Prodigal - Book III

Ascendant

There was a time when Allayria had wanted to save the world as a part of something, a group who meant to shape a place where people could have a chance to make their own path, to stand on their own merits. Once, she would have rather saved it like that, powerless, than alone as the Paragon.

Allayria doesn't feel that way anymore, because that world she dreamed of—the world they told her to dream of—is a lie.

"We're inherently destructive," the dynast, now naught but charred dust and smoldering ruin, once told her, his voice hushed in spreading twilight. "We destroy to survive. We destroy to thrive. We destroy because we like it."

Allayria can now see the real monster at the end of this tunnel—it's the thing storming in flashing twilight; the faceless being hovering, pale and masked, in the dark; the young girl crying in the mirror as the ballerina spins, rotely, on the stand. It's the dark, it's the subtle lie, it's the voices, the echoes of murmurs, whispering just out of earshot.

It's not what the kings and masters said it would be, what they promised. The prodigal daughter, cunning and dangerous, holds true in the end, protects when they said she [that viper] would attack. And here they all are, aligning in their neat rows, leaving mountains in between their words, in the things unsaid, in the things unexamined. Practicing hidden deception, careful secrets; sprouting their neat philosophies, when the truth is uglier, ranker.

[They're only going to use you until they don't need you anymore.]

Isati destroyed all the Spirit seekers, except one, the tiny thing fluttering in the cradle of her arms, unseen but still beating, because this is the game they play. Their personal board of them, alone. And everything else, chess pieces.

Because there is no world where people will allow each other to be free.

[We destroy because we like it.]

Allayria's head is a low throb, a pulsing warm glow of pain, an echo of what reverberates across the tautened line. At first she had only accidentally grazed the metal conduit for a second, but the feeling seared and remained, a sore, burned thing. And the consequences of Isati's mercy pulsed in the night, through the murmurs, like a knock on Allayria's skull, a beacon in the dark, a knuckle tapping on a dark wood floor.

We destroy to thrive.

And Allayria answered.

She sharpens her swords in the dark now, her eye trained on that sliver in between the tent flaps, on the slice of Vatra's shadowed mountain-scape, hovering in the distance. She keeps watch while Lei slumbers, unknowing, in their bed.

There are some choices in life that are ugly things, things that should be made and then put away in a desk drawer, left to molder and stink. It's the weak-willed who return for the choice, who circle desk, who think on it, ruminate on it.

The stronger let it die in there.

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's time to put the rotting thing in its drawer.

After all, death did not let her go for nothing.

A/N: I will answer all theories and hypotheses only with a mysterious smile because I cannot give ANYTHING away. (But please still send them to me.)

In some very exciting news, we have a new POV and new header art next week! Any guesses who it is?

Chapter notes: Qui Wren gives his dim view of humanity in Partisan's "The Fox and the Owl," while Ben tells her she is being used in "Did You Love Me in the Firelight." Isati talks of grave plots and freedom in Prodigal's "Cut Off Your Face," and Allayria catches a glimpse of younger Isati in "Lightning Bones." Allayria decides to give up her powers and work with Ben, Meg, and Iaves in Paragon's "Believe."