*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...
Rất tiếc! Hình ảnh này không tuân theo hướng dẫn nội dung. Để tiếp tục đăng tải, vui lòng xóa hoặc tải lên một hình ảnh khác.
It's raining out here, a slow drip of drifting mist, shimmering around lamp posts, twinkling on stone streets and brick walls, covering this city in a dark gleam. The crowd in front of him murmurs, soft and low, a rumbling as familiar as the pitter-patter of a heart.
They are a heart, in their own way: a beating, thrumming thing that pulses with both energy and movement, constant and inconstant, slow in stupor and quick in rage. This heart, beating at the center of Quersido, is calm... for now. Though something thrums, electric, underneath it all.
They are uncertain, he knows. In Keesark, besieged by Jarles, abused by traitors like Brezkin, and ignored by rulers like Sofo, it had been easier, easier to show them. War is more distant in Halften, its wounds shallower, the burnings, turnings, and churnings more recent.
That is not to say that Halften is without its scars: the long, ashy rivers of dead heat and charred bone are proof of that.
Complacency—this is what Ben must face, this is what he must destroy.
"I've come to speak with you," he tells them, his voice carrying out over the twilight, "not as a leader or a conqueror. I've come to speak to you as an ally."
They murmur. What man would topple a monarchy and not claim it for his own? It's not what they know, not what they understand.
Disbelief—this is what Ben must face, this is what he must destroy.
"You have spent your entire lives led by people who do not know you, do not understand you," he says, pacing now. "A man who thought it best to spend his time locked in a tower, tinkering with his little trinkets, rather than speaking to you, understanding what you want, what you need."
He stops now, stares out at them, hands empty, palms up.
"Who now marches onto your doorstep to lay claim to your throne?" he asks and his right hand points East. "A young woman of no Halften blood, whose claim to anything at all is a mere accident of birth. A woman who has spent her life running from this only to turn now and run into the bloodshed. What does she know of you? Your dreams? Your abilities?"
They rustle, tense, a flock waiting for the first to break so they can all take flight. He senses in them all a certain fear, an intangible question unsaid and unexamined but still present.
Heresy?
Ben glances back, briefly, toward the pale tower looming in the dark.
Obedience—this is what Ben must face, this is what he must destroy.
"You need leadership, but I am not here to tell you that I am the person for that," he tells them, turning back. "I'm here to tell you that you are."
He begins to pace again, the motion old, familiar; a path he's walked many times before, on different platforms, in different places, but in front of not-so different people.
