Nyxiana
Istop holding myself in. My wings come out, both of them, all the way and I don’t slow them down.
They keep opening after I expect them to stop.
The air they move rolls out across the chamber and shoves two of Faelan’s constructs sideways before I’ve done one thing with my hands.
I’ve kept these wings small all my life.
Not hidden. Small. Half a span at a garden party, a quarter at court, never out at all in a room where somebody might decide what to think about them.
Nobody at Ash Hollow has ever seen them like this. Neither has my father’s court.
The flame has been coming out of my hands since we came through that door.
What I haven’t done is let it out. I’ve always held it back.
Not because it fails me. Because it doesn’t.
It goes up both arms and out past my hands, and it burns nothing like the way fire burns.
Fire takes whatever it can reach. This takes only what has no business being here.
Faelan has been working his way through this place for centuries and there’s a great deal in this chamber with no business being in it.
Where the flame goes, corruption stops existing. There’s no scorching, no damage, it’s just gone, the way a stain goes out of cloth, and the architecture underneath comes back the color it was before he ever touched it.
Then I let the reading all the way open.
Every signature in the chamber comes up in me at once.
Faelan’s is rotten the whole way through.
The five holding the far end, straining, each one separate.
The constructs, with no signature at all, reading as holes in the room.
And Valen’s. Whatever is in that man has been asleep since the day I met him.
Tonight it’s awake, and so loud I can hardly read anything else in this room over the top of it.
I’ve wanted to read him since the first night he came out of those trees.
I still can’t. Not the man. His nature is roaring in front of me.
The person inside it is as shut to me as he was the day I met him.
That will still be true tomorrow, next year and probably always.
I put my hands up to bring the grace over him.
It’s the last thing I have. It settles over a person like pressure.
Everything that comes at them arrives through it slower. I’ve never given it to anybody.
Faelan’s strike goes through Valen while my hands are still coming up. Straight through the middle of him without slowing down, it doesn’t break on anything, just comes out the other side and dies against the floor.
He doesn’t even turn his head. I take my hands down.
He doesn’t need it. The grace. Whatever the founders built into that man is doing something no grace of mine could do, and I’ve been putting my body in front of him since the first realm we crossed together.
So I fight beside him instead. I look at him between my own strikes.
He fights nothing like the man I’ve watched work a training yard.
That man wastes nothing. Everything held back, the smallest movement that does the job.
There’s none of that left in him, now reaches out and a whole section of torn architecture draws itself shut, he’s turning before it finishes closing.
Faelan comes at us together, then at each of us separately, then at the space between us, because that’s where a man looks for a gap in something like this.
There isn’t one. He finds the seam where my flame stops, Valen’s sealing starts and puts a construct through it.
The thing comes apart between the two of us before it’s covered ten feet.
He tries the same place twice more and it closes faster every time.
Whatever he throws, one of us has it before it lands.
He tears and Valen shuts. He drives a construct at my flank, it comes apart on the flame before it’s halfway to me.
Then one of the constructs gets past both of us.
It goes past my left side low and fast. Valen steps in and takes it on his shoulder.
The edge of it opens him from collarbone to arm.
Faelan’s power goes through the man as though he isn’t standing there.
He isn’t. Constructs are pieces of this realm with edges, they cut him exactly the way they’d cut anybody.
He found that out when the first one opened his forearm, and he keeps stepping in front of them.
He doesn’t slow down. There’s blood drying at his temple from something I never saw land.
Then Faelan stops throwing. He pulls back, the first ground he’s given all night.
He reaches past this chamber entirely. I feel it before I work out what it is.
Three marks - Nova’s at her wrist, Harper’s at hers, Kari’s burned into her right palm.
All three of them realms away from here being hauled toward firing at once.
I can read them from here. Faint, unmistakable, and getting worse while I stand still.
There’s no crossing from here. No message.
Nothing I can do about what’s happening to three women I love except keep fighting the man in front of me.
So I do what I’ve always done when I can’t fix something. I set it down and keep working. For once that’s the right thing to do with it, because nothing I do in this chamber changes one part of what’s happening to them.
Then Faelan turns and looks at me. The fight goes out of him all at once. He stops throwing. His hands go open. “You know what I’m going to say.”
“Say it anyway.”
“The two of us end it tonight.” He isn’t raising his voice, never does. “Not the network. That was for if you refused me. You and I standing here can put the truth into every realm at once, cleanly, in one breath. Every court, throne, the Accord you serve. All of it comes down with it. Tonight.”
He means it. That’s the part I wasn’t ready for.
He isn’t threatening me, isn’t bargaining.
There’s no edge anywhere. He didn’t tear his way in here for me.
He came for the Council. What he’s holding out now is what he honestly believes is the best thing anybody alive is going to get, he’s offering it to me because he thinks I’m the only other person who sees it as clearly as he does.
It lands harder than anything he has thrown at me tonight, because there’s a part of me that agrees with him and has agreed with him since Doria.
He’s right about the crime. Every institution I’ve ever worked inside of is standing on it.
Faelan waits. He asked me something and he’s willing to stand there with his hands open until I answer it.
Then Samuel comes out of the formation. He crosses the middle of the fight to do it.
The four behind him take up what he was carrying, the light where he stood goes thin, and every one of them knows exactly what that costs.
He stops in front of me. “You’ve already decided,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Then you should know one thing before you say it out loud. We won’t come after you for it. Not you, not Valen.” He says it the way a man puts down something he’s carried a long way. “That isn’t the order talking. That’s me, and I’ll answer for it.”
He looks at me with my wings out at full span, white flame running up both arms. Nobody has ever seen all of me at once. I’ve never let anybody. Then he’s back in the formation and there are five of them again.
Faelan’s hands are still open. There are two things I can do with them.
I can take his hand and put the truth into every realm at once.
Every court that ever ruled off the founders’ lie comes down in the same hour.
Whatever that does to the people living under those courts is the cost of having it finally over.
Or I can hold the seal. Do what the Council has done for two thousand years, what I’ve done in my own smaller way my entire life; decide who gets to know, when, and keep the heavy version where nobody carries it but me.
Everybody who has ever stood where I’m standing has made one of those choices. The founders buried it. The Council went on burying it. Faelan has spent centuries getting ready to burn it. Standing here I understand exactly why, because both of those are simple solutions. I refuse both.
“No,” I tell him, out loud, across the chamber, loud enough that every being in this place hears it.
“I won’t do it your way. Put that into every realm at once and it stops being the truth and starts being a weapon.
The people it lands on aren’t the ones who did it.
There are packs, courts, whole populations who never had a say in any of this.
You’d bring the ceiling down on all of them to prove something you’ve already proved. ”
“And so it stays buried.”
“No.” I look past him at the five holding this place upright. “That’s the other lie, I’ve been telling it in my own house for years. Deciding which people are strong enough to hear. Keeping the hard version so that nobody else has to hold it.”
I bring my eyes back to him. “I’m going to carry it out in the open. I told my own pack two nights ago. Now I’m going to tell everybody else who has a right to it. I’m going to stop deciding what people get to know about their own lives.”
Faelan says nothing.
“And I’m not going to use it,” I tell him. “Not on a court, or a throne, or on the Accord. It isn’t a lever. It’s the truth, people are owed it, being owed something is not the same as having it used on you.”
Saying it out loud does what days of turning it over never have.
It stops being something I’m considering.
I’ve said it in front of witnesses now, that means I have to do it.
There’s still the part I have no answer for.
The people the founders shut into the world they closed.
Whether they ever learn a word of any of it.
Whether that door was ever meant to open again.
Nothing I just said reaches that. I don’t have anything for it tonight.
Faelan’s face changes. I’ve watched that man take a strike, a refusal, seen his own certainty come apart in front of him, and none of it moved anything in him. This moves him. There’s real loss now, the kind that goes all the way down.
His whole purpose runs on there being two roads. Every year he has spent on this was built on one certainty, that anybody who saw the crime clearly would have to pick one or the other, that refusing to burn it meant choosing to bury it, and that put them with the Council.
I’ve just stood in front of him and been neither, he has nothing ready for that.
The chamber tears open behind him. Valen shuts it before it runs.
Faelan turns back into the fight, his hands coming up.
The offer is over. I turn back into it with him.
My wings are still out, the flame still lit up both arms. I’ve spent my life letting rooms see about a third of me.
I’m showing everything now.