Even though the light had been grown from a pinpoint, even though memory knew what was coming, the return of the sun was blinding.  This was not light tricking down through shafts cut into a mountain but full on sunlight.  Hovering amongst a few clouds in the sky, the sun was rising over the Eastern Sea.  When he stepped out of the tunnel, the shattered remnants of the arch marking the start of the Grand Road scattered around him, Quartes stopped.  In part it was the dancing of the light before his eyes, but the Landian simply took a breath and held it.  He the freshness of the air, the taste of grass and salt it brought to his tongue, just the feeling of it moving about him were all welcomed changes.  He felt the full warmth of the sun on his skin, sighed as it begun to burn away at the cold that had settled into his bones during the weeks spent under the mountains.

His knees ached, the cuts from the battle in Serijo and from obstacles burned with the sweat created by the final climb back to the surface.  To arrive while the sun still rose was a boon, he could make his way down from the mountains in the light, travel along the old shattered road as he made his way into the lands east of the Hendarks.  In the Last Cycle his time here had been brief, quickly cutting north to reach the now lost city of Aus Argentum.  For a moment he frowned.  In his time in the West since the Cycle ended there had been no word from Aus Argentum.  Assumptions were not something he would make but he would find no surprise if upon the old empire’s capital there would be the lair of a new dragon.

These lands though, tucked between the Hendarks and the East Sea had long been sheltered.  The story went that line of Falden had settled Aenesi and Hunai here in past Cycles.  Had set them in the fair climate to farming and raising cattle, to be the bread basket as the Landians of the past had still thought there was a way they could defeat the Dragons once and for all.

That shelter had created isolation and in his Cycle, the inhabits had seen him and the other Landians as creatures out of fey tales.  How much more wold those stories have faded in the years that had passed?

Quartes took another deep breath.  Felt the crispness of it, the feeling of a fresh day.

His pale eyes, nearly adjusted now, followed the faded road.  He could see a fort a ways down, a guardhouse that had acted as the simple defense for both heading in or out of the realm of Falden.  There were figures on its partially crumbled walls.  One had a hand raised shading his eyes, another was pointing towards Quartes and shouting back behind him.  Quartes straightened his shoulders, rested a hand each on the Shard of Lehn and the hilt of his old sword.

“New stories,” he whispered to himself as he took the first step.