Preamble
He had crossed half a continent and ice-capped mountains to reach the heartland of his enemies, then dared to walk the streets of their capital. Aided by an invaluable few, Hanuvar reforged the broken links of his intelligence organization into the backbone of a liberation network. Thus had he brought Volani survivors by ones and twos and threes and dozens to freedom.
A brighter day had dawned for those hundreds, and for the empire as a whole, for a kindly young ruler had reached the Dervan throne. Hanuvar put his back to the politics captivating the capital and travelled to the Oscanus region along the southeast coast of Tyvol. There a small number of his people remained in the possession of intractable slave holders. The deliverance of each would have to come by clever stratagems, Hanuvar’s specialty.
There too lay a makeshift boarding school owned by Hanuvar’s old nemesis and firm friend, Ciprion, who had conspired with his wife, Amelia, to purchase all the Volani children they could at auction. Hanuvar hoped to find his niece Edonia hidden among them. And this was not the only relative he sought. With several companions, Hanuvar’s daughter Narisia had escaped Dervan captivity into the countryside. Neither the revenants nor the praetorians nor Hanuvar’s spies had found trace of her existence since.
Apart from worries, for his surviving family and many others, Hanuvar had much to be thankful for. Cured of a sorcerous malady, he was blessed with a handful of recovered years and a body healed of all but its most recent injuries. Further, he and Izivar Lenereva had not only forged a crucial alliance but also found solace in one another’s company.
The roads we traveled felt incrementally safer. The new emperor had little love for the revenants and thus had decreased their funds and limited their domestic activities, blaming his father’s assassination in part on their myopic focus upon tales of Hanuvar’s survival. Enarius ordered them to center their efforts instead on the Cerdians who had not only engineered the old emperor’s death but threatened Dervan western interests. Thus while revenants were occasionally to be glimpsed, large patrols led by their black-garbed trios became a thing of the past.
We did not yet know that the revenant legate had become obsessed with proving Hanuvar’s existence to Emperor Enarius, so were more concerned that the scheming Metellus, whom Enarius had promoted to legate of the praetorians, held a trusted place at his side. At the time of our arrival along the Oscani coast, Metellus was still recovering from his recent injury, and was too busy basking in the benefits of his elevated status to be plotting much trouble, although the future was to show us just how right we were to have worried.
That a greater threat than either loomed over us all we had no hope of guessing.