Vault Of Heaven 01 - The Unremembered by Peter Orullian

isn’t the whole point of being a sodalist to protect a Sheason?”
    Braethen replied, unabashed, “The Sodality defends in two ways: the arm and the word. I’m focusing on the word right now.” Again he tapped the emblem at his throat.
    This whole “focusing on the word” thing was a small evasion, and he hoped they’d be inclined to let him have it—though they didn’t likely know any better. Besides, after all the joking done at his expense, Tahn had told him once that except for maybe Braethen’s father he thought Braethen was the most ethical, dependable person in all the Hollows, precisely because he lived by the sodalist oath. That had been a good day.
    Tahn broke the silence. “I think Sutter’s trying to say that he’s jealous, since digging roots is so awfully important.”
    “Yeah, that’s it,” Sutter agreed in a sarcastic tone.
    “The past, all the ages of man, show us what will be,” Braethen said, hefting one of the tomes before him. “They help us act today so that tomorrow doesn’t come with all the mistakes that have gone before. This knowledge helps a sodalist serve a Sheason, the two working together in the common interest of others.”
    “You sound like a book,” Sutter said.
    Braethen ignored him, and turned with familiarity to a passage. “This is our purpose.”
    “Here he goes,” Sutter muttered, “with the credo.”
    “‘Change is inevitable and necessary, but the traditions of our fathers need to be preserved. Someone must watch. Someone must remember. And someone must defend…’” He trailed off, feeling again as he had the first time he’d read those words: humbled, yet eager to take the oath himself.
    “You sound like the reader when you speak of such things,” Tahn said.
    Sutter waved a hand in front of Braethen’s eyes. “Yeah, kind of spooky.”
    Braethen shook himself physically from his reverie. “The storms have never held so long. It bears another meaning, I think … rain, water … renewal … change. Maybe war.”
    A chill ran down Braethen’s own back, and Sutter closed his mouth with an audible sound. Then the would-be sodalist looked up. The little room grew suddenly quite serious. “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m more fond of Ogea than anyone, and I hope he is dead and that we simply haven’t received word of it. Because … I don’t like what I believe is the alternative.”
    “What, did you read something like that in your books?” Sutter wanted to know.
    But before Braethen could answer, beyond the door the sound of slow hooves fell upon the street. At the lonely echo of a rider on the muddy roads of the Hollows, another chill rushed over him. They all went to the window to look out. The window began to cloud before his face and he unwittingly held his breath. Outside, the wind moaned over the eaves of the house and sighed through the trees.
    The rider passed, so slowly that there could be no mistaking his identity: the reader. Ogea sat slumped in his saddle, his forehead resting upon the neck of his mule. In a moment, he vanished again down the road, lost beyond the trees surrounding Braethen’s home.
    “Let’s go,” Braethen said. He ran to the back of the house and told his father the reader had arrived. Then he donned his cloak and flew out the door, Tahn and Sutter close behind him.
    It took but a short walk to catch up to the reader. Ogea’s mount plodded along steady and slow.
    As was tradition, the reader wound through the Hollows, saying nothing, his procession his only announcement. Townsfolk and Northsun travelers flocked to the street, as they always did, today drawing their coats and cloaks tightly around them as they followed behind. There was always a quiet reverence at Ogea’s passage, but this time Braethen felt a sullen edge to the silence.
    Dirt-stained and torn, the reader’s cloak bore black-fringed holes as though left too close to a fire. Underfoot, the mud on the road, now being trod by a hundred boots