A New Hero

Returning Home

Light burrowed into the creases of her face, each flicker of the candle lengthening the years and pain etched into a woman who wore both with a weakening grace. Queen Nerazda sat upon her knees as she had for the past three hours. Her hands were clasped together right beside the body of her youngest son. He'd been cleaned as best they could manage and dressed in a suit of fine silk, bluer than the frost runes that once circled his body. All that was left for him now was the stone to come and claim their lost son.

All that was left for her was to wait.

Behind, a shadow crept over the weeping candles. It seeped into the breadth of the stones themselves, snuffing out light and hope with each cautious step. Nerazda didn't rise from her forehead pressed into the altar, the Queen's neck perfectly stretched to be sliced in half.

The stone shifted, shadows feeling from a gust of wind. It should be soft as a newborn's breath, barely a whisper releasing as the knife slid out of its sheathe, but the candles knew. Every burnt wick danced closer, wiping away the darkness surrounding the altar. Still, the Queen did not raise her head.

What creature of the night dared to disturb this refuge, this tomb of a lost son? It cared nothing for the anguish weeping from a broken mother's heart. Slipping its silver fang to a fresh hand, it gripped onto the grieving woman's shoulder.

"Welcome home, Tenna."

Her fingers trembled, the assassin swallowing hard as she faced down her mother's head rising from the stone tomb. Slowly, Nerazda turned to eye up her wayward child. "So it is true, then. You have returned only to...to break your family."

"Me?" Tenna hissed, a hand slapping to her chest before she gripped onto her mother. "How dare you blame me. I wasn't the one to doom us to this treacherous life. You did, mother. You turned your back on everything we knew, everything we held dear and for what?"

Nerazda took a deep breath, her weary eyes struggling to focus on the daughter clinging to her shoulder as if she were hoping for a piggy-back ride. "To keep us alive."

"Alive?" Tenna spat on the ground, "We are not alive. We are nothing. We have been cast from the stone. Parade about down in your pseudo-pit all you like, pretend to claim back some lost glory, but it is gone. All is lost because of you!" She moved to swing her dagger, but Nerazda wouldn't look away.

"Why?" the mother's questions froze Tenna. "Why kill your brother?"

"You know," Tenna hissed, tears burbling in her words.

The Queen shut her eyes a moment and groaned, "He was a boy, he didn't...he chose to live. For all of us."

"He doomed us, he opened up the deep roads."

"We were dying, Tenna. We could not have survived without..."

"He made us casteless!" she shrieked, jabbing a finger at the man who'd long left the world of caring behind.

Nerazda sighed, "It depends on how you look at tradition..."

"No, mother," Tenna sucked in a sharp breath, too focused on the task to notice anything amiss in the darkness. "I will not let you warp dwarven tradition, the shaperate itself, to fit your vanity. We are here, on the surface. We have seen the sun, walked under it. Suffered from it. I know what it is to have my skin burned upon my bones while dust coats my tongue."

"That was your choice!" she turned to her daughter, a wrinkled hand struggling to catch the assassin's as if she could wrestle the dagger away. "You were not banished. You were free to remain."

"As a fraud, pretending to be a dwarf while all of it seeped away from us. Everything that made us what we were lost in a single earthquake. What we were, what we are was buried under miles of stone as we should have been."