*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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In the light of the golden nobleman's sneer a free, uncomplicated anger flushes to Ben's face now, burrows down into his throat which contorts in knots.
"You have lost it," Hiran Baulieu continues, arrogantly, insolently. "Don't you hear yourself? You shot the Paragon off a cliff, you lunatic. You killed her, and now you're flying into a rage when others tell you she has turned and propose to do the same?"
Baulieu sees the direction of Ben's gaze and looks back behind him, to the shadowed tree where Allayria sits. Not that, of course, he can see her.
"You've lost it," he repeats, another laugh hiccuping out of him. "You really lost it."
"I haven't lost anything," Ben manages to spit out, "but keep talking and you might be the one to lose—"
"You've gone all this way, done all these horrible things to get to where you are, and at the end you're going to whiff it because you can't keep your head on straight," the man interrupts, either not realizing or not caring how close he is to a knife in his throat. "All of this, all of this bloodshed, all of this killing and burning, and now you're just going to go to pieces? Over the woman you chose to kill?"
"Don't—" Ben hisses and his hand flashes to the knife on his belt.
"You are moping after a person that is no longer there," Baulieu cuts in and he's cold now, cold in a way Ben did not anticipate. "You and I have no love for one another, but she was my friend. Whatever she was before you shot her, that's gone. I know because the Allayria I knew is gone. And the thing in her place? Let me assure you, it doesn't hold the same moral philosophies that you do. Quite the opposite."
The nobleman leans forward, disregarding the half-withdrawn knife.
"There are many, many things you and I do not, and will never, see eye to eye on," he says. "But there are some essential rights we both believe in, rights she now has the power to remove. Rights she has removed for some already. And you may not care if she kills kings, kills people like me, but who will she turn on next when we're gone? Who will she seek to control in order to protect herself?"
Ben stares at him.
She would never. She never— they had always led her astray. Bent her, like a fine tool, to their darker purposes. She wasn't— She never meant— She was a sacrifice, an ugly, horrible, unforgivable sacrifice, but she was not one of them.
"That's what she wants," Baulieu continues, "control. She's removing all others in power not to give that back to people, but to keep it for herself. I can't pretend to be privy to all the intricacies of that brain of yours but I'm going to take a leap and say that is the very opposite of what you are trying for."
The phantom shifts in the corner and Ben, still, but tense, says: "That's never what she wanted."
Baulieu laughs again. "Then maybe that's what she learned. There are parts of what happened in Vatra I still don't understand. She was alone with the Imperator's daughter for a long time, and I saw no signs of real struggle when I arrived. That woman was a monster of control, much like her mother."
