Chapter 13: Letters from the Capital

The merchant caravan arrived with the first frost, wagon wheels cutting deep ruts through Willow's Hollow's as morning mist clung to the ground like reluctant ghosts. Eris watched from the garden wall as traders unloaded their wares—fabrics from the eastern provinces, preserved foods for winter storage, small luxuries that reminded the village of its connection to the wider world. But it was the courier's pouch, sealed with the sunburst of the Dawnguard, that made his mother's hands tremble as she accepted it.

"Is it from Father?" Liran asked, her altered vision showing her more than the simple leather and wax. Around the letter, she could see echoes of its journey—dusty roads, way stations where it changed hands, the faint imprint of urgency that had carried it from the capital to their doorstep.

Mara nodded, her fingers tracing the seal without breaking it. The morning light caught the silver threads in her dark hair, and for a moment, Eris thought he heard something—a discordant note beneath the everyday sounds of commerce and conversation, as if his mother's emotional state had begun to resonate at frequencies only he could perceive.

"Aren't you going to open it?" he asked, sliding down from the wall to stand beside her.

She looked at him then, and there was something in her expression that made him feel younger than his twelve years—a weight of knowledge that pressed down like winter snow on thin branches. "Inside," she said quietly. "This isn't for the street."

They gathered in the kitchen, the heart of their home where important conversations always seemed to happen. Liran perched on the worn wooden bench while Eris leaned against the counter, both watching as their mother broke the seal with careful precision. The parchment was thick, expensive—the kind the Dawnguard used for official communications. As she unfolded it, Eris caught a glimpse of his father's handwriting: neat, controlled, each letter formed with military precision.

Mara read in silence, her expression growing more distant with each line. When she finally looked up, her eyes held the particular emptiness that came from suppressing strong emotion, and perhaps a flicker of something deeper – regret? Eris couldn't quite place it.

"Well?" Liran prompted, impatient as always. "What does he say?"

"He's tracking something," Mara said, setting the letter on the table between them. "The Church has been... active in other regions. There are reports of children like you being gathered."

"Gathered?" Eris felt his Echoflux stir, responding to the undercurrent of fear in his mother's voice. "What do you mean?"

Mara was quiet for a long moment, her fingers absently tracing the wood grain of the table. "Your father writes that the Sect of the Storm has established 'rehabilitation centers' in three northern provinces. For children who've been touched by the Whispering Roads. Children they call corrupted."

The word hung in the air like a blade waiting to fall. Eris had heard it whispered in the village—not about them, not yet, but about others who bore the silver threads, whose gifts set them apart from the ordinary flow of life.

"But we're not corrupted," Liran said, though her voice carried less certainty than defiance. "We're learning to control it. Lydia says—"

"I know what Lydia says." Mara's interruption was gentle but firm. "But the Church has its own interpretation of what's happening. They see the Echoborne, the manifestations, the changes in children like you, and they believe it's a spiritual affliction that needs to be... corrected."

Eris picked up the letter, scanning his father's words. The tone was indeed serious, almost formal—nothing like the man who used to carry him on his shoulders through the village square, who told stories of his adventures with dramatic gestures that made an even younger Liran laugh. 

The patterns are concerning, one line read. Seventeen children in Greenvale alone. The local prior claims they volunteered for purification, but my sources suggest otherwise.

There was concern there, buried deep beneath the formality – the concern of a father who knew the danger his children faced, yet expressed it through the detached lens of command. This was Captain Vayne writing, not Father.

"Why does he sound so..." Eris searched for the word. "Cold?"

Mara's smile was sad and knowing, but also held a trace of something weary, an old ache. "That's his report voice... It's how they maintain their truth—by building walls between what they know and what they feel. The Dawnguard forged much of that distance, yes... but not all of it. Life has its own way of hardening paths chosen long ago."

"Was he always like this?" Liran asked, and Eris heard the real question beneath it: Will he protect us if the Church comes?

Their mother rose from the table, moving to the window that overlooked the garden. The protection charms she'd woven into the frame caught the light, too complex for simple village craft—something Eris only now recognized as significant.

"No," she said softly. "He wasn't always like this. When I first met your father, he was..." She paused, seeming to travel somewhere distant in memory. "He was the kindest person I'd ever known. Full of hope, and a simple desire to make things right where he saw suffering.""

"Tell us," Liran said, and for once, there was no impatience in her voice. "Please."

Mara turned back to them, and Eris saw her making a decision—weighing what to share, what to protect them from. Finally, she returned to the table, settling between them like she had when they were young and frightened by storms.

"I was seventeen," she began, her voice taking on the particular cadence of carefully preserved memory. "Living in Kareth, though 'living' might be too generous a word. Surviving, more like. I'd been cast out of... a place I'd called home, and the streets were all I had."

Eris felt his Echoflux responding to the emotion beneath her words, picking up harmonics of old pain transformed into story. Beside him, Liran had gone very still, her gift showing her shadows of the past that clung to their mother like cobwebs.

"I was stealing food from a merchant's kitchen—not proud of it, but hunger makes its own laws. And this young guard caught me. Just a trainee then, with the kind of honest face that suggested he'd never had to choose between dignity and survival." Mara's lips curved in a remembering smile. "I was terrified. In Kareth, thieves faced harsh punishment, and someone like me—someone already marked as corrupted by the Church—well."

"But he didn't turn you in," Eris guessed.

"No. He gave me his own coin purse. Told me..." She paused, and Eris heard her voice catch slightly. "Told me I was worth helping. Not for what I could do, not for any reason except that I was a person who deserved to be seen."

The kitchen fell silent except for the distant sounds of the merchant caravan preparing to depart. Eris tried to reconcile this image—his father as a young man choosing compassion over duty—with the formal, distant tone of the letter before them.

"He kept helping," Mara continued. "Found me and the other children I'd been protecting, made sure we had food, shelter when the weather turned cruel. He never asked for anything in return. Never tried to save us for his own glory or convert us to prove his faith. He just... helped."

"What changed then?" Liran asked, though from her expression, Eris suspected her gift was already showing her pieces of the answer.

"Duty," Mara said simply, the word landing heavily in the quiet kitchen. "The Dawnguard found him, recognized his potential. And I... the Weavers' Guild discovered what I could do. We stood at a crossroads then." 

She looked down at her hands, fingers twisting slightly in her lap, a gesture Eris rarely saw. "Our paths diverged, choices were made... choices that carry weight. The man he had to become to serve the Dawnguard... it required him to build walls between his heart and his duty." She didn't meet their eyes as she spoke of the choices, focusing instead on the table's grain.

She touched the letter again, gently, as if it were something fragile. "He's still the same man underneath. The one who sees suffering and wants to help. But now he has to balance that against larger responsibilities. The Dawnguard serves the crown, maintains order, preserves the kingdom's stability. Sometimes that means..." She trailed off.

"Sometimes that means choosing the kingdom over individual lives," Eris finished, understanding flooding through him cold as winter rain.

"He's warning us," Mara said firmly. "That's why he writes in report language, why he documents the Church's movements so precisely. He's giving us information we need while maintaining the distance his position requires. It's the only way he can help now."

Liran stood abruptly, her movement sharp with agitation. "So if they come for us—the Church, the rehabilitation centers—he won't stop them?"

"He'll do what he can within the bounds of his duty," Mara said carefully. "But you need to understand—both of you—that we can't rely on his position to protect us. That's why Lydia is here. That's why you're learning control. Because ultimately, the only real protection is the power to defend yourselves and the wisdom to know when not to use it."

Eris felt the weight of this settling into his bones. His father, the distant hero of bedtime stories, was also Captain Vayne, bound by oaths that might supersede family if the choice ever came.

"Is that why you left the Weavers?" he asked suddenly. "Because they wanted you to choose between duty and something else?"

His mother's expression flickered with surprise, then something deeper—a grief so old it had worn smooth like river stones. "That's a story for another day," she said softly. "But yes, in a way. Every organization that offers power demands payment in the currency of self. The person I had to become to rise in the Guild... I chose to remain the person who could love your father, who could raise you both, who could tend a garden and weave protection into ordinary things."

She stood, gathering the letter with careful hands. "Your father made a different choice. Not wrong, just different. He serves in his way, I in mine. And both of us, in our own fashion, are trying to keep you safe."

As she left the kitchen, Eris caught Liran's arm. "What did you See?" he asked quietly. "When she was talking about Father?"

Liran's eyes were distant, still partially focused on whatever her gift revealed. "Love," she said simply. "So much love it hurt to look at. And underneath it..." She shivered. "Fear. Not of him, but for him. For what his choices cost. For what might happen if his truth and his duty ever truly collide." She stopped for a second. "And... something heavy around Mother. Like chains made of old words. Words about... duty?"

They sat together in the kitchen as morning aged into afternoon, processing the weight of their parents' history. Outside, the merchant caravan departed, carrying with it letters and goods and news of the world beyond Willow's Hollow. But inside, two children grappled with the realization that their protectors were as human as anyone—caught between love and duty, power and principle, the desire to shield and the necessity of letting go.

That night, Eris dreamed of walls—not physical ones, but barriers built from choice and circumstance, obligation and love. And in the dream, he heard his father's voice, warm and close as it had been in early childhood, whispering: Sometimes the greatest love is in the distance we keep. Sometimes protection looks like letting go.

He woke to find frost patterns on his window that resembled the Dawnguard's sunburst, and for the first time, understood it not as a symbol of glory, but as a sign of all the light that must be contained, controlled, and sometimes sacrificed in service to a greater order.

The letter remained on his mother's desk, its formal language hiding a father's fear and a husband's warning.