Seven Moments - Eresten
Eresten is five years old when he leaves home, not entirely voluntarily. They do ask the young boy what he thinks about it, because they need his consent as well as his parents’, but he’s too young and overwhelmed to really register what’s going on.
He’s six years old by the time they finish the paperwork which allows him passage in and around the four major kingdoms. He stays in Sol Venia for a long while, though. It’s several months before they find a suitable mentor for him.
He’s seven years old when his earliest proper memories kick in, and they go a long way to defining him. It’s then that the dreams begin, subconscious warnings of what he fears might happen even when he doesn’t understand what’s going on. He cries himself to sleep sometimes, thinking of the family he doesn’t quite remember. At least, that’s what he tells to the older boy assigned to watch out for him. The dreams warn him away, and to secrecy.
Eresten is eleven years old when he gains a firmer grasp on reality, and starts believing in logic more than gut feelings. By this time, he’s long since stopped listening to the dreams, although he still talks about them often. It’s the easiest way to get the attention of the older boy that he now calls a friend. It’s the closest to family that Eresten has come in over half his life.
He’s twelve years old, just barely, when the Guild give him a new sister. Eresten can hardly remember the old one, but he feels something similar between them, despite the fact that the new one, Lalla, is several years older than she’s supposed to be. He all but loses his brother in the trade-off, though, and for a long time he believes in the Guild even less than he believes in the dreams.
He’s fourteen years old when his old mentor gets back in touch, and for a while Eresten feels useful once more. Lalla has him believing, or at least she believes enough herself for the both of them, and Eresten is happy either way. He doesn’t mind what they’re getting into, so long as he can keep feeling the same way.
He’s nineteen by the time everything is finished, over, said and done. He loses a friend because he believed too little in his own dreams, and his friend believed far too much.