She could not save Parwys from itself.Even in Ulun, her goals had been simpler—the destruction of the dread engines, which were vile in their own right.She had not stayed long enough to witness the aftermath, neither the fall of the sorcerer-kings nor whatever would rise to replace them.She had discovered a horror, broken it, and moved on.
Here … she had stumbled upon a kingdom on the brink of transformation, where people had already confronted the wickedness long hidden in the barrow of history.Their struggle was to overcome it without becoming what they fought against.Her presence had shifted that process, certainly.Put weight on the scales in favour of the Greenwood, she could hope.That had to be enough.It was not her responsibility, not her people, not her history.
Better not to meddle, as Arno had always said.Go into the world, learn what could be learned to the benefit of the City, and return.Anything else was a fool’s errand, a display of incredible arrogance.
She coughed on a sudden burst of laughter.Weeper huffed beneath her.Frog shifted nervously on her shoulder.Colm glanced back from where he rode a few paces ahead, a broad silhouette in the dark.
When had she shied away from arrogance?What was trying to tilt the scales in favour of a better future for this little kingdom, compared to the aspirations that had brought her out into the wider world in the first place?She imagined herself the most important person to live since the Vanishing of the First Folk.The person who would begin to unravel the world’s greatest, most intransigent mysteries.First the nature of the First Folk themselves, then a spell to conjure their souls, and from there an understanding of their purposes, their language, their magic—an unlocking of their every secret, an unfurling of knowledge like nothing in the history of the world.
She was beginning to understand why she had been so much an outcast.Why she could count only a single friend in the vast population of the City—and that friend was Arno, who had taken it upon himself to coordinate a gaggle of the most unruly and unusual people Thaumedony produced.And why the research board had rejected her proposal over and over again.How absurd it must have seemed to them the first time, to say nothing of the eighth.
She had not been ostracised or rejected—she had set herself apart.She had given herself an importance above and beyond even the most brilliant of her fellows.Who in their right mind would want to spend any time around someone like that?
Now she would choose not to shoulder Parwys’s burdens because doing so would betoo arrogant?What an absurdity.No.It was arrogant to strike deals with ancient fae.Just as arrogant to drag a child away from her home and back to the City to further a research agenda that had been rejected as firmly as anything could be rejected.She was more than willing to meddle—with people’s lives, and with powers she could little control or understand—to serve her own purposes, to further her self-image as ‘Fola, the greatest mind of this era, if not all eras past, present, and yet to come’.
There was something bigger than her at stake here.A chance for a downtrodden people to build better lives.Yes, built from bloodshed, and only after unearthing a history of long-suppressed agonies.Painful, but worthwhile.More profound, perhaps, than any unravelling of the mysteries hidden in the depths of the Library.
After all, what would it say about the nature of mortalkind if they could only be good, and just and compassionate in a City that simplified and eased their lives to the point of triviality?The wider world held its fair share of darkness, but that only made what lights there were shine all the brighter.Llewyn had sacrificed everything for a child whose own father would have traded her away.For the comfortable to be kind was simple.Far more challenging—far better—to find comfort among the wretched.
She looked to the dark sky.The Grey Lady had said she would bind the raven fiend until the Huntress was freed.Fola’s sense of urgency was her own, not something born of the deal she had made.True, she did not know how long the Grey Lady’s protection would hold, but neither did she have any real reason, beyond her own fear and desperation, to think it would fail.
It took some time—her horse was unfamiliar, the ground uncertain, and she had one working arm—to wheel about.
‘What are you doing?’Colm called to her, as loud as he dared.They had left Bryngodre behind and had looped back towards the road, still keeping a careful distance in case of patrols.
‘I can’t abandon them, Colm,’ she said.‘I know this isn’t my fight, but I’m choosing it.’
‘It’s a hopeless fight,’ he pointed out.
‘I know.’She grinned at him, revelling in an unfamiliar relief.The weight of guilt falling away.‘But helping them is the right thing to do.Their fight matters.And, maybe, with my help it won’t be so hopeless.’
‘With our help, you mean,’ Colm said.
She shook her head.‘You’ve no obligation to—’
‘Come now, Fola,’ he said, turning his horse.She caught the flash of his broad teeth in the dark.‘You know better than that.’
Often the scales of fate are weighted unevenly, one side far heavier than the other.In such times, no individual act can hope to shift the balance.
Sometimes—as in Bryngodre, in Parwys—a single choice can be enough to tip the scale.
Bryngodre
YC 1189
To wield the relics of the First Folk is anathema.Their power promises to make us greater than we are, and thus corrupts even the most virtuous soul.
Wari the Younger, Pedagogue of the Mortal Church,First Declarations,YC768
Anwe carried Torin through the night and the next day.The corona burned continually around her head as she leaned heavily on her virtues to buoy her exhaustion and knit her wounds.A debt she would have to repay, eventually.Torin watched the dark sky, a mounting fever turning his thoughts to a jumble of mad half-notions and fears.Perseverance and industry would restore his body, but neither could heal his broken faith.Always, his mind returned to that moment when the sacred flames of ritual cleansing had burned in the sky, and been overwhelmed.
From the moment he put on initiate’s robes, he had been taught, and had believed, that mortalkind could overcome the horrors that plagued their world.That the pursuit of virtue could truly make them an equal match to First Folk, fae and fiends.That mortalkind no longer had to quake in terror as little more than dumb beasts living in a world shaped by gods.
He had witnessed the failure of that belief.The greatest power of the Mortal Church had broken like a wave against an unassailable shore.Some deficiency in his character?Or the terrible strength of a power able to match the virtues of the Agion themselves?Both possibilities were blasphemy that seared him to the soul.Either he was unworthy of the power he wielded, or the very foundations of the Mortal Church itself were unsteady.
It left him unbalanced.His world stood askew.The system by which he made sense of things had been proven unfit.As though he had dropped a stone and instead of falling, it had, of its own volition, shot into the sky.
He cycled through grief, rage and despair while the dark of night became the slate-grey of morning and they, at last, reached the safety of Bryngodre.Torin had expected to find the town all but emptied.Its levies had been raised to fight the battle against Glascoed.Only children, their caregivers and the infirm ought to have remained, other than the druids of the green tower and their servants.Instead, red banners decorated with the crowned bear of Abal’s house and a white flower device that Torin did not recognise fluttered over the gates and the town’s lone inn.A few tents had been raised in the field just beyond the town, also bearing the paired heraldry.
