*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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Meg stands between walls of flames. There's nothing here to breathe but smoke and ash, and the heat buffets so strong that she doesn't know if she herself is aflame.
Plenty of the others are.
She doesn't dare pull the water from her canteen—it would only turn to steam here—instead, its dirt she wields in her hand, shifts with quick, decisive footsteps.
Around her people flee, their sweat-slick foreheads gleaming in the firelight, staining dark the red fabric tied around their lower faces. They move with purpose, they move quickly, burdened even as they are with the thick bundles.
In the blazing light that shadowed, distant form she knows is one of the Brothers of Wren waves, an arm jutting out to his side, hand closing into a sharp fist. It's the signal, and her Skilling halts as it is her turn to run out from the inferno, the last beacon in the flames.
But the danger of the fire is nothing to what awaits on the other side.
"Tools out," she orders and these masked people comply because they too know what lies out here, in their ruined city.
The first Keesark soldiers seem to be borne from the smoke, their gray, gleaming bodies materializing from the shrouding vapor as they run in straight, orderly lines toward the survivors. Meg looks, but she doesn't spy the Queen's bloodhound amongst them.
We have a chance, she thinks then, the steel sword in her hand a jagged thing, thin but solid. After all, aside from that beastly shade, most of the non-Jarles Smith Skillers are now on their side.
It's a heave, one-armed and high, but she employs it all the same, down onto the crook between the shoulder and neck, into soft, exposed flesh. The soldier crumples just as she kicks, the punt of the blunt cobblestone smashing through his helmet.
It's the easiest way to bring them down.
She kicks the next one off, this tin man who thought a one-armed girl would be easy prey. She would show him, show them all how wrong they are.
The phantom limb twitches at the thought, the missing fingers flexing alongside her still-attached ones. It's the damnedest thing, this ghost stuck to her shoulder and she swings violently now with her real arm, her blow with an extra bite to shake it.
The wound may have scabbed over but it feels like an open sore, gaping just at the back of her mind, a shadow that never quite leaves her. She feels it when she sits to eat, when she tries to pull a tunic on, when eyes pass by the empty sleeve. It's rage, rage that it was taken, rage that they stare, rage that it had first made her so damnably weak. How could she Skill with only one hand? How could she fight, be anything more than utterly useless to the cause when she couldn't even tie her own damn boots?
Well, that at least I have solved, she thinks to herself, aiming a quick kick at the next soldier, feeling the crunching punt of cobblestone follow suit, barreling up through the man's helmet. There was, at least, some small benefit to their long imprisonment.
