They were gone before the sun rose that morning.
    Eric could tell that Chrystle had not received nearly as much sleep as she needed, but he didn't feel as though they were safe anymore.  For once, his paranoia was grounded in fact.  Earlier that evening, after Eric had retired to guard his sister's sleep, someone had tried to enter the room.
    The elder Andrews shook his head and sighed, walking slowly through the forested area he now found himself in.  He didn't like to think about all the attention that he had brought to himself by fighting that knight.  But, it had to be done - his sister had told him that he was to accomplish something, and Chrystle had not once been wrong.
    For two years now, he had walked the lands with his sister.  Ever since the destruction of his city - the incident which he had hoped to put out of his mind for the entire journey - his only task had been to look after her.  Chrystle had other ideas, however.
    He had awakened, on that fateful day,  in the charred ruins of a home he had once known from his childhood.  The instant he realized he was alive, he had sprung to his feet and raced out to the ruined streets.  Nobody was there - they were all dead, buried in a mass grave that he could visit if he so wished.  He did not.  Instead, he walked toward where his palace had stood - first slowly, and then with growing panic.  His sister hadn't been there.  His entire town was gone, but the one thing he had been guaranteed was that his sister would be unharmed.  And in those first few terrifying moments he was certain she had been taken from him too.  He had paid for his treachery with her life, he was certain.  He had only been allowed to live so he could suffer, alone, for so long as the Powers would let him.  And he deserved it.  For what he had done, he deserved every moment of guilt and pain.
    But it hadn't happened that way.  He had run into the family palace - scorched with flame and reduced to rubble in most areas - and nearly stumbled over her.  Chrystle Andrews had been standing there, looking around in shock.
    "Eric, what's happened here?" she had asked.
    He had told her half of the truth - that assassins had snuck in the night before and silenced the guards, and soldiers from the outlying countries had attacked in the morning and razed the town.  He hadn't mentioned his own role in the attack to her.  He never would, either.  Chrystle had already been through enough.

    "Do you know where we are?"  Chrystle's head was turned up to him, a wistful smile on her face.  She wasn't teasing him - her tone indicated only curiosity.  Eric paused in his march to think about the question.
    "No, I don't believe I do."  he finally concluded.  "The last country we were in was Eleni, but that was a few months ago.  We've been going due East since then, and I don't know what's out in this direction."
    The younger Andrews took her brother's pause in movement as a cue to sit down.  Eric followed, mentally chiding himself for not calling a pause to their walking earlier.  He didn't really need to rest at all anymore, but his sister certainly did.
    "I think it's nice."  she finally commented, looking around at the brightly lit forest.  It was nearly noon, and Eric was rummaging through his pack for some of the food he had saved from a stop earlier in the week.
    "What's nice?"  He inquired, producing some of the dried meat of the sort that had sustained them for most of the voyage.
    "The fact that we don't know where we are." his sister answered, taking some of the food as her brother offered it.  "It's been nice just walking.  Of course, it's good that you're doing nice things too, but the traveling... I never got to do that before."
    She was right, of course.  Chrystle had rarely been allowed out of the palace - let alone out of the town.  He had made sure that her life had been sheltered, back when he had been in power.  He had been as protective of her then as he was now.  Perhaps too much, as it happened.
    Eric's sister ate while he looked around, taking the opportunity to unwind.  He didn't get physically tired anymore, true, but he did need to stop occasionally and just relax, else he tended to get worked up.  He had been feeling especially nervous, ever since the fight the evening before.  He couldn't shake the idea that he had been followed.  Despite his best efforts to keep their trail hidden as well.  He hadn't seen a pursuer, but he had caught glimpses of movement out of the corner of his eyes.  The rational part of him insisted that it was just animals.  However, the other part of his mind - that part which had fought and triumphed in war - would not allow him to relax his guard for even an instant.  He was fairly certain he couldn't be harmed - as his confrontation with the knight in last evening's scuffle and a few other entanglements had proved - but he didn't want to find out if the same applied to his sister.
    He hadn't always been like this, however.  He had once been a normal, breathing human being.  He had memories of his youth to prove it - countless memories of scrapes and bruises as a child, wounds incurred during training, and at least one broken arm.  Ever since the day his town burned, everything had changed.  He didn't need to eat, he didn't need to drink.  He didn't even need to breathe, though he did so out of habit.  His eyes had changed from their dark brown to their current fierce violet - a color he had never seen in another person, save his sister, before or after.  There was his sudden persuasive ability - he would merely told someone to do something forcefully enough, and they would do it.  Perhaps most disturbing, however, was the fact that he no longer bled.  There was pain if he was injured, but his body seemed to repair itself with alarming speed.
    Chrystle had changed too.  Her eyes had been like his before, and were like his now - a painful reminder of the destruction that had started it all.  There were the things he had to accomplish too.  He had known that had been part of the bargain he had made.  He was to go and do certain deeds.  What he hadn't suspected was that it would be his sister who would know what he had to do, not him.
    So the two of them had been traveling, and he had done what his sister had told him to.  They usually stopped in taverns like the one he had visited the night before, and occasionally - about once every two weeks or so - Chrystle would let him know that there was something he had to accomplish.  He didn't know how she knew he was supposed to do something, but he trusted her intuition.
    He didn't know why they had chosen to go this way either.  Traveling east had seemed like a random decision - he had wanted to put the town behind him as quickly as he could, and so he just took Chrystle and ran.  Once he left, he just kept going in that direction.  Chrystle hadn't complained - she seemed to welcome the opportunity to travel, and it seemed as though she wished to put the disaster of the town out of her mind almost as much as Eric himself did.  Judging from her demeanor, she seemed to be much more successful than he.
    Eric's musings were interrupted by a rustling sound behind him.  One moment, he was watching his sister eat and thinking about his past - much as he disliked to do so - and the next he had spun around, prepared to block whatever was out there from Chrystle at all costs.
    He must have moved much more quickly than his quarry had anticipated, for she was still frozen where she had been - standing just down the trail, over ground that Eric had tread only minutes before, was the woman that he had saved the night before.

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