*COMPLETE* "People don't believe in us anymore. They don't believe that in the end we will do what is right. We can't let them down. We can't let Ben win."
Decisions made on top of the lonely, wind-swept cliff of Lethinor reverberate around the five...
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The shadows sit like ghosts on Ruben's face, haunting the crevices and cracks of age, lurking in the shifting, flitting corners, seen only in quick glances, in barely-caught flickerings. This once-open face is now shuttered to her.
He watches her in a new way now, a way that measures, a way that hesitates.
No more benefit of the doubt.
He's surveying her still as she stands here, at the tent opening; they are only two people amongst all these empty chairs, standing alone in this wide, cavernous room.
"Enemies at our front; enemies at our back," she says into the emptiness but does not look back into the tent. He will choose his words carefully in answer.
"So it seems."
A smile twists on her face, warping into a wince at its end.
Do you still think I was wrong? she wants to ask, to press. If I stayed I could be dead. If I stayed they could have—
"He doesn't know where it is," Ruben says to the silence. "Without the bow he has no reason to harm you."
She feels her eyes burn as she finally looks back at him and there's something painfully soft in his expression. She wants to snap at it, to break it, shatter it with impact so it can't be said, can't be offered, these words of pity, of consolation.
I am pinned into a corner, she thinks. A fox caught in a foxhole.
"Ben is not the first young man to seek powers to destroy everything," Ruben says, his voice the same as it was at the beginning: a lull in dark twilight riddled with far-flung tales, set against the stars, which twinkle through billowing smoke. "There was someone my age once, too, someone I considered a friend. But he had no use for those—he wanted to conquer everything, to hew the world into a shape to fit his desires, regardless of the carnage. Rast, Dost, and I rose up. We cut him down to size, brought him low."
Ruben shifts, moving closer, looking out at the distant throng of people, soldiers, weaving between campsites and tent lines.
"Power," he says, "eventually rots everything it touches."
Allayria watches that ebbing mass a while longer, watches as it sinuously tautens and compresses, this organic thing of human bodies, this hive of people.
"What did you do with him?" she asks. "In the end?"
There's a flash of something—wariness—that is flickering across Ruben's face when she glances back.
"Nothing; he retired into exile, into a long age of repentance."
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The suns set like firelight in the horizon, all oranges and golds, bringing the day to a close. She watches it from the crack of the tent flap, holding out ashen fingers to push the gap wider, to sit and watch this beautiful thing that comes and goes with or without them. The pair of burning stars will rise in the morning, set in the evening, on and on, long after she and everyone else on this earth are only dust or hollow echoes across plains of grass and wells of rock and stone.
She knows the ugly thing that has to be done, the cruel command that has to be made. She knew it when they drank to Sofo, accepted it when they honored Leo. She knows what she has to ask.
She stands, placing her waterskin on the rickety table, stepping forward only to stop as Lei ducks in. They stand for a moment, face-to-face, the surprise slowly melting into a crease between his brows; a question.
"We're deploying tomorrow," he says when she doesn't answer it, and he's watching her carefully.
She nods and when she starts to move forward his hand finds her shoulder and she looks back up at him.
It's like she's looking at him in twilight, the moon at his back, snow in his hair and on the ground around them, and there's something in his expression, something in hers, that has to go unanswered.
"We can't all go," she says. "We have to leave two behind."
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A/N: Why yes, the title of this chapter IS a reference to Lord of the Rings.
Who's getting left behind? Our squad is breaking up, you guys.
Chapter notes: foxes and fox holes is a throwback to Allaryia's conversation with Dynast Wren in Partisan's "The Fox and the Owl."
Penultimate chapter is up next... whose will it be?
