Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month VII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 7th Month
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The Three Families, Before the Journey
Meanwhile, further south, the three families who'd once escaped the destruction of old Maya had finally come together and decided, after years of quiet hoping, where each of their futures truly belonged.
The decision itself had taken years to arrive at, but once it came, it came fast, the way water finally breaks through a dam that had been cracking quietly the whole time. To call it a return to their roots wasn't quite right, though. It was better said that they'd escaped here, to the south, all those years ago, since none of them had actually been born here. Their original families had lived here for over a few decade, yes, before escaping and findimg themselves on the forest of Lonelywood to settle, but they themselves had been born in the north, in the great forest of Lonelywood, in the village of Maya.
Every day carried some fresh ache once they'd learned that the village had survived the massacre, every rumor that reached them pulling their hearts a little further back toward the place they'd always understood as their home, somewhere beneath the surface, they still belonged there.
Even having chosen to leave once and abandon their life there, they'd never quite managed to shake the pull of wanting to return, to see the place they should have called home all along, even if it meant facing a redemption they weren't certain they deserved, even if August Finn, the sole survivor of that massacre, might never forgive them for leaving him behind to face it alone.
They still wanted to go home. And over the months and years since learning the truth, they'd slowly begun mobilizing, until at last, the decision was made: they would leave the south behind for good and return to the forest where they'd first been born.
At the Arbe compound, Aldrin called his family together one final time, not to deliberate, that part was long finished, but to divide the work of leaving a life behind into pieces small enough for people to actually carry. Twelve survivors had become, over the years, a household of nearly sixty, children and grandchildren born here in the south who'd never once set foot in the forest their family still called home in every story told at dinner. Aldrin stood at the head of the same table where he'd once gathered the original twelve, laden now with far more food than that first meeting, though just as little of it got eaten.
"We are not simply packing for a few days stay," he told them, with his merchant's voice carrying the same measured weight it always did in negotiations, though this time there was nothing to negotiate. "We are closing a ledger that has been open for thirteen years. Every contract, every partnership, every debt owed to us or by us, settled before we left this compound for the last time for good. I will not have us arrive at Maya's gates carrying loose ends behind us."
It took the better part of two months. Aldrin himself handled the largest accounts personally, meeting with business partners who'd known him for a decade and watching their faces shift through surprise, then something close to grief, as he explained he was leaving for good. A few tried to talk him out of it. More understood immediately, the way people who'd built something from nothing tended to understand another person doing the same in reverse. His eldest son handled the smaller contracts, the household staff, the quiet work of telling loyal employees, some of whom had been with the family since their merchant family was first founded here a decade earlier, that their positions were ending, along with severance generous enough that none of them left the meeting angry.
The house itself sold within three weeks, faster than Aldrin expected, to a rival merchant family that had been trying to buy the property for a decade. He didn't haggle over the price. For the first time in his life, the number didn't matter to him at all.
At the Nebe household in the Duchy of Heran, Gerold's process looked different, it was much quieter, the way most things about Gerold had grown quieter over the years. He didn't call a formal family meeting so much as simply to begin a casual conversation, it was always something important, one that drew the rest of the household in gradually, one member at a time, until they found themselves gathered inside his own study, a room most of them rarely saw, kept locked away from view most days.
A decade or so of correspondence with the other two families sat filed there with the same obsessive care he'd once put into hoping, and later into not hoping, for exactly this news. He told the family plainly that they would return north. That he would go regardless, he said, even if none of them chose to follow. He wanted his burdened heart to finally find some peace, free of the guilt he'd carried since the decision to leave the village behind in the first place, and free of the grief tied to his son's death as a direct result of it.
His daughter found him there late one evening, surrounded by boxes, holding a single folded letter he hadn't yet decided whether to bring or burn.
"Pa, what is that one?" she asked.
"The first letter I wrote to your grandfather's old contacts, asking if anyone had heard anything from the north. It is now thirteen years old." He turned it over in his hands. "I stopped expecting an answer to it a long time ago before I stopped sending others like it altogether."
"Are you bringing it with us?"
He was quiet for a moment. "I think I have to. If I leave it behind, it feels like leaving behind the part of myself that never stopped asking. Even just for the smallest glimpse of gossip or news. None ever came to answer what this letter was really asking."
The Nebe household had built its quiet stability on trade in dyes and textiles, respected work, though never flashy, almost as if they'd been afraid to draw too much attention to themselves. Unwinding it took less drama than the Arbe fortune, but no less care. Gerold insisted on personally training his second son to take over what few holdings the family intended to keep managed remotely within this parts, it was a steady stream of income they might need to supplement the village's own until Maya Village's own economy proved itself capable of supporting them entirely. He wasn't a man who left things to chance, not anymore, not after spending so many years bracing for news that never came, only to receive it anyway, a decade late and though it was impossibly good.
His wife asked him once, gently, whether he was afraid.
"Of the village not recognizing us? Of not belonging there anymore, after all this time?"
Gerold considered the question honestly, the way he considered most things. "I think I stopped being afraid of that a long time ago. I think what frightens me now is different. It's the idea that we'll arrive, and it will simply be home, the way it always should have been, and I'll have to sit with every year we spent somewhere else instead. With the people we lost along the way, escaping to a place we never truly considered our own."
Elena Bern, true to her character, moved faster than either of the other two households combined.
Within a week of the family's final agreement to go, she'd already summoned her eldest child, her household stewards, and the heads of every business interest the Bern family held across the Kingdom of Talvasia, and laid out a timeline that left no room for hesitation. They'd served the kingdom as soldiers for a time, but it was time now to return to their roots.
"We leave within the season," she told them, standing tall before the family circle, as she always stood for anything that mattered. "Everything that we will not be brining with us gets sold, gifted, or given to staff who've earned it. I won't have us dragging half a life behind us like a wounded animal too stubborn to leave. Either we're going, or we're not. And I've decided that we're going. It is time we leave and return home"
Her decisiveness rippled through the household fast. Distant cousins who'd built lives entirely disconnected from the family's history in the north found themselves swept into the current of it anyway, some were grumbling, most quietly grateful for a matriarch willing to make the decision so no one else had to carry the weight of making it themselves. A handful chose to stay behind, established enough in Talvasia and its military that uprooting it felt like its own kind of loss, and Elena let them go without a single word of guilt laid on their shoulders, though she made sure each of them knew the door home would never close.
Her own packing took a single afternoon to conclude. She'd never been a woman who collected things, she was a warrior of old Maya and a hunter before anything else, someone who'd always traveled light, carrying only what mattered. The years in the south had done nothing to change that. What she carried instead, she told her daughter while folding the last of what would come with them, was harder to pack and impossible to leave behind regardless.
"Everything I own fits in three trunks," she said. "Everything I actually care about has been sitting in my chest for thirteen years, waiting for somewhere to put it down."
The three families corresponded constantly through those final months, letters moving faster than they ever had before, no longer weighed down by grief or hesitation, just logistics now: travel dates, headcounts, which routes remained safe within Arwen, what could realistically be carried and what would simply have to be left for the new owners of homes that had, for the last decade, been the closest thing to home any of them had ever had.
The land route was quickly ruled out. None of them wanted to relive the particular kind of danger that had already claimed twenty-one of the original fifty-two who'd escaped Maya together, not with children and elders among them now, and not with the roads through the shattered Kingdom of Arwen as unpredictable as they currently were. The river remained the only real option, and it was Aldrin's commercial network, still the fastest and most reliable of the three, that eventually turned up word of a large merchant vessel that have recently anchored south from ferrying goods that came from the north, there were also rumors of it ferrying a delegation from Maya Village itself, one that had also stopped briefly in Arwen before eventually heading further south: the GMV Skipper.
When Captain Skippy heard who wanted passage north, and why, he didn't hesitate. He told them, grinning, that he'd just finished hosting people from Maya not two weeks prior, with a particularly strong young man named August among them. He didn't know the full history behind the names Arbe, Nebe, and Bern, only that whatever brought them to his ship mattered enough to make grown adults go quiet and press a hand to their chest when he said it.
In the end, one hundred thirty-nine of them boarded together: a new generation of grandchildren who'd grown up on stories instead of memories, children old enough to understand what they were leaving, and the last of the original survivors, older now, slower, but still upright, still present, thirteen years after a night filled with guilt that none of them had ever stopped carrying.
They left behind titles, fortunes, homes built brick by brick over those thirteen years. They carried forward everything else.
They had grown, in the years since old Maya's fall, from the fifty-two who'd survived that first desperate journey south, down to thirty-one once the road itself finished taking its toll, and now, finally, to the one hundred thirty-nine who stood ready to make the journey back.