The statue presides over the two forms from five stories up. It is a single stone edifice carved in the shape of a bullwheel terminal and ending at the top with the figure of an eight-year-old girl dropping an acorn-sized seed.

Pasha Adderey takes in her visage above, which is three times her size, and in that moment, feels the pressing hands of time on her. She’ll never match the dimensions of the nine-foot statue, but she will grow—she has thought it for years since that moment. The prospect scares her.

“You were a terrible guard captain anyway,” Pasha utters. “Always late to the proceedings. Do you remember when I was attacked?”

Governor Drinnam of Kaskit kneels beneath the monument commemorating the burned. “Would it be wrong to say I forgot about it?” The man still carries the double-bladed polearm, which Pasha has never seen him employ in her defense. “I was a formality, Signature. Your Entrusted had you.” He looks up. “Still have you.”

The buzzing comes then, a cloud of figures, each as tall as Pasha’s statue. The group of five around the desolate plain that was once the cenotaph of the Far Flung Sails—Kaskit’s navy, though now focused chiefly on ropeway cord deployment. The creatures fan out as subtly as if the stone form of Pasha had come to life and shook her hand.

Balkou is the largest Entrusted in her employ, a male rhinoceros beetle with an enormous horn that could impale five men and dangle them like a kebab. He clacks his mandibles as he walks over. “It wasn’t you on there, Pasha. It was that raw man.”

“You told me that last year,” Pasha says. “Though, I don’t know how my city would feel seeing Genebrict Stalt hurling the seed that saved it.”

“Historical accuracy.”

“It’s not meant to be accuracy.” That Balkou has any artistic inclination or opinion at all perplexes her. “Have you been sketching?”

“Somewhat, Pasha. It is difficult to replicate everything.”

“Then replicate the essence of the thing.”

“I’m not sure you know what that means, Pasha.”

She doesn’t, only heard the phrase from other artists, none she had spent any significant amount of time next to, save for this one.

“Pasha?” asks the beetle.

“Uh huh?”

“What would the essence of this thing be, then?”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Pasha tries to decipher the statute’s meaning. Carved blacker than the night, the only detail implied by angles in the stone, and some shimmering that must be extra polish, the thing glitters in places like a crystal found in a cave. The artist didn’t detail it, leaving out the windows in the bullwheel terminal, the cracks in the structure, and even the men fighting underneath it after they had destroyed most of her alcazar. The sculptor even omitted the bullwheel itself, making Pasha the focal point of what she did. Her stone face on the visage barely says anything, just like she feels right now, though she shouldn’t.

“Grief,” says Pasha. “Or, it should be.”

“They were all Incited,” Balkou reminds her, using the word to describe the humans turned to fight against each other by the Inciter strand. That outbreak in Kaskit is a chapter Pasha never wants to relive, and if things go correctly, she never will.

“I wouldn’t feel bad, either,” says Drinnam, standing. “I saw those men salivate at the prospect of killing their own—saw whole squadrons turn on each other in the blink of an eye.” He looks at his arm. “Will it work, Signature?”

“I hope so,” Pasha thinks, inspecting the fist-sized depiction of the fire seed trailing from the tower. There is sadness in the entire portrayal, but one Pasha does not feel and thinks she should. “Am I human?”

Neither man nor beetle responds immediately, searching the air for a response and perhaps, after exhausting that, fabricating one.

“You may be the most human of us left,” Drinnam says, two hands at his waist as he inspects the burned cemetery grounds around them. Its inner walls hold the skids of charred firestarter sap even after the seed had doused the whole inner core of the city years ago. Some tombstones are unperturbed as if laughing at Pasha’s effort.

“I don’t believe I have any right to speak on this matter,” says Balkou, his voice like rocks grinding together.

“The essence of the thing,” Pasha reminds him.

“‘The essence of the thing’ is that you did what you had to do. What more is there to ask?”

Eons more, Pasha thinks but doesn’t voice. These guardians are the product of Sixt and Vakye, both lost during the assault on her alcazar, and both share their mother and father’s lack of understanding of human nature. Balkou, however, is getting better.

Before she can ask them, another Entrusted joins the fray, fluttering down from the swirling patrol like a raven’s stray feather. A female this time, the second largest in her employ and no doubt the future pairing to Balkou, if the two would only get along.

“I don’t trust these sods with a mycorrhizal,” scrapes Murrell, already sounding like an old woman with a smoker’s rasp. She looks up, watching the rest of her brothers and sisters fluttering about, and carries a sealed wooden box with a silver lid that gleams against the light of the Twin Pales. “Are you sure about this, Pasha?”

“Not sure about anything anymore.” Pasha takes the box. “Who taught you how to cuss?”

Drinnam shuffles his feet. “Sorry.”

The Entrusted squadron descends, and Murrell fans her carapace out to form a buckler the size of a dinner table, looking at her brothers and sisters as if they’ll throw knives. Balkou shakes his head.

Pasha opens the box and looks down at an orange mushroom spotted in white about the size of a drinking mug. It regards Pasha’s with deep-black bulbous eyes that protrude from its stem, where its mouth rests, zipped shut.

Those open eyes signal to Pasha that someone is listening on the other side—someone who has been waiting for her message for decades. “Estensheer?”

The voice on the line sounds annoyed, as it should be, but also perplexed. “Pasha Adderey?”

No title? Maybe that is the way it should be.

“Hold a seat for me. I am coming.”