*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 her dreams now, there is an antlered skull that walks, loping in a slow, inevitable way, toward her. It's borne by a putrid gray, fleshy body and blackened hooves, the skin and fur gone from its face. Only pale, stained skull bone has been left behind, pecked clean and bleached in sunlight, and its eye sockets are burning holes of black cinder, staring down at her. Around it, and in it, is a bright flame; it burns, ever-bright, against the darkness of her dreams.
Once, maybe, this mirage would have frightened her. Once it might have felt like foreboding, or a haunting of a past coming into the fore for her. Now, all she feels is anticipation.
Bear's Spear fell, as she knew it would. And as the messengers go east, back to an armor-encased queen, the Paragon turns west and contemplates.
A foul smell is rising from the furnaces here. One of smoke, one of burning. There is movement in the halls and in the forges where another fire burns day in and day out. The work continues.
As she waits for the Red Queen, the Paragon strips her motley flock of their kingdom colors—of the black and blue, the purple and red, the gold and crimson. She clothes them instead in black and white, and on their shields, their cloaks and helmets, is emblazoned a curved, reptilian eye, whose flat iris is a dark slit down the center.
Though many of the Cabal will not understand, Ben, of course, will.
There are some of her followers now out in the yard. They wear masks, cold, hard, and smooth, and they all, the soldiers and civilians alike, move in quick, perfect unison. As if they have done this forever. As if they can all hear the same tune.
"Why don't you let them take it off?"
Lei's question strangely echoes in the not-so-far reaches of her memory, though he had been talking about other creatures.
She had pulled off the mask of one of Isati's creations the very same evening she took their control. The blood of their previous owner was but newly dried on her armor when she did it. Not, she thinks, that any of them had minded. Like Lei, she had been curious about them. Curious about what laid beneath.
When he asked, she hadn't lied: what lies beneath isn't pretty. Taut, pallid flesh stretched all over the face that greeted her, stretching almost like another mask. A mask of skin covering whittling bones, laid smoothly, without crease or opening, over the mounds where eyes should have been. There were still holes where the mouth and nostrils were, though they sagged out of near misuse. Any definition, any characteristic that could have made them something, was simply... gone. And in its place was a cold hollowness filled with rattling breaths and yellowing teeth. A cold hollowness that echoed what remained inside those skulls.
They really are puppets, Allayria had realized then. Things on strings. And yes, they were fashioned that way, but they also gave in to that. They also submitted to it.
She had put the mask back on and it smiled fixedly back at her. A face to replace the one Isati had cut off of it.
