The commander, wearing a healer's uniform that could've easily been his skin, knelt between them. His head faced east, where the setting sun Nu'um was obscured behind the Fade’s body. Its light shone over the world as through a curtain on this caskerwol morning. Mekkendor could get quite humid despite having two suns, but never in the Gaar, not when a wall of toxic flame surrounded it on all sides.
Commander Abadir vlii Eerind looked up to the suns in more ways than most Mekkendorians. He looked up to them even more than some of his fellow Adalaantians, even the ones outside his Gaar. Right now was an excellent example. "Fools search for wisdom in books, but a wise man need only crane his neck from time to time." One of Abadir's favorite passages.
Deelediktus seventeen, he recited. He left the scroll inside. He did not need it for morning prayers between his doctor rounds in the infirmary, and he did not want to risk getting blood on his scriptures.
Abadir's ears picked up a soft thumping in the air. A beating of wings, growing louder. When he opened his severe purple eyes, a majestic red-tail falcon was perched on the stone railing in front of him, carrying a message in one talon.
"Sun-Beak," he greeted. Abadir reached and stroked the bird behind its feathered head, just where he knew it liked. Sun-Beak was a good creature. Abadir raised it himself before giving it to his son for his Yeerbadl ceremony. Heemlik didn't take after his father in some key areas, but taking good care of his messenger falcon was one of them.
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Abadir took the proffered letter. He opened it. He read it. Without thinking, he wiped gently at his mouth. You never knew where the mess from a trip to the infirmary had gotten.
"I see," he said slowly, in a voice that would've made Heemlik's fingers unsteady, had he been in earshot.
The commander raised his eyes to the bird before him once more. One did not kill a messenger in Adalaant; it was bad form. If the Adalaantian military had one thing, it was form. They marched with form, they ate with form, they prayed with form, they worked people to death with form. It was the Ochre Company way.
Timoor and his bird’s corpses proved that it was no longer the Steppe Hound way.
A few minutes of patient waiting later, which Sun-Beak spent eating the mouse Abadir gave him for his services, the bird was off and away, headed for the northern provinces with a response clutched in his talons. Abadir watched the bird go, then raised the message before him once more and re-read the last paragraph:
I will find another way to sate the Fade.
I know you don’t believe such a way exists.
But when I find it, I look forward to your embrace.
Your son and your son alone, Heemlik
Abadir sighed, and raised the letter to one of the torches. As it crackled and burned, he strode off his balcony, hands clasped behind his back and head bowed.
Heemlik was going to persuade Abadir. How did one deal with a child who’d grown all the way up to Heemlik’s age and still believed in myths like that?