"Vondran?"
"Yes, Thalion?"
"You've been very quiet lately. Is everything alright?"
"Yes. I've just been a bit overwhelmed lately with memories of my death. I hadn't expected them to be so ... vivid."
"I assumed you had died of old age. Was that not the case?"
"No, it was not. After my mother passed away, I was lost for a while because I had never been alone. I didn't know how to exist without her, and I made some very poor choices. She had raised me to one day assume a throne, but when she died, so did my belief that I was an heir to anything. I became dead inside. Not knowing what to believe or how to exist without her guidance.
"I began to drink, trying to drown my sorrow, and was unable to remember all that she had taught me. To protect me, she had taught me the language of wherever we were, so that I could blend in like a native and not draw attention. But alcohol had a way of making me forget what she had taught me. One night, after a particularly dark episode of memories, I had offended some travelers at the inn. A simple coined phrase that did not translate as I intended, and the next thing I knew I had been dragged into the woods and was being beaten with a cudgel."
"Is that when you died?"
"Not directly. In that moment, I saw myself as she would have seen me, and I realized how ashamed she would have been that I had lost hope. That was what killed me. I gave up hope."
"Vondran, I know you have some misgivings about Kael being on this journey with us. Is it because in a previous life he was one of the men who beat you? Is that why you don't trust him?"
[This is an ongoing chapter a week story that began with the first Words for Wednesday for 2025 on 1 January. I'm hoping to continue it through 31 December, the last Wednesday of the year. To start from the beginning, click on the Words for Wednesday 2025 label to the right and it will pull up all of the weekly posts, beginning with the most recent. To start from the beginning, continue to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page until you get to 1 January 2025, then click "Newer Posts" to read the next date. You can thank Blogger for the inability to list them by chronological order under the labels.]