Normally, Basil would have relented.

He had seen the way Jarza’s jaw tightened and any sensible lad would have backed away. But there was no one else. The silence of the night was still echoing in his ears, and the fear that mingled with curiosity, same cardinal sin of his father, was a cold weight in his gut that wouldn’t shift.

But above all he was his Alpheo’s son, so, when a door was locked, he didn’t turn back, he started looking for the hinges.

He adjusted his seat in the saddle, schooling his face into a mask of innocent disappointment.

"I see. That is indeed regrettable," Basil said, letting a heavy sigh escape. He slumped his shoulders, staring down at his horse’s mane with a downcast look. "I only wished to know more about you, Uncle. Father always speaks so highly of your history, and I’d hoped to hear a few stories of the land that made you.But I understand...."

Jarza, a man who could stand unmoved against a gale of arrows or a winter storm, tried his best to ignore the boy’s performance. He kept his eyes fixed on the path, his profile like a bust carved from old wood. But the silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable, until the Legate finally let out a long, weary exhale.

He failed.

"What is it exactly that you want to know?" Jarza asked, his voice rough with resignation.As if he had just gave half the meat he was looking to eat to a begging dog.

Basil seized the opening before it could close. "Is it true? That the Arlanians worship the fire?"

"A bit of a strange question," Jarza replied, shifting his weight. He gave Basil the sort of look a tavern keep gives a patron who looks likely to bolt without paying the tab. "I fail to see the connection between my old hearth and your father’s court."

Too fast, Basil realized, his pulse quickening. I’m being too obvious.

He braced himself for a scolding, but instead, Jarza blew a breath through his nose and looked toward the distant peaks that formed Turogontoli. "It is not the Arlanians who worship the flame; it is the Azanians. We Arlanians were always the children of the sun.

Of course, the world calls us cousins to the Azanians, and they’d be more right in that than pitting us with the Romelians. We share much of the same blood, the same roots..."

Jarza continued, drifting into a dry history of his homeland. Basil listened, nodding along, but his heart wasn’t in it. This was dry dust. It wasn’t the heat he had felt.

"Do they..." Basil interrupted softly. "Do the Azanians claim to hear things? To see things inside the fire?"

The effect was instantaneous. Jarza’s brown eyes snapped toward him, hard as iron and twice as cold. The atmospheric pressure between them seemed to drop.

"Why do you want to know that?" Jarza demanded almost throwing himself toward the boy. "Is there something you aren’t telling me, Basil?"

"No... Uncle, I was just curious," he stammered, trying to widen his eyes into a look of pure, boyish wonder.

"Curious about the Azanians?"

"About their worship. It’s just... so different from the Five."

Damn his instincts, Basil thought. He can smell a lie like a bloodhound.

Jarza gave him a long, searching look that made the boy’s blood run cold. Finally, he turned away, though the tension remained in his shoulders.Perhaps he wasn’t so good at feeling lies...

"Mh. I would suggest you kill that curiosity before it grows. The only good thing to ever come from the Azanians in the last century was the smoke and ash that came when the Sea Rats paid them a visit and thinned their ranks. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Cease your interest in those heretical beliefs; nothing but rot comes from mingling with such things."

He reached up, his fingers absentmindedly brushing the silver star of the Five hanging on his chest, just above the breastplate...

"The Azanians pray to evil beings, Basil. They sacrifice their own to the flames, and the quacks they call priests proclaim visions and whispers from the coals to justify why they all heart the screams of people being ravaged by flames. It’s all a fraud. A theater of lies and deception. The only thing you can truly hear in a fire is its roar, and the only things to be seen are the smoke and the orange light."

But that wasn’t true. Basil knew it. He had heard the voices, not the crackle of meat, but words. He had seen shapes that weren’t the dancing of a flame.

Was I wrong? he wondered, a sudden flash of doubt hitting him. Am I making a fool of myself?

He looked at Jarza’s iron-grey hair at the crown of his head, which he could not yet shave as he was used to, no doubt the blame belonging to the war.

If a man like the Legate said it was all smoke and mirrors, perhaps it was. But if Jarza was wrong, then who else could he ask? The court priests would likely douse him in holy water and declare him possessed. His father? Alpheo was a cynic who might find the interest academic, but Basil couldn’t risk the look of disappointment that would surely follow. There was, after all some hate that his father bore to religions, all of them...for some reason he wasn’t privy to.

He fell silent, feeling more alone than he ever had in the center of an army.

Well since I am not going to get what I want out of this...I could make use to ask some other....

"Hey, Uncle... can I ask you something else?"

Jarza didn’t look over, but his shoulders relaxed a fraction. "As long as it isn’t more talk of those heresies."

"Why did you change?" Basil asked, his voice curious and soft. "It seems you’re the only one who truly found the Five after you met my father. Uncle Asag, Uncle Egil... they didn’t share your change of heart. They stayed as they were."

A shadow passed over Jarza’s face at the mention of Egil, a flicker of grief so sharp it almost seemed to cut the air, but the Legate reined it in with the discipline of a lifetime. He turned a look of profound, weary love toward Basil.

"We all have our own ways of answering to pain, lad. It is good that your father spoke honestly of our roots; there is no shame in it. We rose through our own grit and the strength of our hands. But the time before our rise? That was a hell on earth. I was a man of the sun once, but the sun didn’t reach the pits where we were kept. I thought I would die there, I felt the cold of the grave in the very marrow of my bones. And then, of course, I met him."

Jarza took a deep, shuddering breath, his eyes fixed on a horizon that wasn’t there.

"He was the youngest of us. The smallest. The weakest in frame. And yet, somehow, he was the strongest soul I had ever encountered. You’ve heard the legions, Basil. You know there are those who whisper that your father is the Son of the Warrior. Some say it to cheer his victories; others say it because they truly believe he was forged in a divine furnace."

Jarza slowed his horse, his voice dropping into the reverent tone of a man at prayer.

"I am among those who believe. I believe your father has the blood of the heavens in his veins, what other explanation is there for the miracles he has wrought? But I do not believe he is the son of the Warrior. No. I believe he is the child of the Weaver. She is the Mother of Mercy, the Bringer of Salvation.

... He was the light that found us in the absolute dark."

Jarza looked at Basil, his eyes wet with a sudden, fierce intensity.As that of a holy men happy that he could preach his holy mass.

"In all my life, I have never seen another who embodies even an ounce of the wonders your father was gifted with. He was the one who pulled us from the mire. He gave us a future when we didn’t even have a present. This life we lead now? This is the paradise he promised, and he led us to it with bleeding feet. Is that not the work of an angel?"

He shook his head, the memory of their shared suffering clearly vivid decades later.

"He starved himself so we could eat. He took the whips and the beatings intended for us, absorbing the world’s cruelty until he could deliver us to safety. He was so selfless, so generous, that he truly must have had the Weaver for a mother. She is the one I pray to most fervently, Basil, because I know she sent a miracle our way. I know it because I’ve marched beside it for fifteen years.When I’ll die I’ll be buried beneath her altar."

Jarza’s voice faltered as he thought of Egil again.He wasn’t buried beneath any temple but instead of the field of battle as it was tradition with his tribe.

"It is our most holy duty to see your father’s plan delivered. Egil martyred himself for that dream, and the dream lives on because of his sacrifice. I pray the gods have delivered Egil to a place of peace; he will be missed every hour of every day. I only hope he knew how much he was loved before the end."

A profound sadness settled into the lines of Jarza’s face. "It was his choice, made with a courage I can only envy.

But it broke my heart to see your father’s pain. He... he cannot see the goodness he has done. He has no eyes for the lives he saved, only for the tribulations he believes he forced us to suffer. He thinks himself a creature of darkness, blind to the light he has shed upon every one of us. I have prayed that he might one day see himself through our eyes, only then would he understand the holiness that resides in him.

What else but a god could craft a being like him? An existence where every breath, every intent, every kindness is a strike against the dark? He thinks he is a monster, Basil. But he is the only good I have ever truly seen, with his violence like LightBringer, he was sworn to see evil washed away."

Jarza nudged his horse closer, the animal’s flank brushing against Basil’s as he reached out to steady the boy. He placed a heavy, grounding hand against Basil’s back, his voice thick with a sudden inexpicably pride.

"When word reached me of what you did for your father, how you stood for him,that you managed to do what we could not, I felt a surge of hope I haven’t known in years.

You truly are his blood. Just as your old man once stood as a bulwark for us, you looked pain and terror in the eye without a single flicker of hesitation. In your thirteen years, you’ve shown more grit, more stone, than I ever possessed at twice your age."

He squeezed Basil’s shoulder.

"The Weaver is guiding your hand; of that, I am certain. I will spend the rest of my days thanking the Five that they gave me a cause I can serve without question, a family I would die for with a smile on my face. Your father... well, he can act the fool at times, and he’s possessed of a stubbornness that could crack a mountain, but at the root of him, he is the greatest man I have ever known. And you?"

Jarza offered a sharp, decisive nod, his eyes shining with wetness.

"You are his heir in more than just name. You are the heartbeat of his legacy. Of that, I have no doubt at all.

You will inherit your crown from your mother, but from your father, you shall inherit something more valuable. Gods’ blood.’’