The heat pummeled the StarSeeker and those aboard while she carried the Stewards back towards Arabel. Even in the dark of night, the dry heat pulled the moisture from his body, regardless of the cooled room thanks to the icy spells of Hyaku and himself. Even his high tolerance to weather temperatures only reduced the misery to extreme discomfort, but that was not what kept him from entering the embrace of ifeira, or reverie as the common tongue mistakenly attempted to translate it in its harsh tongue.

Regardless of his excitement at having found the only surviving member of his sister’s last mission, the incoherence of his drunkenness combined with the irritation of certain interruptions, had made his inquisition of Bianna’s former compatriot difficult; the final straw had been the declaration of his return of her sword, Kerym’Vel’Viar d’ Malichor, in the cover of darkness where he had . . .

Uneasiness filled him. An indirect feeling, yet unerringly attached to Bianna, his neth’guanor. With what little she had told him of her upcoming third mission in command of her team, essentially only the knowledge that she could be gone for up to two years, not long considering her last mission before she accepted her first command.

Yet he had awoken as the first sunlight filtered through the leaves of the ancient forest of the city of Semberholme, his ifeira of the night, a joyful remembrance of Petralia and his first night dance together, broken by an intense wave of foreboding.

It had settled into the unease he felt now as he left the room holding the fruits and pastries for breakfast and walked lightly down the airy pathway mystically grown out of the ground, stone and massive trees that surrounded and rose above the bubbling stream that watered the honeyberry bushes and their massive thorns that had given the Thornstreams their name and the light honeyfruit elven wine that had once provided his ancestors immense wealth prior to the invasion and long running wars with their evil cousins a few hundred years before.

His steps paused as he was about to enter the inner courtyard to listen to the bubbling of the stream, a place he had long used to let the natural sounds settle his often passionate moods, yet some odd detail had caught his attention. He turned and there the oddity hung, not new but old renewed, the place of honor where it basked in the magic that held it, slowly rotating as it had for over three centuries before Bianna had drew it the night before the official ceremony naming her an El–Valu’Tael, a master of the ancient art of Querim`hinuel.

Even the wails of the Or-tel-quessir sound musical as they waft through the air, echoing along with the wind as if the trees and birds mourned with him as the tears blurred his eyes while he stared at the beautiful weapon, fully intact and weaving its arc as it danced within the column of magic that housed it.

Normally the awaking from the ilfeira was smooth and comforting even when the reverie drove one towards a dark event in which to relive the gifted remembrance, whether chosen consciously or forced by current motivations as events today drew comparisons to the past. This time, the crossing to full awakening proved full of pain, emotional and physical.

It didn’t make sense, not in its entirety. After the initial shock had worn off two decades ago, he had realized that he still felt their connection, very very faint, as if far way, which meant she was still alive, but some how he knew she had been betrayed. He didn’t know how and he had slowly and impatiently waited for the rest of her expected time away, training in ways he had never done before, and slowly seeking volunteers who would venture with him and training with them, constantly working with Petralia to organize his and Bianna’s friends to become a cohesive unit, with no desire on his part to command, seeking to convince her to take that burden. She politely declined, citing his organization and recruitment, and used very persuasive techniques to convince him to lead their cohort to Bianna’s rescue. Finally the passage of two years, normally a slight amount of time, had agonizingly passed, and yet her presence felt no closer.

A year later, he had sent those who lived home via the portal stone and a few days later Malichor’s Grace had shattered in his defense of Corydalis, the dryad who had healed him as he healed her.

He should have known that her blade, as ancient as it was, would not have broken due to a Zhentarim’s blade. In his blind pursuit of Bianna, and the wounds he suffered that day, he had not even mourned the destruction of the blade until long after.

Kymil sighed, arising to begin his meditations and prayers out in the light of the burning sun, hot even in the early rays of dawn in this godsforaken desert. They hadn’t even left the sand dunes below yet, but the heat no longer impacted him, the burning of anger inside had become far more potent. He needed to figure out how to make this heap go faster. He had important questions for Vic. Even with all of what he discovered in the last few years, he still couldn’t grasp the potential for betrayal by the Elven High Command.

What he did know is that the place of honor that had held the ancient weapon Malichor’s Grace that Bianna had taken up was mystically keyed to the Thornstream bloodline and those they wed and no more. Which meant someone in his family had retrieved the weapon from the entry of his family home, and magically falsified the mystical repairs to the sword.

What he refused to believe . . .what he refused to believe was that his father or mother had betrayed their own daughter, his sister.