Free What Was Forgotten by Tim Mathias Page B

that emerged when they had made the discovery under the temple…
    That night, she gathered as many as she could and told them the truth. She told them they had been abandoned, that Aulvennic could no longer protect them here, but many of the soldiers refused to leave.
    Jass Johain had fought the Ryferians in the field and now led the city’s defense after his last defeat. “I know their tactics,” he urged. “If we can hold out for longer, we will have victory.” Some agreed. Some refused to believe Sera, thinking it impossible that the ancestors had disappeared.
    It was only when the enemy were at Yras’ Shield, the great iron door and last defensive point left in the city, that Cohvass relented and convinced his cousins, their families, and his sword-kin that they must follow Sera.
    “She is one of the Revered,” he had implored. “She will lead us. We will fight again if we go, but the war ends here if we stay.”
    They escaped through the underground. The tunnels had been there for centuries for exactly this reason, though up until the last few months, no one that ever lived in Yasri ever thought there would be a need for them.
    It was almost a half day before they emerged several miles east of the city, so narrow and difficult was the tunnel. When they emerged into the dim daylight, Sera looked back on her city and thought for a moment that, from the distance, she could entertain the illusion of peace within the walls even though she knew what would likely happen to her captured kinsmen, if it had not happened already.
    The few hundred of them stood there, each looking to the next for guidance, uncertain in this land they used to know as their own. Now it was enemy territory. Many looked to Cohvass, as he was the most renowned warrior among them. But the imposing man looked to Sera, and when they had decided where they would go, every last survivor followed her. They went into the Yasur forest, and that night, Sera wept during Aulvennic’s holy hour. She thought only of those left behind. Cohvass sat beside her that night. It was enough of a comfort to have him there, silent as he was. Words had lost their sense along with everything else they knew.
    They had moved slowly and carefully through the Yasur over the following weeks. Directionless as they were, they made invisibility the heart of their existence. While her people slept, Sera spent hours in the evernight, looking for guidance. Looking for anything. She heard Cohvass say each day that they would learn the purpose of their survival. She only hoped it was soon.
    Shouts of anger had reached them through the trees. Someone had to shake her back to awareness. They told her, excitedly: the scouts had come across a Ryferian column in the forest.
    “There was arguing among them. One of the gattra killed a nasci soldier,” one of the scouts recounted.
    “The nasci treat the shadows like criminals,” another remarked.
    “They are criminals to them, just as we are,” Sera said. “Guilty of having different gods.”
    “Something else… They’ve taken the Raan Dura.”
    Sera nodded, unsurprised. Many of the others looked at each other, caught between disbelief and panic. She knew what they were thinking; they were a people without a home, and now their most sacred of artifacts was being taken from them. They would soon suffer the same fate as many other enemies of the Empire. Sera thought it, too: this could be the last moment in their history, if they did nothing.
    “I need to see,” she said.
     
     
     
    They counted over two hundred soldiers. Sera, Cohvass, and three other scouts lay prone and watched the column as it began its march, the sun just beginning to rise above the trees.
    “There,” Cohvass whispered as he pointed to a carriage bearing a number of crates and barrels and wooden boxes overflowing with shiny trinkets and treasures undoubtedly stolen from Yasri. Among them was a familiar iron chest with bands of gold inlaid in ornate