*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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His world is covered in darkness, filled with the burning taste of ash and other, fouler, fuming things.
Is this it, the ending inferno? he wonders. The thing waiting beyond our living veil?
But light, flickering, blazing light reemerges: a razing inferno at his side, three, four, five stories high, heating the dark metal coffin he is trapped inside.
Fae, he thinks, because he knows her name as surely as he now remembers his. Fae.
He lifts his head.
The world outside of the smoke is an archaic thing of ruin.
The dais has been splintered, cloven in half by the eruption of the street, people flung to either side, the fire blazing cold, vicious yellow-white at its center, blown up, over it all.
Fae.
He crawls along his side, clutching the remnants of rock, clinging to the last good cobblestones, edging his way toward the melting gates. Burning things are tumbling past him, rolling down into the bright inferno. When the ground keeps, when it stops cracking and crumbling underneath his iron grip, he climbs, slow and swaying, to his feet.
A tangle of burning bodies and clashing people greet him. More of the Cabal circles in from surrounding streets, pushing onto this side of the terrace. His hand grips the black sword, holding it uneasily, lifting it to swing.
The ones who rush forward aren't ants anymore, and it troubles him that they aren't but also how easy it had been when they were. They're people, breathing, moving people with faces, names, and everything else beneath the cold masks, and the sword, once simply part of his arm, slips between his fingers.
I am not what they say I am.
They look like children in the blast of smoke and ember, children with sticks for swords, buckets for helmets, charging at him one last time. But there's nothing to protect this time, just him, and he lets the sword fall because he's not what they say he is—
They crumple like tin soldiers, dark arrows pluming out of their backs like the levers of windup toys, and something cracks behind them all, stone cleaving apart. He looks up at the crumbling dais where, now clinging with one hand, holding the ornate bow in the other, is the spymaster.
He starts toward the hanging man, the fire blasting at his left, ground growing hot at his feet, and he hears something shoot past his head, the click of something mechanic behind him. He turns to see, to face it, when he hears the cry from the dais.
He reverses course, facing forward just as quickly to see the thief fall, see the bolt pinning the holding hand, and he moves faster, sprinting, pulling the wall of flames behind him, absorbing the next bolt and whoever conjured it behind him.
Fae's bow clatters to the ground by his feet as Keno swings his arm up, grasps the bolt puncturing his other hand, and pulls.
Instead of felling a body, Caj catches it, gripping the swearing thief as he slides off the platform.
"That's where Beinsho's fucking crossbows went," the man pants, and the inferno roars at their side again.
They stumble back into the charred side of a building, Keno snatching the bow and holding the mangled hand to his chest.
"What the fuck did those madmen do?" he asks over the roar. "The whole street is gone, Caj, everything, everyone—"
Everyone.
Caj looks back up at the thief, seizing his shoulder.
"Where is Fae?"
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A/N: Houston, we have a problem!!! Also, how DARE they harm my child.
