*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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Isati Chaudri, second child of Abadi Chaudri, heir to the Jarles kingdom, is climbing an old, familiar path when she feels it: a snap. It's the whip of a belt, the slap of cold metal. She stops on this treacherous path, amongst sliding rock and trembling stone, and leans her head back, feeling the sunlight, the wind, it, it, it.
It's more a beginning than an end, a releasing, a loosing.
Oh, she did it. Oh, oh, oh, she did.
The path is easier after that, almost nothing in this glowing aftermath, this heady culmination.
Dead, dead, dead, and us, alone, in a universe of bodies, the only things thinking. At last, at last.
She doesn't mind that nagging thing, that unexamined question shoved to the corner, her brother's face behind the staff of flowers, bruised and bloody.
Isi, Isi, are you okay—?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, she is.
Isati Chaudri pays no mind to the billowing smoke down in the valley behind her, nor the black, jutting structure just behind her that emits all that negative space, that gaping nothingness, where there used to be suffocating pressure.
There is infinite possibility now, so many choices, and yet, only one still. One she climbs toward, carefully, faithfully.
When she reaches the top, when she climbs up, onto the Sun Dais, she sees her waiting.
Dark armor, pale face, hunched over, calculating gaze out, out, over her dominion—our dominion—watching, waiting...
For me.
"You made it," the Paragon says, as if there was ever any other possibility, any other choice.
"I brought you a gift," Isati says, moving quick, careful, steps lighter now, lighter than anything, and she throws the Chieftainess's helmet at her feet. "Why have one kingdom when we can have them all?"
The Paragon stares at this, gaze lingering on the dark stains, the clinging wisps of gray hair.
"Any one else?"
Isati thinks of the blond woman, of cleaving her bird but missing her head, Lei interfering, Lei jumping in, Lei—
"Not yet; I didn't want to have all the fun."
She's watching Isati now, her irises black, face almost ghostly in the red sunlight.
"You did well," she says.
Pride flushes through Isati, rushes with a heated flush, a potent certainty, and she takes another step forward, extending her hand. The Paragon takes it, hand warm, flesh alive, and Isati pulls her to her feet.
She's close, closer than ever since Isati had realized, since Isati understood.
All my hard work, Isati thinks, relishes, all my careful planning, all my pain, for this, for this. The culmination of all things, the conclusion of a fight well fought. A fight Mother would have never understood, never anticipated—
