Interregnum
Page 56
Darius smiled and looked down the avenue of trees toward the graveyard. Some days, even with the bad sight that had crept up on him since his sixtieth birthday, he fancied he could actually make out his father’s gravestone. He’d stopped visiting it a couple of years ago when such long walks had become too much of a strain for his tired frame and he refused to be carried in a litter like a fat old autocrat.
Strange somehow that he’d spent the first twenty years of his life imprisoned on this island and feeling trapped and inhibited by it and after only a year or two in the outside world, he’d longed to be back there. Oh he’d travelled all over the empire in the next four decades, even to visit Brendan and his family in their villa up near Vengen where they owned a considerable vineyard, but he always came back here. Isera was home.
He smiled and leaned his chin on his steepled hands, gazing out across the western side of the island and that was how, less than an hour later, the Emperor Kiva the Golden found his father, the last of the architects of Interregnum.
And, insofar as these things ever really have an end, this is it.
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