Terric
“Have you ever been up here? To the Borderlands? Into the Blight?” Terric asked, stepping back out into the hall. With Avyra by his side, he set off in a random direction. “I’ve been to the Blight before. I was about the same age you are now. We managed to make our way rather far into the Blight.”
He shot a quick glance down at Avyra. “Sometimes bands of algai’d’siswai will go up to the Blight to kill a few trollocs for ji. Our mission was a little different.” These were memories he’d rarely discussed. Most of the people he would have talked to, had been there anyway. They’d all seen the same horrors. Telling Avyra felt like opening the wound again.
He began talking in a rush, “Kids were disappearing, all over the Threefold Lands. We’d lost a lot from the Nakai. The Red Shields, we followed clues to the Blight. There was this fortress guarded by trollocs and full of shadowrunners. They were holding the children there. They were trying to raise an army of Channelers for Sightblinder.” His voice sounded harsh in his ears. He kept walking, fists clinched. The trollocs and myrdraal were the least of the horrors he’d seen. He’d left out the haunted hollow eyes of the surviving children, their cheeks gaunt from starvation, bodies covered in signs of abuse. He didn’t tell her what the Masters of that fortress did to the children who couldn’t learn or who they couldn’t control. Sorena had always been a firebrand. In hindsight, it made sense that she would run afoul of the Masters. He’d come all that way to rescue her only to find her head floating in a cook pot. He’d never felt like such a failure. Raya’s sad eyed understanding hadn’t made things better. He’d failed her and failed to rescue her first-sister. Avyra didn’t need to hear about all of this did she?
Their walk was taking them down a dim, narrow spiral staircase. He stopped at the bottom, in a hallway that seemed to be filled with storerooms, and turned to face her. Still standing on the stairs, she was at eyelevel for a change. Well nearly. Terric stood, studying every curve and line of her face, letting her concerned green eyes fill his thoughts.
