Chapter Text
“Raqim?”
It almost hurt the way these northerners pronounced his name, with a sharp “k” like the blade of a knife, chopping it in half.
Like his life.
The last thing he recalled he was dying in the desert outside Botosani with his comrades of the Pure Legion, after a sweep of the ruins a couple of leagues southwest of the city startled an enclave of Sarenrites, which would explain why he was wearing his desert gear, but not the lack of blood.
And then there were nightmares, but these slipped through the fingers of his mind like sand. Meaningless jumbled images. Molten, screaming souls. Stitching hands. Alchemy and sulphur.
And then—cold. Colder than a tomb, the air here. His head as if clamped in a stone vice, suddenly released. An angel? Confused, incomprehensible voices ringing in his ears. Pain like someone was trying to pry out his sternum with a white-hot crowbar.
Nothing made sense.
Since that awakening the ensuing madness gave no reprieve from the nightmares: inquisitors, demons, earthquakes, a bad fall, fighting for his life through a maze full of monsters and demonic cultists. People telling him the year was 4715. Seventy-seven years was not something one simply lost.
“Raqim Ag Adar,” he said again. The Queen’s scribe stared at him, a drop of ink beading at the end of her plume.
He spelled it for her in Taldane and she still got it wrong, writing his family name as one word: Agadar.
There was a boy once who held his father’s hand while his father patiently spelled out their names for a clerk at a refugee camp, a Sarenrite symbol clasped tightly between their palms out of sight of the Rahadoumi. The Rahadoumi found it anyway and took it away. That boy was already a limb hacked from a tree. Lost.
Now like a branch hacked from that limb, there remained only this man.
Raqim Agadar. Knight-Commander of the Mendevian Fifth Crusade.