Ado’s trial came quickly enough. The church’s always did. She met it with as much dignity was was left in her, but that had been wrung out to a disheartening degree over her short stay in prison.

It was not, in the end, captivity which gnawed at her. It was Folami. Folami and his poisonous offer. Poisonous, not venomous. Because a poison’s lethality came only when it was drunk, not injected.

She could live. To do so was surrender, desecration, betrayal and defeat. It was to throw away everything she’d ever wanted, to turn on the one man who valued what she could do. To prove the world right about her weakness.

But it was to live. And living…Well, that was life instead of death. It was an argument just by the basic fact of its existence.

Ado paced, and thought. She slept, infrequently and for minutes at a time. Slowly becoming more and more bedragled by her own discontent and fears. Slowly feeling death’s scythe creep nearer to her neck. It was almost a relief when her trial came. Almost.

Folami was the one to take her to it, and for a moment she mistook his presence as a stroke of cruelty. The worry on his face, though, told her otherwise. Her brother hadn’t been getting much more sleep than her, not much at all.

“Change of heart?” She asked, knowing full well he’d not answer in the affirmative. Folami’s weariness disappeared quite quickly, buried beneath a new mound of bitter irritation.

“You always keep it up, don’t you Ado?” He sighed. “No matter what, that tongue of yours just can’t keep cutting away. Even when it’s cutting you.”

She was almost impressed by the quick-wittedness involved in such an easy and seamless metaphor, but Ado was fatigued beyond such a petty sensation. She just sighed.

“What do you want?”

Folami sighed too. Apparently, whatever it was, it didn’t inspire much in the way of hope for him.

“Sister, I don’t know what you’re planning for your trial. Please, though, just…Accept what’s coming. Plead guilty, confess your crimes, you know you’ll be forgiven.”

She did. She knew that very, very fucking well. Well enough to torture herself with it.

“And what will come of it if I do?” Ado spat. “Wudra will just hunker down and be destroyed, even you must realise that.”

“If they fight immediately.” Folami breathed, after a moment. “Yes, they will. There was a reason they did not send our father aid when Shaiagrazni’s invasion first began. But that is not the plan.”

Ado froze, stared at him, and then rearranged the events around her with that in mind.

“They intend to grant the Dark Lord passage.” She gasped, as everything clicked into place at once. “To send him forth and let him and Shaiagrazni fight one another, to watch their enemies destroy each other while they sit idle.”

“And then to swoop in and crush the victor in their weakened state.” Folami finished, grinning. “Correct, and so you see sister, you don’t need to continue this. Shaiagrazni is not the only way this world can be saved, you need not serve that demon of a man.”

Need not.

They reached the room of Ado’s trial, and it was, at least, no less than a man would have received. Large, pillared, sterile and nearly pure in its construction of marble and steel. She saw galleys filled with glaring faces, and at the end of the room there was a seat held atop a podium, towered over by two more.

It was in those dual peaks that the King and High Priest sat, waiting damnably for her entrance. Ado did not delay them any longer than was necessary.

“Princess Ado Mortascia.” Came a booming voice, ringing out the very moment her feet came down into the top of her podium. “You stand accused of treason, subversion of the Crown and consorting with practitioners of the Dark Arts. How do you plead?”

There it was. How did she plead?

“Silenos Shaiagrazni is the only hope of defeating the Dark Lord.” Ado replied, almost wincing at the sound of her own words echoing out across the room, let alone the reactions they drew. Hisses, glares, disgust. Rage. The sight of one angry man was something any woman knew to be very, very wary around. A hundred, as she saw now…It had every nerve in her body screaming for flight.

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But she held, and continued speaking. Ado had precious moments before the room’s shock wore off and her voice was drowned in protests and condemnation. She had to use it as best she could, because it wasn’t just her life hanging by a thread.

“I implore you all, please, think about this issue. Shaiagrazni did not send me as an envoy for no reason, he needs your aid. The Dark Lord is a threat to all- he wants to destroy this world to its very foundations. His armies kill and absorb, with virtually no exception. His people starve. Starve. If you are all right, and this does end with either of the Dark Lords weakened and finished off in their enfeeblement, then you have nothing to fear. But what if you’re wrong? What if the victor is able to win against you, even still? You must throw your strength behind Shaiagrazni, for all the world’s sakes.”

The silence that followed was a crushing weight upon Ado’s chest, compressing her lungs into stagnancy. It made way for hope. A single, stupid moment of it.

Then the gavel came down, almost before the snarls and roars it was swung to silence. She turned to see the High Priest glaring daggers at her.

“We’ve all heard enough.” He roared. “Guilty, this woman is guilty. Bad enough to admit it so brazenly, she even tries to tempt others into her own charge with the time allotted to recant it!”

Cries of agreement ran out, pricking Ado from all sides like blunted needles. She felt weightless, suddenly, unbalanced as if the floor were spinning and rocking beneath her. Her head spun, ears rang. Hope crumbled.

“Ado Mortascia, you have pled guilty to all charges brought before you, and have shown no hint of regret in their face. You have left this court with no choice but to sentence you to death for your crimes against the human race.”

What was happening. This couldn’t be…What was happening? How could this be happening?

It all happened in a bizarre, elongated fugue. Ado was seized, dragged from the hall, snatched away from the hateful, spitting voices and marched down a cold corridor. Mere moments later, her brother was beside her.

“What were you thinking!?” He spat. Ado froze. What had she been thinking?

“Shaiagrazni.” She croaked. “People under him, they live…Well. Long lives, they’re happy. He kills aristocrats, nobles, strips them of power and displaces Monarchs but the people are-”

“-Who gives a fuck about the damned peasantry?” Folami snapped. Ado stared at him. “This trial was about the subversion of a Monarch and subservience to a Dark Caster, the only one to even mention the peasantry was you.”

Ado didn’t have the words to reply, she just considered his. And she realised he was right.

What had she thought of the peasantry, a few months ago? Nothing. Literally nothing, they’d not even been a concern for her. Just things that did work, and sent the rewards upwards into their masters’ hands. She’d been one of those masters. The happiness, contentedness- the basic damned rights of the ones responsible for propping her life of comfort up had all been less than tertiary. A non-factor.

Somewhere along the way, between Shaiagrazni’s lectures, Baird’s arguments and the simple, basic experience of seeing with her own eyes what the world was changing to around her, Ado had learned differently. And she’d forgotten what her people were truly like, what they valued. What they didn’t.

What a fool she’d been, to try and convince nobles, aristocrats and holy men that Shaiagrazni treated the common man differently than the Dark Lord. They didn’t fight the Dark Lord over their peasants’ treatment. They fought him to maintain their own hegemony. Everything else…At best, was pretence.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Ado said, finally. Her voice was fragile in her own ears, and sharp. It felt like wielding a needle of glass. She couldn’t help but betray the bitterness wrapped in around it. “What’s done is done. There would never have been any persuading them, not of what matters.”

Somehow, it was freeing to say that. Because Ado didn’t matter.

“How far you have fallen.” Folami sighed, staring at Ado as if he pitied her, somehow. As if she were the mad one in a sensible world. “I tried, sister. I really, truly tried to save you from yourself. But…It seems you are intent on dying. It seems, no matter what, you will follow this path to its end. Even if that end is also yours.”

“Perhaps the world would be a better place if less of its controllers cared about their own end more than other people’s.” Ado replied, feeling a new fire taking her. “Think, Folami, for once in your life, think. Why exactly do you think Silenos Shaiagrazni has such an excess of allies in so short a time? Why do you think he was able to suborn Collin Baird and Kaltan, to travel for so long with a Paladin, to bring in the Vampires of Clan Liliai themselves. Why do you think each settlement he takes is so passive and calm after the taking? People are not loyal to us. A few are, maybe, those who truly drank in the dogma and duty we’ve spent so many generations feeding them, but for the most part they simply don’t care for us. And they shouldn’t. They should hate us, because we are hateable.”

By the time Ado finished, she was out of breath. And she hadn’t even given voice to the most important part of all.

How do you think Shaiagrazni brought me in to work beneath him?

But Folami was not in the mood for discussion and debate, he only fell silent and bitter, rather than contemplative, after hearing her remarks. Ado watched him fall away from her side, letting the guards further escort her. With that, she was left to think all by herself.

She was going to die. She’d brought it on herself. Ado had practically suicided, in that courtroom. And all she had left was the notion that it had been just.

Had it?

Ado recalled the sight of her father, her mentor. She recalled the countless thousands crushed to paste under Shaiagraznian grotesqueries. She trembled, but she did not falter in her beliefs.

Yes. In the end, with everything considered and weighed against all else, she had done what she’d needed to. The only thing she could have. Ado was competent, intelligent, and magically gifted. She had value, but she had none at all compared to all else that might come from House Shaiagrazni’s rule.

Her hands clenched into fists. She believed what she’d said, she knew that it was true. And she pitied the fools now sending her off into a cell. Because their own people knew just what Shaiagrazni’s rule could bring.

And they knew, too, that his emissary was scheduled for execution.