The Sun Blade

Balance the Scales

"CRESANA, STOP!"

Kirigan's voice was commanding, his presence imposing, but it was the use of his own powers that was jarring enough to pull Cresana out of her reverie. Although Cresana wasn't able to see when summoning light, she could feel the darkness that Kirigan had created in the training hall pressing against her skin like a vice. She was unsure how he could do this, and it was the first time she had ever experienced it, but she knew instantly and undoubtedly what was happening.

Shaking and breathless, Cresana felt her mental concentration snap like a brittle twig as she fell off the edge of her powers. As the light she had summoned faded, her eyesight slowly and hazily returned, as if waking from unconsciousness. She realized she had fallen onto her hands and knees. The cold hard stones helped her ground herself into the room. As did the roaring pain in her kneecaps from what had obviously been a hard collapse just moments before.

As her breath and concentration returned, Cresana dared to look up at Aleksander. He was standing only a few feet from her. He too was shaking, not from fatigue like her, but from rage. His eyes seemed to boil with ire as he stared down at her over his nose, his lips pursed together and jaw clenched.

Cresana braced for the onslaught she knew was coming. She wished she could stand as she loathed how weak and powerless she felt bowing before him, but the muffle in her ears told her that if she stood now she'd just as quickly faint.

She heard the General take a sharp breath in as if readying to yell. Instead of screaming, though, she heard him let out a long slow sigh, hissing faintly between his teeth. The silence between them grew thicker and tenser with each passing millisecond.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet but deadly, like a sheathed blade from an unseen hand.

"Pathetic."

It was nothing Cresana didn't already know – she was acutely aware of her incredible failure as a Grisha and an asset to Kirigan – but the venom with which that single word was delivered stung like acid in her blood. She felt whatever small sliver of hope Kirigan had been holding onto regarding her vanish, and along with it whatever protection she had as a possible weapon in his arsenal. All in a matter of an instant, Cresana felt her fate sealed by that single word. She knew what this meant, this final and total rebuke. It meant death. She had outlived her usefulness, and there was no more patience within Kirigan to allow such a liability and failed investment continue to exist. Against every fiber of her being, the crushing weight of this realization caused her to let out a small, terrified whimper.

Disgusted by her, Kirigan made a snort of derision. He considered ending it here. What a relief it would be just to be done with her. The very idea of shutting the chapter on this colossal dead-end was intoxicating. Images of what Kirigan had hoped Cresana could be – his greatest weapon, his gifted protégé, his equal, the answer to everything, and perhaps even a Queen next to him – fractured and rearranged into fantasies of watching her bleed out right here on the cold stone floor in front of him. It would be so easy, so clean. Even painless for her, although this was a minute consideration as he truly cared very little for her pain, given how much she had already caused him. Kirigan felt his hands beginning to twitch, the Small Science working automatically through his rigid fingers, his powers gathering like shadows at the edge of his mind. Just as he was about to give in to the temptation to kill Cresana as she lay prostrate in front of him like a pleading servant, the door at the end of the training hall opened.

Kirigan snapped his head up to see Ivan stride in. Kirigan couldn't be sure from this distance, but he had the vague feeling that Ivan knew somehow what Kirigan had been about to do and that his entrance was not a coincidence. With more than a little irritation, Kirigan forced the growing pulse of darkness that he'd been martialing for the Cut only moments before back into nothingness. He straightened slightly, trying to unclench his jaw.