Page 183 of The Sun He Buried

Enough.

I reach for the silver.

The first rune releases near my left jaw. Flesh opens under it.

Then the second.

The mask peels from my mouth one sigil at a time. Each line tears free of the scar beneath it. Blood warms my chin. The last rune holds beside my right eye until I force it loose.

Silver comes away in my hand.

Cold finds the branded skin.

Myrkviðr finds the rest of me.

A woman below the hill lies awake beside a coughing child. Fear keeps pace with every breath.

Two guards at the west doors are hungry, bored, and trying not to laugh about the snow packed into one man’s boot.

The old cook is angry about wet floors.

Three mine workers drink in a lower house. One has lost enough coin to resent the game. Another wants him to keep playing.

A girl sleeps through the storm with joy still warm from the basket fort in the Hall.

Grief sits under a roof near the market. Fresh. Private. The man beside it offers comfort and worries it’s the wrong kind.

Hundreds more press in before I finish the next breath.

The mask doesn’t stop their emotions. It blunts them. Takes the edge from every life until I can walk through my own Hall without carrying a settlement in my skull.

Now there is no edge.

There is only all of it.

I lower the walls that keep the noise at a distance.

More.

Every sleeping mind leaks. Every waking person pushes fear, want, irritation, pleasure, loneliness, and love into the forest. None reaches for me. None knows I stand above them receiving it.

I take nothing.

I let it arrive.

The storm adds no emotion of its own. It only gives everyone below a reason to produce more.

The settlement comes in through every gap the silver usually covers. It all runs together. The sleeping girl’s joy. The guard sick over the roof above him. Grief in one house and want in the next, none of it staying where it belongs.

This is why our rulers forge masks.

No mind was built to hold a town.

The first breath hurts.

The second doesn’t fit.

By the third, my knees have locked against the force of staying upright.