Chronicle of the Guild Years
From the act of creating together is born not power, but belonging.
The common room of the Wandering Steps Guild smelled of damp wood and dry paint. It was a smell the oldest members no longer noticed, absorbed by the routine of weeks that piled into months without anyone marking them precisely. On the walls hung an unfinished mural — begun by no one in particular and continued by everyone. Kaelen had painted a golden stag in the left corner, with fine, patient strokes, like someone who has all the time in the world. Mireya had added blue flowers around the stag without telling anyone: she simply appeared one morning with a brush in hand and stayed until lunchtime. Torvald wrote his own name in enormous letters near the ceiling and, just below, in smaller but no less careful letters, the name of every member of the guild.
It was before this mural that Eryndra stopped, on the day she arrived at the guild with Isabelle by the hand.
— Are you going to put my name up there? — she asked, standing in the doorway, looking up. —
If you tell me what it is — Torvald replied, without climbing down from the improvised ladder made of stacked crates.
— Eryndra. — She paused a moment. — Reyes.
Torvald added the name with the same care he had used for all the others. Then he climbed down, stepped back two paces, tilted his head to one side, and said:
— It looks better this way. "Two names" have more space.
Isabelle, who was seven years old and had not let go of Eryndra's hand since they had left home that morning, pointed at the names with her index finger:
— Mine too?
— Yours too — Torvald confirmed, and climbed back up the ladder without further ceremony.
Isabelle stood looking at the wall for a long time after that, even after Torvald had already come down and left the room for dinner. The months that followed were marked by the common life of a small guild on the rise: contracts fulfilled, new routes explored, disagreements resolved around a table with hot food. Kaelen taught Isabelle to identify plants along the edges of roads — he had patience to repeat the names of herbs as many times as necessary, without ever seeming tired. Mireya told her stories before sleep on the nights Eryndra arrived late from a mission, and her stories always ended with someone coming home. Torvald carried Isabelle on his shoulders when she complained her legs were tired, which happened with a frequency no one truly believed was genuine.
The guild grew. More contracts came, larger ones. The name Reyes began to circulate in tavern conversations and in letters from nobles with ornate handwriting. It was through one such letter that an invitation arrived from Baron Aldric Voss for an audience in the east hall of his residence.
The baron was a man with a soft voice and eyes that did not follow his smile. When he received the guild, he brought wine and cushioned seats and spoke for twenty minutes about the importance of solid partnerships between people of standing. In the middle of a sentence about the value of exclusive contracts, his eyes settled on Isabelle, who was sitting beside Eryndra with her hands in her lap.
— The child... — he said, leaving the phrase in the air — does not seem fitting for this hall.
— Then let the hall adjust — said Eryndra, rising to her feet.
The meeting was brief. The guild left before the wine was served, and no contract was signed that day.
Three days later, Kaelen and Mireya did not return from a routine patrol along the southern edges of the city. When night fell with no news, Torvald set out alone along the same path the two had taken that morning, without alerting the other members. He found them before dawn, on the riverbank. Before leaving, he had left a short note on the door of Eryndra's room. When she arrived at the spot, she found him with his back to her, hands resting on his knees, not moving.
— They were brought here — he said, without turning. — They didn't die here.
Eryndra said nothing. The river ran without haste.
— Who else knows?
— Only me. I wanted to wait for you before telling the others.
Eryndra knelt beside Kaelen. She looked at his hands for a moment — a small brush was tucked in the pocket of his vest, its tip still stained with blue.
She removed the brush slowly, as though mindful of the sound she made, and placed it in her own pocket.
That night, Isabelle slept in Eryndra's room without anyone needing to ask. The guild gathered in the common room after the lights in the surrounding houses began to go out. They stood before the mural for some time, without anyone saying anything in particular.
— Should we erase their names? — someone asked, near the door.
The question hung in the air. Torvald crossed the room, picked up a brush from the pot on the shelf and, without answering, added two birds just above Kaelen's golden stag — birds with open wings, with no destination traced.
— No — he said, as he finished the second bird's wing. — We don't erase.
In the days that followed, the other members added things to the mural, each one in their own time: a road of red earth leading out past the wall's edge, a stone bridge over a river with no visible banks, a square window with yellow light spilling into the imaginary room. None of these additions were agreed upon or requested. Each happened in silence, the same way it had happened from the beginning.
Isabelle woke early one morning and came downstairs to find Eryndra standing before the wall with a candle in hand, looking at the names.
— Are you going to paint something? — Isabelle asked, her hair still tousled from sleep.
— I'm still deciding — said Eryndra, without turning.
— It can be anything — said Isabelle. — That's what everyone does. Everyone puts whatever they want.
Eryndra stood looking at the wall a while longer. Then she picked up a brush. She painted a small crown, simple, without jewels or ornaments — just the outline of a crown, resting on a stone at the center of the mural, surrounded by everyone's names.
The investigation into the deaths of the two adventurers took weeks. Baron Aldric Voss was called to account before the Council of the Five Cities, and what emerged from that hearing was enough to permanently end his influence over the region. Into the void that remained, the Council sent a letter to the Wandering Steps Guild with a proposal no one had anticipated: that Eryndra assume interim governance of the region until more stable structures could be established.
She asked for three days to respond.
On the first day, she stayed at the guild. She spoke with each member individually, without anyone knowing exactly what those conversations contained, because each took place in a low voice behind a closed door.
On the second day, she returned to the mural. Torvald was there, carefully retouching a line that had dried crooked during the night.
— What do you think? — she asked, without needing to specify about what.
— About the throne? — Torvald continued with the brush. — I think you'll accept it regardless. But it's good that you asked someone before deciding.
— I asked Isabelle too.
— And what did she say? — She said that wherever I am, she will be too.
Torvald stopped the brush. He looked at the wall for a long moment.
— Then take care of her — he said. — And take care of the mural. — He turned to Eryndra. — Wherever you govern, you need a wall like this. One where everyone can add something, without asking permission and without having their name erased afterward.
Eryndra looked at the wall. Then she left.
On the third day, she sent her answer to the Council: yes.
The inauguration ceremony was austere by choice — not for lack of resources, because the Council had already prepared a hall with velvet curtains and flowers cut that same morning. Eryndra refused the embroidered garment the master of ceremonies presented and entered the hall in the same clothes she wore on missions, with Isabelle at her side, hand in hand.
Someone in the audience murmured something to their neighbor. Another person, two seats away, responded loudly enough to reach the front rows:
— Silence!
The crown was placed on Eryndra's head by Torvald, not because it was protocol — protocol required the eldest councillor — but because she had asked him to, and the eldest councillor had not objected. The crown was simple, without jewels, exactly like the one she had painted on the guild wall weeks before.
When they left the hall, the afternoon already advancing, Isabelle adjusted her pace to match Eryndra's and asked, looking at the crown:
— Does it hurt?
— What?
— The crown.
Eryndra looked at her.
— It's heavy — said Eryndra.
— I can hold it for a while, if you want.
Eryndra squeezed Isabelle's hand.
— Not yet — she said. — But thank you.
In the first weeks of governance, the Council's meeting room was where Eryndra spent most of the time she wasn't in the field. It was a room with high walls whitewashed white, with portraits of previous rulers hung at regular intervals — all with stern expressions, all looking slightly to the side, as though there were something more important outside the frame.
In one of the first meetings, Eryndra asked that the back wall be left without portraits.
— For what? — asked the eldest councillor.
— For what comes — she said.
No one knew quite what that meant. But the wall was left bare, and the portraits intended for it were sent to the palace storerooms.
Weeks later, during a long session that ended with no agreement on anything in particular, one of the Council's youngest assistants — a girl who copied documents and rarely spoke — picked up a piece of charcoal and wrote in the lower corner of the blank wall, in small letters: here we work.
No one ordered it erased.
The following week there were more things written: dates, names, a short phrase with no declared author. Isabelle, who accompanied Eryndra to meetings when there was no school, added a drawing of a stag — small, imprecise, but recognizable to those who knew the original. Torvald, when he visited the Council for the first time, stood before that wall for a considerable time before entering the meeting room.
— Good — he said, without further comment.
Months after the inauguration, Eryndra returned to the headquarters of the Wandering Steps Guild one afternoon with nothing on her schedule. There was no mission and no official reason recorded. She simply went.
The common room was different in small ways: new chairs, an additional shelf, a rug that hadn't been there before. But the mural was there, intact and added to with things she had not yet seen — a lit lantern in the middle of a field, the outline of a city seen from very far away, a pair of open hands with no identified owner.
A young man she didn't recognize was sweeping the floor near the entrance. He recognized her by the crown and stopped his broom.
— Can I help you with something, my lady?
— No — said Eryndra. — I just want to stay here a while.
He nodded and kept sweeping, without asking more.
Eryndra stood before the mural. She found Kaelen's golden stag in the left corner, exactly where he had painted it. She found Mireya's blue flowers around the stag — a little faded, but still there. She found the open-winged birds Torvald had added that night, and the crownless jewel she herself had painted, resting on the stone at the center of everything. She found the two names written side by side, "Eryndra Reyes" and "Isabelle Reyes," in Torvald's letters that time had not erased.
Before leaving, she took from her pocket Kaelen's small brush — the one she had kept from the riverbank, months before — and placed it in the pot on the shelf, among the guild's other brushes.
Outside, the city continued doing what it had been doing before the ceremony, before the investigations, before everything. In the streets, there were people who did not know the names of those who had died by the river. There were people who would never enter a guild, who would never see the mural in the common room, who did not know the birds painted above the golden stag. There were people who would not choose a crown if they could — and there were people who would never have the chance to refuse one.
And there was, also, a wall somewhere in the city with names written in letters of different sizes and birds with open wings and a road of earth and a bridge with no visible banks and a window with light coming from within — all painted by different hands, on different days, at different hours, with no order other than the simple will of each person to add something of their own to what was already there.
End of the Chronicle — Guild Years