Foxes In The Spring

The world of Verenden keeps growing... Vesten, now stuck between two empires. He needs to make a decision. Thrust back into a life of mercenary work while his pregnant wife worries for his safety. He has one goal, to do the job and get home. When the task ends up being delivering the prince of an empire he hates. A kingdom that killed his son and left an eternal divide in himself. He decides to transport the prince back to safety. Along the way, he is forming an unlikely bond with someone born into a world of chaos, destruction, and conflict. No father should ever smell the smoke in the air and fear it is that of his child. No father should ever have nightmares recounting the times he ran through a city square just in time to see the last of his son's tears sizzle away with his skin. No father should ever have to remember the screams. The crowd cheering as everything you ever deemed perfect in this world is taken away from you in a mere minute. No one gets to choose whether or not they get a quirk, but when you have spent nearly all of your life helping an empire that will one day murder your child in front of you and your wife . . . It takes a toll. A toll on my marriage, a toll on my heart, a toll on my hand whenever I pick up a blade and feel the weight of my son upon it. Never knowing if in my lifetime I will ever be able to avenge him. I wish I had told him I loved him one last time. I wish I had held him. I wish Amarille and I could sing to him one more time as he slept. For it was, at the age of ten, that my son unwillingly first sprouted a flame from his fingertips. I still remember his eyes, the realization on his face upon seeing me just in time to watch him burn but too late to save him. I still remember the charcoal smell and the feeling of being powerless to save the only thing that truly matters. For it was, at the age of ten, when he was turned into ash upon a wooden spire where hundreds every day meet that same fate. Slimhixe, an empire I used to call my own...took my son from me. I remember it all. I will never forget. And I will avenge him. For Erron. For Erron."