*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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It isn't an easy path Ben takes, the one that ends in a dim-lit room struck by the waves of a phantom sea and heavy with the cold, dead thing glinting black in moonlight. It's a path of errors, a path of doubling and redoubling, of circles and codes.
What sets Ben straight, what aims him true in the end, is a book. A book, thin and scraggly, that had been tucked, shoved, thrown away into a musty corner of the Tower. Had the dynast been more careful, had he had more foresight, he would have burned it.
But fortune favors Ben.
What a flesh and blood dynast would deny him is given freely across the barriers of space and time, coded in that small, hasty diary. Though, perhaps diary is too strong a word—it is more of a rush of disjointed scribbling, a shorthand closer to a cypher than sentences, and Ben spends hours just pulling it apart and putting it back together to make sense.
"Oh, yes, that's got to be it: 'The eye of the butt.' You cracked it, genius," Meg murmurs in a dark corner of Ben's mind as if she is alive, alive and breathing, because this is what Ben does now: he collects ghosts.
This he understands, much more than the blood, the sweat. This reward of patience, of careful searching. It makes sense that, after all the carnage, all the fire and blood he's been muddling through, it's these basic lessons, paper and ink, that bring him deliverance.
Deliverance, in the shape of a tiny hut, smoke spiraling out its teetering chimney, in the middle of nowhere. Right about now, though Ben has no way of knowing it, Iaves is sitting out on a log, staring south with mist smoking on his cloak, and in that direction, in a dark hall, the breathing version of the phantom behind Ben is giving a toast, raising a blood red-stained goblet in honor of his impending doom.
But it's not his death and destruction that lingers on Ben's mind as he rides down the hill toward the hut. Instead, he's watching the shadow in the garden below with careful scrutiny. It toils amongst small thickets of crops, one hand wielding its hoe, as the party descends. When they reach the gate Ben dismounts, hangs his crossbow on his steed, and waves the others to hold back.
There are chickens inside the small, stitched-together fence, chickens that cluck and chatter, scampering as the stranger enters their space, but their master, the scraggly, gray-haired man, gives no reaction, continuing to drive his tool into the dark earth.
Ben shifts his bag back behind as he approaches, inspecting the bucket sitting idly there, pale green seeds and springlings housed inside. Ben stops a minute, thinks—that quick, keen mind ticking away—and then he kneels down and puts a hand into the earth. It's soft, wet, cold—still not wholly touched by the heat of the sun. Ben lets it run through his fingers for a moment, this churned, black soil, before pushing it aside.
He's dropped a few seedlings into the divot when the man stops, back still turned to him. Ben smooths over the dirt, moves his hands over a pace, and begins again.
