*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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She feels something, something strange. It ripples in the Skill, a sudden roar of dark energy that feels like the cave, the black door, the infinite chasm. It ripples along her skin like gooseflesh and, around her, her creatures shiver in aftershock.
That did not come from below. It came from... elsewhere. She turns, almost as if to hear it, somewhere out west.
"He has it," she says and, to her right, Lei jumps.
"Who has what?" he asks, voice hushed even as they walk in daylight.
"Ben has the bow."
"What?" the Nature-caller demands now. "How do you know?"
"A feeling," she answers. "He's been hunting it while I was gone."
A pause; Lei shifts beside her.
"It's not certain," he tells her, as if to assure her. "Ruben would have hid it well."
"Not well enough," she answers and turns away, back to face the vast jungle below and, behind it, the lonely ship beached on the sandy shore. "He has failed me for the last time."
Before Lei can protest this and before she can intercept his words, something tugs in the corner of her mind.
Arrived, it whispers, and she catches a glimpse of pale mountains in bright sunlight, a sandstone city perched on their side. The new Imperator has made it home successfully.
She closes this connection and plucks at the others. Smoke rises in Solveigard City, though from forges this time—not bombs—and the queen is being shown the city's progress in rebuilding. Up north there are snow-capped mountains glinting out on the horizon as the soon-to-be chieftainess chooses from an offering of leather vests for her coronation.
All going smoothly.
The creatures around her have recovered, steadied, like buoys in a calming ocean. They have adapted well to the change, acclimated to receiving the commands directly from her mind itself, not the metal.
It was Isati who first showed her the way, really. Isati who used the shimmering sliver of metal to make a bridge, a conductor that allowed her to reach in, to pluck and scramble thoughts like a Spirit-caller. Allayria had used it bluntly before—clumsily, as the long dead Serfigue might attest—but she had not understood it, had not comprehended what it truly meant, until she walked the paths Isati carved, touched the mother metal she pressed and grew.
It seems ironic that Allayria should learn how to Spirit Skill from a Smith-caller.
But a command is all Skilling really is, isn't it? Once you cut out all the false trappings, the pretend dead ends, those limitations in substance the rest of them all yield to. Nature, Smith, Beast, Spirit. All facets of the same thing. Finn understood on an instinctual level how blurred those lines were—it's why he could Skill humans when all other Beast-callers could not.
