For all of his reading - the sort of thing that Bahn apparently decried - he did not recall having dreams so vivid as these.
A great swell of the earth pulling Agethlea's buildings high into the air, atop the most unnatural and sinister of hills, and then falling away. Stone shattered air around him as he moved. Searching for anything like safety. It must have been Agethlea. Yet the towers were not great, and the steeple was one he knew all too well. They said that it was built by men who had not yet trained to fight. One hundred and five bells in a single tower; when the acolytes pulled the rope, the tower did not simply ring. It came alive. The music washed over them. And he knew that he was home. No matter that he could not see the tower, or hear the children laughing and singing nonsense lyrics in time to the music.
He knew that he was home.
The face that he assigned to this new feeling was his mother's. It was ridiculous to think that she would look the same after fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years. It was strange to think that he would imagine her that way. Not older, not stressed by time; at some level he knew. She was dead. Yet there she was standing over him as he clung to earth. There were whispers he could not hear. Her eyes were deep with some remembered pain. Eragos wanted to ask her. He did not know the question. To think of killing family was horrific. Whatever Valos was, whatever hurt he had done, was because he was flawed as a man. Not because he was a creature worthy of death. It was anger and jealousy that led to true pain. Eragos thought he'd managed to avoid anger and jealousy tainting what he did.
Only what he touched, Eragos thought. His eyes were open. Vera's face caught the lantern light. His did not. And her expression was unreadable. Eragos wondered then what she saw when she dreamed. Did the great hand that swept away all good in her life come to her? Did she speak without words on the pain in her heart, as he had? A flutter of eyelids was all. Yet the sound seemed loud in this room, with her at his bedside.
As though he'd been asleep for a thousand years Eragos began to test himself. Yes, stiffness in the leg. Stitches that he could feel in his shoulder. A dozen or more bandages wrapped heavily around those that did not need stitches. He was going to earn himself scars for this. How had he managed to avoid death yet again? Because this was not where Eragos Feareborne died.
He knew what Vaili had been telling him then, as surely as he'd known anything in his life. There was no chance for redemption. The curse would stay with him long after he died. What relegated him to this bed, now, would drag him into the darkest reaches of the punishment he'd earned for his sins. Yet there was one chance to make things right in this world, and it was the thing he shrank from most readily. Talon was an abomination in a way that Eragos Feareborne could only dream of. Yet that was his task. Destroy Talon, undo what he'd done - as much as could be undone - and give this nation a chance to survive on the merits of its citizens, instead of the murder of its leaders. This was the task before him, wasn't it?
Every time he thought he understood... but his mother would not come to him in his dreams, demanding Talon's blood. She doted on the boy. And Talon had kept the faith longer, hadn't he? Awkwardly Eragos attempted to push himself with one arm, to try and sit up in the bed.