A/N: Another one so soon after His Father's Back? *shrugs* took an hour break from studying and the plot bunny got me from my twin, Waffles Risa. This will probably be a four to five-parter. Cross-posted to tumblr.

Sins of the Father

Eirian Erisdar

In the end, they didn't even have the decency to tell him in person.

Viren was sitting perfectly still, head tilted back against the grimy wall with his chains pooling around his wrists and ankles, when he heard it: the careless, too-loud whisper of a guard come to relieve the previous shift. Guards lined the corridor every five paces, Viren knew.

"Did you hear? His children have returned."

Viren's next inhale caught in his chest, and he very nearly tilted too far forward in his haste to catch the next words; his chains clinked softly against each other, and he held his breath for one long moment, fearful that the sound might alert the guards that he was listening.

For a moment, the two helmeted shadows slanted along the faint candlelight outside the bars of his darkened cell were still.

Then, the sound of spittle hitting stone."Pah! Weren't they sent out to seek the princes? What use was that? King Ezran was found and safely returned by General Amaya's soldier yesterday."

Viren ground his teeth. The guards had fairly flung that latter piece of information in his face a day previous as they slammed down his tray of food.

One of the shadows leaned closer towards the other, conspiratorially. "That's beside the point right now - scuttlebutt is fairly on fire up in the barracks. Rumour has it his lordship's children didn't come back…whole."

And just like that, Viren forgot how to breathe.

Not whole.

Not whole like he was, drained with magic and without access to the creatures he used to rejuvenate his appearance, or not whole as in…

And even as his heart paused before its next beat as though considering whether to go on, as the chains around his wrists and ankles grew instantly heavier - the question appeared before him.

The only question that mattered.

Claudia or Soren?

And perhaps, at this moment, if Viren had been allowed time to think, he might have shamed himself by entertaining the fleetest idea of a preference - but the guard had not stopped speaking, and the answer to the question was there.

"They made quite the scene, apparently. I have it on the authority of the guard at the gate that the Lady Claudia galloped in like there were demons at her heels and didn't even dismount before she started screaming for her father."

The second guard snorted. "Fair chance of that coming to any use. What was she screaming for?"

The next words would remain carved into Viren's memory forever - beyond the image of his wife's straight-backed form as she rode away to her homeland, beyond the horror in his heart when Queen Sarai's breath halted right before his helpless eyes.

"Her brother. He took a dragon-tail to the chest and fractured his spine four days ago. He's paralysed. Can't even raise his head to drink."

Viren jerked.

His chains clattered in an echoing cacophony across the grime-stained floor; there was a flurry of motion outside.

Viren halted, chest rising and falling in rapid, uneven breaths.

A moment of silence.

"Do you think he-"

"Shh! Go, go. It's my shift."

In the half-shadow of his windowless cell, Viren began to shake.

There was a roaring in his ears that was louder than the memory of Thunder's gaping maw descending on him and the late Queen; the grey-purple backs of his hands in the darkness, still blanched with the marks of dark magic, shivered in his gaze.

Soren was-

His son was-

Claudia's lighthearted voice tumbled out of memory, a conversation in Viren's study which had taken place only a fortnight previous but seemed an age ago now, here in the dank shadows of this solitary cell.

"Let's say we're attacked by giant bumble-scorps and they're all like bzzz! Bzzz! and flailing their scorps at us like bzzz! - and I'm forced to choose between saving the egg and saving Soren. What should I do?"

Then, Viren had found himself momentarily speechless - he had looked from Claudia's dancing, joke-filled green eyes (his former wife's eyes) and down to the carpeted floor, because she had, in the unassumingly brilliant way of hers, voiced the question he had refused to ask himself.

Claudia had laughed and poked fun at him for not recognising a joke when he heard it, but she had been only a dozen steps to the door when he spoke.

He had taken the guilt and the shame and compressed it into a sphere so tight beneath his sternum it burned, and made the decision for the good of Katolis.

Just as he had made the decision regarding Harrow's life, and later, to abandon the princes.

For the good of Katolis, and for mankind.

"The egg," he had said, with that firm, unyielding authority that he knew his daughter would understand. "If you have to choose, choose the egg."

What horror and sorrow had now bred from his words then?

What had he done?

What had he done?

Viren's blood flared to fire in his veins, and he scrambled forwards on his hands and knees even as a deep, warning hiss from the worm in his left ear whispered, "Be still!"

Four days ago he would have listened without question. Now, Viren raised his head and shouted with the barking, staccato voice of a throat completely dry:

"Guards!"

The clang of a spear against the bars of his cell. Contempt from the shadows of a guard's helmet. "Quiet, prisoner."

"Still yourself and listen to me!" Aaravos's sly murmur hissed urgently in his ear. "If you do not-"

Viren wet his cracked lips with a tongue so dry it hurt. "Guards!" he snarled, voice snapping like his son's back must have, out in the wilderness against a dragon he was not equipped to fight. "I need to speak to Opeli!"

A guard's laugh reverberated down the half-light of the corridor. "Mere prisoners have no right to summon a member of the High Council at whim, no matter their station before their crimes,traitor."

Of all the words the guards could have chosen, that was the worst.

Traitor. Traitor, he who loved Katolis best - had sacrificed anything for his country and his people, and now had even sacrificed the happiness of his firstborn son.

Viren's snarl turned into a roar.

"BRING HER TO ME!"

He had no magic here with him, and the voice in his ear would not give it - but the words lashed out of him with such desperate power that for a moment he fancied that the walls shook and the flames of the torches wavered in the corridor.

A muffled curse outside the cell. The rasp of swords being drawn, steel-toed footsteps on the flagstones. A figure in the armour of the citadel guard, silhouetted before the bars of the cell.

"Lord Viren! This is your last warning! Quiet down or we will-"

Viren was straining at the very end of his chains now, and cared not that the taste of iron coated the back of his throat and that steel carved into his wrists and ankles.

"I NEED TO SEE MY SON!"

Whatever the guard did next Viren did not know. The world was spinning before his vision, and the drum of his heart in his head had drowned out all else.

Half-blind with desperation and shivering from unspeakable emotion, Viren laid down the last treasure he had reserved, even bound in the depths of the castle's deepest dungeons - his pride.

His head lowered to press into his hands, fisted in the grime of the sawdust floor.

The worm was still and silent in his ear.

"I need to see my son,"Viren whispered, with none of the fire of moments previous. "Please. Let me see my son."

Soren.

And there, curled in his uttermost fall from grace, Viren could only wait.

I'll see when part 2 comes - I have Waiting in the Quiet for all you gremaya fans and The Silent Song to continue. Check out my tumblr for more TDP, and if anyone is interested in more about Soren, Claudia, and their father, His Father's Back is a recent oneshot I posted to both tumblr and FFN. Thanks for reading, everyone, and reviews are good food!