*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...
You have to get up. There's still a chance she's alive.
Lei Chaudri looks up, into the echoing black, and for once truly wishes he could conjure fire. Wishes he could illuminate this carcass of a place, burn it to stubs, to ashes. He grips that small, cold arm one more time and then pulls himself to his feet and steps in further.
He doesn't have fire, but his eyes begin to adjust after a time, adjust enough to see a dark form lying, inert, several paces away, and terror floods through his veins again.
He stumbles hurriedly not toward the body but the side of the hall, hands outstretched, feeling in the dark, for latches, for levers.
He finds one, twists and pulls and a groan rumbles through the hall, like a dusty maul, as light spills in from the unshuttered window.
He pulls another one, just to be sure, just to get enough light, and he turns, palms sweating, stomach churning—
And Lei Chaudri sees the cold, dead gaze of his mother.
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He's just made it to the Plinth—Plinth, that's what Lei called it, wasn't it? Hiran can't quite remember. It's all bleeding together now.
Finn, where are you? he thinks, gaze darting around this hollow city. Where is anyone? If he can just find Finn, just find him. And then Allayria and Lei, maybe Lei, if his monster of a sister hasn't quartered him up yet.
But there's no one here, no one at all, not even the soldiers...
Down below, the things—the Jarles—are all just sitting on the fields, motionless in the dust, kneeling to nothing. It was like an unhallowed gust had blown through, had suddenly tipped them like paper cards, or dominos on a bar table. The machines went on, whirled on, bursting up, burrowing down, but the soldiers just sat there. Still.
Hiran swallows, glancing around.
When the Jarles first fell Dost and Wren's soldiers had just stared, like men pulled out of dreams, animals doused in cold water. And then one stepped forward.
One raised his sword.
One swung.
When the kneeling opponent fell down, unresisting to the last, Hiran thought that would be that, a sign of some kind of truce working it's strange way up on the mountain above. A sign to stop.
Instead, another soldier swung.
And another.
And another.
Hiran doesn't know how many of those kneeling Jarles are left now; he doesn't want to know. At the time, he grabbed Tara by the hand, pulled her up, intent on dragging her out of that hellhole, but she had pulled back.
