Chapter 26 #2
“I’ve learned quite a bit, actually,” I say, willfully ignoring his attempt to take control of the situation. My eyes are all for Eraya, who has fallen into a form but hasn’t started moving. “I’ll tell you what we’re for.”
“Compassion!” Mujin snaps, with no apparent awareness of irony.
If you have to yell at compassion, you are not on the right side of history.
But Eraya begins to move. Jerkily, like she was not ever expecting to be called on in this way, but the Order’s pampered promises mean nothing when they are threatened.
And she is their puppet, and the Order holds her strings.
And so, on cue, do the priests move.
I spin reflexively into a form before halting at the sensation of my wrath flaring not just from within me, but also along my mate bond.
I’m not alone.
Terrifyingly, that also means there are more people in danger than just me, and I’m beginning to appreciate how sheltered I used to be in this respect, too.
It’s much easier to burn yourself to a crisp when there is no one relying on you to exist.
I look back at Zan, who has stayed a distance away to be able to react to anything the Order throws at him. “I need more time,” I whisper.
All the time. For him—for me.
For all of us.
I feel the mental equivalent of his nose bumping my forehead. ?Then you’ll have it.?
On instinct I brace with my power as with a powerful flap of his wings, Zan takes to the sky, which bowls over the immediate Crystal Hollow contingent behind us.
It will also mean anything unleashed before he starts a counterattack will go over their heads.
Now there are two targets for the Order, and Mujin will not be able to resist the chance to take down Zan—
Or so I thought. The priests’ forms don’t shift, though, which means they’re still locked on to me.
And Eraya is between us.
A wave of gold from her surges toward me, but I am so pissed at how they are using her that with a roar of rage I unleash a shockwave of pure magenta power that wipes it out before it can reach me.
Eraya reels back, and so do the priests.
They’ve never learned how to brace against a sage, because why would they need to?
But what surprises me is the brief flicker of relief on Eraya’s face, the breath she takes, and all at once I realize why.
The priests are holding her in front of them like a living shield and draining her power at the same time. Making the priests lose their footing also broke their working.
Zan takes the opportunity to close in, his powerful tail sweeping priests off their feet and throwing them into the air.
It breaks their formation and forces them to turn their attention to him.
And that’s the moment I need.
As Eraya gets to her feet, I move into an old, old form.
A shield is, I’m sure, a kata she recognizes. She’ll have seen priests use it for defense before.
But she isn’t trained to fight for herself. So she moves into the only form she can, to let the priests use her power instead, not realizing that when I unleash my working, I’m including her inside the shield.
My concentration of wrath is so intense that it’s as though we’re in a world of pink haze, cut off from sight and sound outside.
Just two sages in the sphere of my power.
Where she can’t hear anyone else telling her what to think.
Where her power is her own, and she can’t give it away or have it be taken from her.
The Sage of Compassion’s eyes go wide as she spins into a different form, trying to shield herself within my domain. But it’s unpracticed and stilted, and while I appreciate the initiative and what it says about her spirit—
We have a narrow window, and I need her to hear me, so I spin into my own kata and shatter her glowing light as soon as it burgeons. She gasps at the hit.
She’s not a combat sage, but I very much am.
“Eraya,” I say urgently. “What they have done to you is not right. Do you hear me? Compassion is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. You should be so much stronger than this.”
The look in her eyes is one of fear and anger as she says, “I am not a monster.”
Am I? Probably.
And I think she could be, too, but that’s not something she’s prepared to hear.
“You’re a sage,” I tell her. “Your compassion—it’s all from within you, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Eraya says calmly as she moves into another form. “I’m a sage. I can’t expect laypeople to compare to the power of my compassion.”
“Whereas I can feel the wrath all around me,” I tell her. “I can pull from more than my own.”
“It is always easier to incite people to violence and fear—”
“No,” I tell her. “No, it isn’t. I’m not instigating their wrath, I am focusing it. People want to be compassionate to each other. That’s where the wrath comes from, don’t you see?”
“People care about themselves first and foremost,” Eraya disagrees. “They have to be taught to care about greater causes. And I do not regret doing that work.”
That the Sage of Compassion believes this about people explains so, so much.
Her attempt to shield herself brightens.
I swipe it away again, and she gasps.
“Your work is hurting them,” I tell her. “You were partially right, before. We should be on the same side. Wrath and Compassion—they go together.”
I spin out of my kata entirely and walk toward her, the sheer force of my presence preventing more than gold sparks on her side.
“When I release this shield, I want you to use your sage senses and feel where the compassion is coming from, because you’re going to feel that it’s not stronger on Mujin’s side.
When you force people to join the side of forcing others, the compassion you can draw on weakens, doesn’t it?
Because you are making them close themselves off to what they know is right.
“You are weakening their compassion. You’re weakening your own, constraining your power by tying yourself in knots trying to justify their crimes. Weakening compassion is not what you’re for.”
I reach her, finally.
I want to shake her.
Instead I put my hands on her shoulders.
She goes completely still.
How long, I wonder, since she has been touched?
Wrath can burn in isolation. But for the Sage of Compassion...
That she can do so much when they are starving her speaks to what she could be capable of.
I turn my wrath outward instead of inward, easing the pressure on her.
And I wrap her in a hug.
Eraya freezes.
“Right here, right now, you are safe,” I whisper to her. “No one can get to you through me. So please, please, take the opportunity to think.”
“I do think,” she says fiercely.
But she doesn’t pull away.
Her arms come around me, too, and I feel her compassion working into me.
And I let it, meeting her eyes so she knows.
Because I have nothing to fear from compassion.
“Then you know they put limits on you to keep you safe to them, but people don’t need to be protected from compassion,” I say. “If the Order is as strong as they say they are, why are they worried about me, just one more sage? Why do they always have minders on you?”
“We are their strength,” she whispers.
“People’s belief should be their strength. If it weren’t all so flimsy, they wouldn’t need to hold you on a leash. But that leash is breakable, Eraya. In my day it was only used as a temporary measure for sages who were out of control. I can change this, but you have to choose it.”
Her eyes flicker.
She withdraws from me.
Damn it, how did I fuck up?
“You want me to join you to deal the Order a blow,” Eraya says. “For it to be my choice for the optics. You wouldn’t accept a person who kidnapped someone you consider yours.”
Ahh.
The responsibility of choice, and their consequences.
I’ve had five hundred years to process what I did, and still the notion of having to choose everything for myself every day is overwhelming.
“People can change,” I tell her. “That’s what we’re here for—to help them change bigger and faster. And that includes you. Not just because you’re a sage who can make that happen, but because you’re a person.”
And I let the shield around us dissipate, let sight and sound come back in.
I’ve been going about this wrong, I realize.
Sages don’t lead from behind; they lead from in front.
That’s what was so backwards about Mujin putting the Sage of Compassion before him when she wasn’t in charge.
But it’s also what’s backward about me, a sage, trying to effect change without moving.
Or expecting Eraya to.
You can’t be wise about the world without moving in it.
What was it I told Jiran only yesterday?
For people to believe in impossibility, they need to have the space to dream.
I will give them that.
“Stop,” Eraya tells me in a voice that has none of her previous strength in it.
The Order draining her, or her own conviction faltering?
My course is the same.
She’s trying another form again, but so do I.
And this one, she won’t recognize.
“Whatever you’re doing—”
“Stop using compassion to wound,” I tell her, “and I will try to use wrath to heal.”
“Yora, wrath is for destruction.”
Is it?
Yes.
But I think I can choose my target.
Let me destroy complacency.
Let me destroy false sense of security.
Let me destroy the belief that we have to sacrifice people and freedom for any goddamn reason.
Is wrath only destruction, though?
We’re about to find out in a really dramatic way.
Zan is in the sky, occupying the priests, but not, I notice, killing them.
A show for Crystal Hollow, that there is another way.
Even if this way is much more dangerous for him.
But I have to trust him—trust that he wants to survive this, too, if not for himself, then for me. And for me, he will support Crystal Hollow, too.
So I can have a place.
And if I have a place, then so does he.
It’s time to do my part in truth.
“I am the Sage of Wrath,” I say clearly, for anyone who can hear me. “Let me show you what that means.”
As I spin into a form, Eraya reacts, too, falling into her own, and now that I’m looking for it, I sense her power flowing into the priests again too.