On a mote of earth torn from an island and suspended in space, a man sat leaned up against the edge of a fireballed church. He'd wandered the few hundred feet in either direction that was left of his world. He'd laid traps, to catch the moles and the rats. More and more, his traps had been coming up clean. He'd checked on his garden. The sun had been getting farther away, he thinks. It had been getting colder. His vegetables weren't growing so well. It was another day of hard rationing. Overhead, the sun managed to glare, despite being colder and farther away. A tiny blue speck hung between the mote and the sun, which, if he'd been an educated man, Detlas Jundar would have known must be Eberron.
In the other direction, a star appeared, and started to grow. Detlas barely had time to flinch before it flashed overhead, leaving a white streak like a comet's tail. For a moment, he could have sworn there was an airship inside that brilliant white light.
Dullahan had been on the deck. Him, Atil, and a few others. He saw a tiny speck of white suddenly grow enormous, momentarily filling most of the port sky before it shrunk away behind. To the two of them, it conjured a memory. It was a battleground they'd been on, a few weeks before the end of the war. They'd been pulled away for their last mission, a deep strike behind enemy lines. They recognized some of what everyone had seen. A caved in dome of a temple to the Sovereigns. Houses collapsed by fireball artillery striking from both sides. It was an all too familiar image of the Northern Front. In particular, it reminded them of an island on the River Cyre they'd once fought at together. Neither of them could recall what it might have been called.
And neither of them was positive that they weren't just imagining it. The war, they were told, sometimes had that effect on people. But there would be people on Eberron who would want to be certain.
Author
Topic: House of Storms (Read 44156 times)