After a long day Lisa and Trent are camped a few hundred
feet off the road, a small camp fire is dying down. Trent was lazily pushing
the embers around with a stick as they listened to the woods around them.
“What’s Lidarion actually like?” Lisa asked out of the blue.
Trent set his stick down. “You spent your honeymoon there, even
if you only left your room to eat you should have seen some of the city.” He
pointed out.
She smiled softly and shook her head. “With the war about to start we never made it further than the first inn we
came to after we got married.”
Trent smiled. “That explains why he never said much about
your honeymoon.” He said as he used his stick to turn over the last log on the
fire.
She had laid down next to the fire and stared intently into
a bright orange ember. “So, tell me about your home town.”
He added another piece of wood the fire and set his stick
down. “Most of my memories come from a life time ago, that Lidarion doesn’t
much exist anymore. Sometimes I wonder if it ever did in the first place.”
Lisa had closed her eyes. “Tell me what you remember then.”
She said starting to fade out.
He moved his feet closer to the fire as the fresh wood began
to light up. “My parents were the elected representatives for the farmer’s
guild. They sat in on the council meetings and because of their duties we got
to live in the capitol city. My father’s brother took over our family farm when
they moved. I have dreams about it sometimes but I wasn’t even three when we left
so I couldn’t tell you if they were even close to accurate. What I do remember
is that as a child, the city seemed to stretch on for a thousand miles. It was
safer back then, before the war. In the summers we would have free reign of the
inner city from the steps of the royal castle in the east, through the central market
district where we could go north up to the gates of the docks district. It
seemed like the central market district never ended. There were always new
shops to discover and new foods to try, new people to spy on and trouble to get
into. I didn’t know it as a child but we were always under close watch by
palace guards that made sure we never got into more trouble than we, or they
could handle. Most days our little gang of royal brats would end up in the
booths of the Room at the Inn. The oldest and most successful bar and inn in
all of Lidarion. Lisa was older than all of us. But by all rights she was still
a kid, so the fact that she ran the place herself while her parents served as
the market district representatives on the advisory council impressed everyone
but us. What impressed us was cinnamon milk and sweet bread snacks, and napping
in the wintertime by the huge fireplace that seemed to heat the entire Inn
perfectly. None of the others kids cared, but often I would break off from the
group and spend hours in the royal libraries that made up a large portion of
the southern knowledge district. I loved wandering through the shelves, reading
the spines of books I could reach or opening scrolls just enough to read their
titles before putting them back on the shelf. My best friend was Squints and
his father was the royal archivist so squints had free reign of the entire district.
We would spends days upon days reading from the personal diaries of the kings
of old as they described the wars that settled the Kingdom of Lidarion from the
feuding squabbles of the nine ancient families to the unified kingdom it had
become. Every hall in every library had its purpose. Some halls were better for
being the sea swept battleships of Lord Vendalth’s assault fleet. Other
hallways were perfect for playing out our favorite events from the succession
wars. I may have been just a kid, but we lived a hundred lifetimes in the halls
of the knowledge district.”
Trent’s attention returned the present and saw
through the fire that Lisa was fast asleep, her breathing was deep and even. He
put another small log on the fire and let his mind wander back to his childhood.
