the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love
great clouds rolling over the hills
and if you close your eyes, does it almost feel

like nothing's changed at all?

He doesn’t often spend time lost in the past. When he does, it gets him into trouble – it is easy to stand idly by and think of those who have gone, and forget that the current flows around you still. Easier, even, for someone like him for whom thirst and hunger is irritating, but by no means deadly. But the past is never far from the surface – a warm breeze will remind him of Morphine, a dark shadow of Luci, the fresh scent of water of Neraza. But they are passing fancies – a moment, a smile, and then they are gone.

This is different. He’s already caught up half in daydream and half in memory when he catches a glimpse of her, just a flash of color. An impression of bay and white and blue eyes. And it’s the eyes that throw him, that make his heart clench in his chest and memories flood into his mind. Because they had blue eyes. She’d been bay and white with those startling blue eyes, and so had her siblings, and so had their son. Even their daughter, though she’d been fire-red instead of bay, had had the blue eyes.

He’s thrown himself through the space between them before he can think about it, before his brain catches up with his memories, as if it might be one of them. When he blinks and looks at her again, not even this master of masks can hide the bitter disappointment at the moment it breaks and washes over him. The pain in his eyes when he remembers that it can’t be Neraza, or Bethanie or Sorenson, or even Neraza’s sister Ranimara or her brother Tancredi, because he has lost all of them. Every single one of them is dead.

But force of habit, of experience, lets him force the memories away, blinking once, long and slow, and when he opens his eyes again the pain and the memories are gone as if they never were. Instead he looks faintly abashed, and takes a conscious step back out of her personal space. “I’m sorry,” he says with a quick half-smile. “I thought you were someone else. I’m Brennen.” Lost in what she isn’t, he doesn’t quite realize what she is. Any other day he would have pounced on her faint familiar air and tried to decide how she was related to him (a talent of his) but today he blames any lingering suspicion on his mistake, not on her being his granddaughter.

brennen