*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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They part at crossroads, in the haze of a yellow morning sun. Dew clings stubbornly to the grass around this fork, causing the sweeping fields to shimmer, shiver in a foggy glow. The mist clings to their horses' legs like a ghost and swirls, cloyingly, as the red-clad figure at the front steers her pale horse around to look back to those who follow.
She rides slowly to the two standing to her far right, stationed just ahead a horde of fur and hide-clad soldiers.
Whatever might have been thought, what might have been privately whispered, is not said when the Paragon stops, but she studies their faces all the same.
Her hand moves, ghostly white, and summons a pair of masked wraiths who slither to the side of each of them.
"Space and time place no restrictions on us now," she tells them, gesturing to the creatures that neither will look at but of which both are acutely aware. "I send with you my eyes, my ears, and you will only need to speak to them to know my thoughts."
She looks in turn from Tara's hollowed, uncertain face to Hiran's stony one.
"No longer will goodbye mean we must be apart," she says, a smile playing on her mouth now, a smile that slips away as she glances back at the long procession, the red banners, the glint of worn warcraft.
"Take the throne of Roften," she orders these two. "Secure the north."
They slip into the horizon, a long strain of bodies, weaving upward, toward that ubiquitous borderline and whatever waits there.
It's the east now that must be dealt with, and its warden already waits, chest heavy and numb, having left more than half his heart already behind him. His dark armor sits on him like a tomb and he doesn't even glance, doesn't even flinch when the masked shadow appears at his side.
Allayria leads her horse closer to him, watching, curious, the flat expression on his face, inspecting it for a twitch, a tell.
"You have the hardest task of us all," she tells him. "One that requires the edge of a carving knife, not the blow of a hammer. You go to blood-stained halls and broken mountains. But you go with my might and my will, and the Jarles will not soon forget it."
The creature at his side shivers.
"Shape it," she orders him, "and cast off the... excess."
It's what you wanted, isn't it? she thinks. What you came for, at Bear's Spear. Now is your chance to finally kill some Jarles.
"You are," she tells him, "as always, my first pick."
His glance is fathomless; he only nods before turning away. But the contents of Caj's mind do not concern the Paragon overly much. Not when she knows the contents of his heart.
They watch Caj's company recede on the horizon, bleed into the red-set suns. Lei turns to take the path—west, to Solveig, west to Feuilles, but the Paragon holds up a hand.
"Not yet," she answers his curious stare, thinking of graying shapes in the dark, in the quiet. "There is one other place, one last memory to revisit."
And when the Paragon turns, it's not North, not East, not West.
It's South.
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A/N: Allayria, where are you going? 🤔
To make matters worse, the gang's all split up again too. Don't they know you never split up? Double sigh.
Chapter Notes: Allayria calls Caj her first choice and he tells her he only wants to kill Jarles in Partisan's "The Final Seven."
