Aethosphere Chronicles: Storm of Chains Read Online Free PDF Page B

Arvis was actually
home), presumably shaking off the effects of a hangover. And then
most nights when Drish returned from the compound, his father was
already gone, and the money left on the dining room table replaced
with a note saying he was at the tavern. Up until tonight it all
seemed so simple, but in this dank wine cellar, surrounded by the
remnants of the old kingdom, it was anything but.
    His father’s unapologetic reception proved
too much.
    “This is how you repay my kindness,” snarled
Drish, firing off the first salvo of what was sure to become a
heated argument. “You take my money and you funnel it to the
insurgency. Do you have any idea the harm you’ve done to me?”
    “Hold on now, how do you know that,”
muttered Arvis as he snatched up the bottle. Confusion muddled his
expression and revealed the extent to which the stroke had
distorted his face’s ability to move correctly. He looked ghoulish
and sinister because of it.
    “Domaire,” replied Drish through clenched
teeth.
    “Domaire? I haven’t seen him in ages, how
would he know?”
    Drish felt the rage boiling within, but he
knew he needed to get out the details before it was too late.
“Domaire’s the clerk at the Ethnic Liaison Office—they handle
issues between the Interior Security Bur—”
    “I know what the damn Liaison Office is—but
a snitch… Domaire’s a snitch,” the pain could clearly be heard in
Arvis’s slurred speech, but Drish didn’t care. In fact, it made him
all the more furious that being a ‘snitch’ was the one thing his
father seemed to take away first from all this. “I never would
have…”
    “You should be glad, father,” Drish let his
temper rage, “because he intercepted a list bound for the imperials
with your name on it. It’s an arrest list of suspected
insurgents! Domaire probably saved your accursed life tonight—at
least for a few more days anyway!”
    Concern galvanized the insurgent leader into
motion, and he dragged the left half of his body around the table
to be closer to his son. “A list? Drish, who else is on that
list?”
    “I am, father! I’m on that damn list….as a
suspected financier. They think I’ve been intentionally funneling
money to the terrorists.”
    “This is important, son, who else is on that
list!”
    “Damn it, Arvis, can’t you think about me,
and what you’ve done to my life because of all this? How am I going
to explain this away?”
    Arvis slammed his fist down on the table,
setting the coronation bottle to rocking side to side. “Can’t you
stop thinking about only yourself for one damn moment, Drish?
People are in danger, very important people!”
    That was it, it was clear Arvis felt more
for his riffraff ‘resistance fighters’ than for his own son. The
sting of it was more unbearable than the day they’d fought over
signing the Oath; after Arvis had refused, and Drish accused him of
trying to destroy everything they had.
    “There are more important things in this
world than our damned wealth and nobility,” Arvis roared back that
day three years ago. “I’ll not take the Oath.”
    But Drish wasn’t done either. He wasn’t
about to rollover and let his father destroy their family’s legacy.
His grandmother would never have allowed such a travesty to occur
under her watch, and neither could he. “Then I’ll do it…in your
stead, father!”
    “You’d do that? You’d sell yourself to the
Empire? You’re a coward, and no son of mine, you traitor.” And then
Arvis stormed from their city-manor a few kilometers north of the
Palace.
    Drish would end up taking the Oath only a
few hours later, but it would not save his family’s lands, titles,
or wealth. He wasn’t the Baron Larken after all, Arvis was.
    It was a year before Drish saw his father
again, and only in brief when he’d ventured from the refugee camps
in Brasstown to the stockades in Throne to see if the rumors were
true, that Arvis had been arrested for sedition. He almost