WARNING: Other players should not read this until Chapter 1 is complete.
Finally being treated like an adult first by Garoway and then later by Captain Brychan had left Kebrin almost drunk with excitement, but he had been restless, almost sleepless, the entire night before because of this undercurrent of tension. And now he knew why.
Kebrin stared out of the water, his mind not wanting to fully understand, to accept, what Garoway had said at first – and then, when it did, struggling and failing to take in the enormity of it. Until this moment, Kebrin had always assumed that he would become a dragonman, or a Harper, or maybe even a brave sea captain and see the world. But his dreams had always had him one day coming back here, to warm his old bones by the hearth and share the many songs and stories he had collected with his family.
Ista Weyr was home, the place he had assumed he would always return to once his journeys were over.
And now it was going away, a painful reminder of an earlier, awful era when Thread still rained like silver death from the sky and salvation took the form of fiery dragons’ breath.
He tried to tell himself that it was a good thing that the Weyrs were no longer needed, that the dragonmans’ harsh way of life should be allowed to fade gently into history, but this was his home, his friends, his family, everything he knew.
Home.
His fingers turned white where they clutched the handrail and his jaw clenched as he fought a doomed battle against tears that wouldn’t stop.
Kebrin was distant the next few days, prone to staring off into space and making mistakes with chores – and even his music – that he would have never made before.
A few days later, that changed abruptly when Garoway found the young man eagerly taking notes from several piles of dusty and often badly-faded Weyr record books laid out before him. Kebrin had found a purpose for himself, a way to process what was happening: As one of the last children to be born at Ista Weyr, he planned to document as much of its long and illustrious history as he could so that he could one day write a book, or even maybe a few songs, so that some part of this place, of them, would live on forever in history.