*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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When it is time, call the banners and look for me in the sky.
Dark shapes blot the morning horizon. They drift, hulking creatures that hover in the dawn, seven airships floating toward Thalassa City.
But the ruler who descends an hour later from the center ship's shuddering, clanking metal ramp is not the thin framed, and owlishly bespectacled Qui Wren; it's stocky, solid Aren Dost.
She marches toward them, made somehow even more imposing with the armor, hewn in thick red leather and encased in carved gold bone guards, her pepper gray mane tied back in a loose knot.
"'Ren," Ruben calls happily, eschewing formalities and stepping forward, embracing the Chieftainess as her squadron clambers down the ramp behind her. "How was the trek?"
Not: "what a surprise," "what are you doing here?" Allayria notes, glancing between the old friends. General Jin also does not look surprised either, and Allayria thinks back to the empty tent on the plains of southeast Keesark long before Thalassa, of standing at its border and turning, watching the new way Ruben watched her.
He is keeping secrets.
"Chieftainess," she says instead, stepping forward, hand extended. "You are a very welcome sight."
The Chieftainess of Roften fixes her brown gaze on the Paragon, clasping one callused hand onto Allayria's and bowing, curt and perfunctory, over them.
"Your Excellence," she says. "A little bird told me it was time."
"I'm probably an owl: nocturnal, better in the air than on the ground," Qui Wren had said before, set against a blood red sunset. "I'll be your sight."
"So it is," Allayria replies.
The Chieftainess comes bearing supplies, and while they unload some food in Thalassa, Jin's troops load weapons and gear for the front.
"The brunt of your forces will have to march to the war," Dost tells them as they walk amongst the commotion, "but we can touch down at baseline ahead of them, organize everything so we can set out to Vatra as soon as possible. Four of our ships are outfitted to carry supplies; the other three have room for some additional troops—"
She goes on, but something else preoccupies Allayria's thoughts.
You take pieces off my board, I'll take pieces off yours.
It's a thought that murmurs, low and sinuously, through all the bustle and noise, senseless, ringing noise.
This is how we play.
But it's not how we win.
It's toying with her, cloyingly, perched neatly in a backpack, a sliver of silver tinted red. It's whispering, low and muted, like burst eardrums, or the slow, suffocating silence of water. The voices are just bubbles in the dark, heard through a glass casing of ice and they reverberate, echo just like the voices before, the voices that come when she points to a brow, presses fingers to a crown. They are the only thing she hears in the deep.
