Vaeren saw his brother die.
He saw it the way you see lightning — whole, instant, burned into the back of your eyes so completely that closing them only made the image brighter. The dive. The twist of Dhaelon's hand. The wet, splintering crack of Aenythar's wing folding in a direction that wings don't fold. The fall. The impact. The fountain exploding into a spray of marble and water and red.
And then the silence.
Not real silence. The battle was still raging. Steel on steel. Screaming. The grinding march of Dhaelon's mind-bound army through the breaches. But inside Vaeren's skull, everything went quiet. Like someone had reached into his head and turned the world down to nothing.
That's Roen. That's my brother. That's the boy who used to steal pastries from the kitchen and blame the dogs. That's the boy who cried at thunderstorms until he was nine and made me swear on our mother's life never to tell anyone. That's my brother and he just fell out of the sky and he's not moving.
