This Was His Home

I am not in the habit of talking about my old home. But it has struck me that there is nobody else left to remember them. I am the last survivor of the Hall of Star’s Reach, and with my death the hold my family led for generations will be gone, forever, and the memories lost with me.

I sit down to write this in no mood to talk of happier days long gone, but there is one tale that ought be told, and it is of how I came to be that lone survivor - and the price. It is not a long story.

Some explanation first. I was the fourth of six children. My mother the Thane, my father helping with the family, and so it came to be that I was taught much more in my adolescence by my uncle Eadmer. He was a wanderer who travelled across Skarsind, lending his sword in different halls for different causes, though looking back I have no way of knowing which of his stories bore even a kernel of truth. In my childhood I struggled to see much of a place for myself in Star’s Reach in the future; my three elder siblings all showed more promise in matters of leadership, and so there was nothing to curb or redirect my thirst for adventure.

Sad to say, my thirst was slaked.

My mother Hannele despaired of what Eadmer taught me - not swordsmanship or survival in the wilderness, but what she viewed as irresponsibility. I should have been training to learn to defend the Hall with the others, not seeking to wander the wilderness. It would be a lie to say that she and I fought often, because most arguments between mother and child were reserved for my eldest brother Tuomas, heir apparent with his own ideas.

It made it very easy to slink off, slip away. My father Cenric knew, but he was ever a softer, more indulgent man, who thought I might come home if given enough freedom to taste the world. He was wrong. All came crashing down on one such excursion. I evaded a long argument with my mother simply by letting Tuomas be in the room, and they decided to argue instead about something else - then slipped out with my uncle. At this stage I was of an age that ‘slipping out’ might mean being away from home for several weeks with him.

We were not more than a day gone, Eadmer promising a hunting excursion for greater pelts than those my sister Ansa could bring home, before the blizzard started. We hunkered down for perhaps a day, waiting for it to blow over. When we realised it wouldn’t, we decided to turn back.

Understand, my uncle was a fiercely independent man. I look back and know his quick smiles and japes were there to help him connect with those around him, for he had always lived under the shadow of my mother, his older sister. That he never found his own place in the world, and had to roam it trying to carve out something solely his own using only his blade, grieves me. The idea of returning to her after all of his bragging about this hunting trip must have stuck in his throat. And if he had listened to his pride instead of sense, he might have lived.

With the blizzard, we were almost upon Star’s Reach before we realised something was amiss. It was not the stillness that troubled us, for closing the doors and windows and hunkering down is normal in such weather. But we saw shapes hobbling through the fog of snow, heard cries and moans muffled by frozen winds. Star’s Reach seemed alive when it should have been dead, and that was only because they were all, all dead.

I refuse to write the details of what came out of the fog. Let those people be better remembered. But they were not alone, which was the first glimpse I ever had of orcish barbarians, striding from what I could rapidly tell was the ruins of the hall’s holdfasts. Later I would piece together that it did not take more than a raiding party, under the cover of the Thule’s unnatural blizzard, to tear down a well-defended hall.

If any still lived by then, I do not know. It seemed impossible, and certainly our survival seemed impossible when we were noticed. I grabbed my uncle by the arm, hissed at him that we had to go, while we still had time, still had distance enough to flee.

He shook off my hand and drew his sword. ‘This is my home,’ said the man who had spent all his life hunting heroic deeds anywhere but Star’s Reach. Time and again my mother had accused him of returning here only because it was a guaranteed free meal and free roof over his head, and Eadmer had only ever grinned and not corrected her.

He had few friends left there. He had no family of his own. And all his sister’s family were doubtless dead behind the walls, or even shambling towards him - save I, the niece, telling him to flee. Yet he held his ground.

The first of the undead to reach us he struck down; the second, I did, but still more came, and I could see the bigger, swifter figures of the orcs approaching. Again I begged him for us to run. He shouted at me, swore at me, even though this was madness. He made no move for the shattered buildings; this was no hunt for survival, or a wild hope that he could defeat them all.

This was his home, and he would not leave it.

Again two figures were felled by his blade, again I begged that we should leave. He spat and called me coward.

That was somehow my permission to run. It would be easy to say I knew it was not cowardice, but forever my greater regret is that I could not convince him to flee with me. But that he called me - young and untested by battle as I was then, his charge, the last of his family he knew for sure was still alive - cowardly for not wanting to stand and die? I knew his mind had fallen somewhere else. I knew it was only a dark part of Eadmer talking, and a part I should neither listen to nor could convince.

So I did run. My last glimpse back before the blizzard swallowed Star’s Reach was of Eadmer the Far Striding, who had wandered a hundred halls and climbed a hundred mountains, stood before the home he spent his life escaping, returned to die.

I did not see the battle between him and the barbarian orc upon him. I have never witnessed the deaths of any of my family, nor had any bodies to mourn. I do not pretend Eadmer survived. I cannot even pretend Eadmer died for anything; had we run when I first urged it, I believe we would have slipped away.

For a long time, I told myself he deserved a better death, a death for something. Over the last few years, I have become more convinced that a hero’s death is about what runs through your heart and mind was you fall, not how many enemies you slay or lives you save. Too often do warriors of the Mark die in their droves in pitched battle, the tale of one no more consequential than the tale of the next. But those are other tales.

I left my uncle to die his hero’s death, refusing to truly abandon his home to the very last, choosing to perish in the lands of his forefathers.

I think I do understand, at last. It would have been much easier.