissa said into the darkness, “You could have grieved and found love again.  Now you are lost.”

He gathered his knees against his chest, his back pressed against the cold stone of his prison as he stared into the darkness.  Dreams and reality melded.  The slow soughing the river ate away at his resolve.  No one could hear him weep.