Chapter Two // Daughter

Kill. That was the only thought Arha allowed herself. Kill kill kill kill kill was all that flooded her mind because if she allowed her thoughts to wander for even a moment she would surely find herself so overcome with grief and despair that she would be unable even to fight back against her opponent.

Her opponent. That's right. Not Tekarn. Not her mentor. Not the man who raised her. He was just another opponent. Just another victim in a long, long line.

He was just one more.

Arha was a being of pure motion, a razor-sharp blur of yellow bone-blade and scarlet hair delivering a fusillade of slashes and stabs and feints and fakes and even punches and kicks, weaving together everything she knew from five of the seven Hateful Sword-Arts at a fierce, blistering pace. The woman known to the outside world as The Terror of the Dunes channeled a lifetime of strength and speed and skill and mastery for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the bastard standing in front of her. There was no past. There was to future. There was only the moment. Only the duel.

Tekarn simply unsheathed his own blade - narrowed his eyes - and parried blow after blow after blow, his stance unmoving and his expression unchanging as he seemed to effortlessly weather Arha's storm, stoic and implacable as an age-old mountain.

This spectacular, breakneck exchange lasted fifty-seven seconds - and then Arha leapt back, her energy momentarily spent.

She was panting like a starving beast of the Wastes, now, strands of hair hanging askew over her sweat-drenched face as the two combatants circled each other slowly, each mirroring the motion of the other. This was the Slow Dance that precipitated the Final Cut; it was one that both master and student knew all too well.

"Explain yourself," Arha hissed, her eyes narrowed to thin slits. Now it was shuddering, hideous rage that filled her mind and blotted out her misery and disbelief.

"There is nothing to explain," Tekarn replied stonily. "I have been given an order, and I will see that order through."

"Who gave it?" Arha demanded.

"Who do you think?" Tekarn replied. "I warned you, Arha."

"You didn't warn me that you were a gutless fucking traitor," Arha growled, her lip curling involuntarily. "You didn't warn me that you were a liar, and a betrayer, and a shameless oathbreaking-"

"My oath is to the Master, and to the Great Worm!" Tekarn thundered, with a sudden intensity that caught the Third Eltok momentarily off-guard. "The same as yours!"

"What of your oath to me?" Arha roared in reply. "You swore to me that nothing in this world would ever harm me again! You swore it!"

"I never-" Tekarn started - and then, for the first time in her life Arha saw the older man's expression crumple, and she knew at once that he, too, had remembered.

"You know what I think?" Arha snarled, unwilling to let him reply or even ponder. "I think your entire like was just a big fucking waste, Tekarn. All that work, all that discipline, all that time it took you to climb to the very pinnacle of strength. And yet here you stand, obeying the orders of weaker men to murder your own daughter."

"This-" he cut in - and then he was silent for some time before he spoke again, softer this time. "You could not possibly understand."

"Hollow words," Arha said, drawing her leg back and dropping to a low, fighting crouch. Her grip tightened around the hilt of her blade. "From the mouth of a man with no heart."

At that, Tekarn's expression hardened - and he drew now to his full height, his shortsword carving a wicked path through the air before him. Any hesitation, any uncertainty, any sorrow - all of it fell away behind a mask of cold and unerring focus.

"I'm sorry," he offered curtly - a final, restrained admission.

"No, you're not," Arha replied - and then she was surging forward like rushing water, the point of her blade angled right for Tekarn's throat.

The older man made to parry, but the instant she saw his wrist move - in truth, the instant she saw his tendons jump - Arha halted her momentum entirely and dropped straight down to the floor, her pointed jab transforming just as quickly into a horizontal slash that would cripple the First Eltok at his shins.

And yet somehow, somehow he was already moving, sidestepping before Arha's sword was even within an inch - how had he done it? there had been no sign, no tell! - and then his boot snapped up and caught her in the side of the face and Arha was staggering back, pain flaring across her jaw and one of her teeth popping loose. And then, before she could even react, there was his blade, hungry and gleaming.

She leapt back, but she knew that it was far too late even before the weapon carved vertically across her face, entering at the top of her scalp and completing its arc by leaping bloodily from the point of her chin. Her vision dimmed, shifted - and as thick, hot fluid spilled down the side of her face Arha came to the rather detached and empirical conclusion that she had just lost her left eye.

She leapt back again, and this time Tekarn allowed her to do so. For a moment, she staggered, her footing uncertain - and then she planted both feet firmly on the floor and glared at Tekarn with one wide, hateful grey eye. The other was but an oozing mass of blood and viscera that dribbled down the side of her face.

The eye mattered not. She was far from done.

"Surrender," Tekarn ordered, his voice as cold and hard as iron - though Arha could scarcely hear him over the insipid ringing in her ears. "This need not be a slaughter."

"I disagree, Tekarn," Arha cackled hoarsely, her laugh a strained and delirious thing. "I disagree."

Tekarn's reply, then, was to storm forward - parry her strike, then snatch her wrist lightning-quick and twist until bone cracked and Arha's sword clattered to the floor, released involuntarily by nerveless fingers. Then came his armored fist, sailing in like a meteor descending to Earth, and the impact was thus that Arha was flung back, her head knocking painfully against the wall.

Her prized collection swords fell noisily from their mounts as Tekarn descended upon her like an almighty wave, battering her chest and face with blow after blow after blow. She dropped to one knee, letting out a gasp of pain as she reached for the tiny dagger concealed inside her sock. But by then, Tekarn had her ponytail in hand - a flash of memory, of the First Eltok admonishing how many times have I told you to that cut ridiculous hair of yours - and Arha found herself yanked back, then flung unceremoniously to the floor.

Her eye was gone. A dozen of her bones were fractured or shattered. She could not hear and could only faintly see. But Arha was a Winnower, and thus she leapt to her feet like a reanimated corpse and flung herself at Tekarn one final time. She would gouge out his eyes with her nails. She would rip out his throat with her teeth. The method did not matter; if she reached him, she would rip her mentor to bloody shreds. That was the sole and singular purpose dominating her dying mind.

Tekarn took one step forward and floored her with a titanic right hook.

And now, it was truly over.

Still, Arha tried one last time to rise - called upon whatever remained of her prodigious strength, of her unyielding drive to win at any and all cost - and then simply collapsed, her body spent and destroyed. And she watched with hazy, shifting vision as Tekarn loomed over her like an amorphous shadow. His eyes were two pinpricks amidst a sea of black.

"Liar," Arha choked out, and blood sputtered from between cracked lips and broken teeth.

Tekarn'a only retort was to raise his boot up, then bring it crashing down against her skull - and to send her plummeting into a vast darkness that obliterated all sensation.

For a time, Arha drifted, and did not think.

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And then, she did not awaken so much as she did slam quite violently back into the world of the physical, of light and color and sound and smell. And of sensation, and oh there was an overwhelming deluge of sensation that started dull and faded but quickly became a roaring inferno that scorched Arha's skin and burned through her veins like acid. Everything was pain. Pain was all that there was.

Any ordinary man or woman would have been brought to a trembling, weeping ball by such agony - to an unthinking thing simply waiting for the torment to subside. But Arha was one of a people for whom pain was but an old and well-acquainted friend, and thus it was that she instead - with great discipline - forced herself into sitting upright. With that sudden motion, there came a great dizziness, and Arha waited patiently for the nausea and the spinning to subside. And then, when it had, she began to take stock of her surroundings.

She was in a damp and dimly-lit cell, one wherein everything was hewn from black rock save for a bone-forged door nested in the center of the far wall. The only illumination was coming from a narrow slit in that very door - flickering torchlight that painted a wavering, uncertain line across the slick rock upon which the Third Eltok now knelt.

Your life is over.

The thought arrived in Arha's head unbidden and unwanted and yet it now could not be un-thought, for now the full and terrible reality of everything that had just transpired fell upon Arha all at once.

Perhaps it was simply the nature of being a Winnower. Perhaps it was a product of her upbringing. Or perhaps it had come from her parents, from the nameless village of warriors against whom even the First Host had struggled mightily. But whatever the reason may have been, the fact remained that Arha's reaction was not one of grief or despondence but one of roaring, all-encompassing hate. Hate that flooded her veins like acid and focused her thoughts into a needle-sharp point directed only at the people who had done this to her.

This was not right. This was not fair. THIS WAS NOT WHAT SHE DESERVED. She was Arha, the Third Eltok, the Terror of the Dunes, the greatest prodigy of her generation, and the universe owed her better than this-

"How are we feeling?" a voice called. Arha's head whipped around, and her eye went wide and her nostrils flared and her heart began to pound at the sight of him.

He was standing there in the corner, so still that Arha had failed to even notice him - pale, dark-haired young Kelsen, clad now in the blue-painted armor of a Bloodied One and draped in a cloak the color of deepest onyx. His mouth was twisted into a cruel sneer that did not match the low, smouldering anger burning in his eyes.

Though Arha knew neither how nor why, she nevertheless knew at once and for a certainty that this contemptible weakling was in some way responsible for everything she now suffered. And so, almost without thinking, she rose to her feet and lunged forward - only to topple to down a moment later, her battered legs having immediately given out.

Her entire body trembled with impotent rage as the newly-anointed Second Eltok strode quite casually across the cell, his cape flaring behind him like a wall of living shadow. There was a truly dangerous hunger in his eyes as he regarded her bruised and beaten state.

"You..." Arha shuddered, forcing the word out from a bile-choked throat. "You...did this...?"

"That's right," Kelsen said quietly. "All the agony, all the betrayal, all the hurt you're feeling right now - I did that to you, you wretched gve'ka whore."

He dropped to a crouch now, and from one of twin sheathes on his belt there came a long and narrow blade.

Get up, Arha was screaming at herself. Get up, damnit! What use was over a decade of training and discipline if she could not, at this very moment, get the fuck up and crush this gloating fool's throat!

In every sense imaginable there existed a vast gulf between the two - a gulf in skill, in strength, in speed, in experience. If not for her present circumstances Arha knew full well she could have taken that stupid, sneering, insipid young Eltok's life as easily as she might draw breath. But instead, here she was, able only to glower and snarl as Kelsen crouched beside her with not even an ounce of fear for his own safety.

"Pay...you're gonna...pay..." Arha forced out, her shaking hands curling tight into fists. Her nails dug into the palms of her hands. It was, all things considered, a laughable threat, but one that could perhaps have actually been believed by the intensity of its delivery.

"What?" Kelsen chuckled, cupping a hand to his ear and leaning even closer. His dagger, still held casually in one hand, glinted in the torchlight as he shifted. "I couldn't quite make that out."

"Kill...you..." Arha seethed through gritted teeth. By the Worm and the Wastes, she wanted nothing more than to do to this idiot what she had done to a hundred hapless fools before him! "Just like...I did...Kagen..."

At that, the atmosphere shifted.

Kagen's smile fell away at once, replaced by an expression of eerie calm - one marred by the violence that was still plain in his eyes. His grip on the dagger tightened from something casual to something focused. Purposeful. And it dawned on Arha then that her all-encompassing hatred was likely mirrored quite perfectly by his own.

"Most Winnowers are orphans, you know," Kelsen said. The words came out strange and detached. "Singular survivors, plucked from eradicated peoples and indoctrinated to the ways of the Great Worm. But not me, Arha. Oh, no. I had a father. I had a father who loved me, and protected me, and made sure all my life that I never wanted for anything. I was proud to admire him. Proud to call myself his son."

He blinked, sniffed - reached up, wiped at his eyes. And then he said:

"You stole from me."

And then without warning the dagger clattered to the floor and those slender hands were against Arha's throat and they were squeezing and squeezing and Arha was thrashing, clawing and scraping at his elbows but she was far too weak and thus the slim man before her had might very well have been a pillar of stone.

"I wasn't like the rest of you gve'ka scum," Kelsen hissed, the veins bulging in his arms as he squeezed somehow even tighter. Tears were welling in his eyes even as he strangled the life from the Third Eltok's body. "I had a father, and he loved me, and you stole that from me!"

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Arha couldn't even begin to process his words - her thoughts were just an unending stream of don't die don't die don't die don't die, a primal response as old as sentience itself as she writhed, her legs kicking madly in search of his shins, his groin, anything to halt the darkness encroaching over her mind and her vision. But it was fruitless, and with every motion she grew only more sluggish as the energy was sapped from her body.

"This is how it felt!" Kelsen roared, his voice echoing in that subterranean cell. "This is how it felt when he-"

The door creaked open behind him - and Arha was released at once as Kelsen's back went ramrod-straight and the hair along the lengths of his arms shot up. Arha fell to that damp floor, hacking and coughing and drawing in great heaving gasps of air. And through blurred vision she saw Gekto standing there in the doorway, his silhouette framed in flickering orange, eyes in shadow and a bemused smile upon his face as he surveyed the scene laid out before him.

"Kelsen," Gekto said, as casually as one might greet a passerby on the street. "Is this really the best use of your time?"

Slowly, the Second Eltok rose to his feet, as though worried that any sudden motion might provoke a response. Arha watched it all with the detachment of the oxygen-deprived, an unmoving and forgotten onlooker to all that was about to transpire.

"Gekto," Kelsen said, respectfully inclining his head despite the fact that Gekto was, technically, a subordinate. Just like everyone else, Kelsen knew well the ghastly tales told of the First Shadow. "It pleases me to see you well."

"That's nice," Gekto smiled, and the silence that followed was a clear prompt for the Second Eltok to continue speaking.

"I was just interrogating the prisoner," Kelsen said quickly, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "There is still, uh, much of the plot against the Grand Lord of which we are unaware, and I thought it prudent to, ah-"

As the Second Eltok spoke, Gekto slunk slow and measured into the room, the shadows on his face deepening and darkening as he stepped closer and closer. And the speed at which Kelsen spoke grew faster and faster until Gekto was right beside him and the Second Eltok went abruptly silent.

"The reason I asked," Gekto said, pleasantly enough, "is because, in accordance with our Laws and Ways, the condemned is to remain untouched until the hour of the trial." His bemused half-smile morphed into something else entirely. "I don't know if you knew that. It's only your second day on the job, after all."

"I am well aware," Kelsen said quietly, staring down at his shoes. "Look, Gekto-"

"Look, kid," Gekto mirrored, letting out a melodramatic sigh. He reached up, then, and Kelsen flinched involuntarily as the older man clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Can I give you some free advice?"

"By all means," Kelsen all but whispered.

The First Shadow leaned in close.

"Don't push your luck," Gekto said, and in that moment his voice dropped from warm and conversational to something low and dangerous and before he could say another word Kelsen was out the door, his cloak flaring out behind him as he muttered a few words of polite contrition in the Old Tongue.

Gekto watched the door, for a few seconds - and then his gaze fell upon Arha and he moved to crouch beside her just as Kelsen had. Upon his face now was a slight frown, and an expression that conveyed not exactly sympathy - but mild displeasure, at the very least.

He waited in silence for Arha to muster the strength to speak.

"Here on...Tekarn's orders?" she managed, finally, gesturing limply at the First Shadow.

"Yep," Gekto replied, with a click of his tongue. "He figured I should probably check up on you, make sure you hadn't choked on your own vomit or anything like that before the trial. And, well, I had a sneaking suspicion I might encounter our little rat."

As he was Tekarn's right hand - and someone who in general Arha held in dim regard - she supposed she should have directed at least a fraction of her anger to the man crouched in front of her. But at the moment, however, Gekto was her only anchor amidst the disorienting sea in which she was currently drowning; more to the point, her rage was quickly giving way to a terrible blanket of fatigue.

"How considerate of him," Arha remarked dryly, forcing herself back into sitting upright and leaning her head against the wall. Gekto observed in silence, making no motion to assist. When she was finally somewhat comfortable, then, she asked him: "Where are my honor guard?"

"Alive," Gekto answered, the corner of his mouth curving upwards. "I'm told Draven managed to talk them down from a fight they had no chance of winning. Sa-vas ah shek, the entire Third Host is foaming at the mouth - but at the moment they've been cowed by the knowledge that Bartok holds your life in the palm of his hand. They're still holding out hope for a future where their leader might be returned to them." He scoffed. "They're delusional."

"Worm take it all," Arha groaned, tilting her head back. Just a minute ago she had been ready to tear out Kelsen's throat with her teeth - and now what she craved, more than anything, was simply to go back to sleep. Instead, she forced her head down, and fixed the Shadow with a one-eyed stare.

"So it was Bartok, then?" she demanded, her voice cracked and broken and yet commanding all the same.

"Bartok, Kelsen, some combination of the two," Gekto shrugged, nonplussed. "A lot of different people jumping on the same opportunity, far as I can tell."

"And that makes Tekarn their lapdog," Arha growled, her ire rising once more. "To think he'd debase himself before Bartok in such a fashion. Don't tell me that damned coward is actually afraid of that fat old vassat."

"Bartok hasn't lost a duel in twenty years," Gekto offered, not seeming particularly interested in the accusation.

"And he hasn't fought one in ten!" Arha pressed. "If Tekarn really gave a shit about me, he would have fought for me! If I were in his place, I would have-" She realized then that her words were falling upon deaf ears, and shifted to a different approach. "It really doesn't bother you, Gekto, seeing him just abandon me like this?"

"Eh," Gekto shrugged. "I just do what I'm told."

"You're like him, then," Arha declared. "A slave who doesn't even know it."

"Hey, I enjoy my work," Gekto countered, nonchalant to the end. "And I think I'm pretty good at it. That's good enough for me."

"You're lucky you don't have anyone you care about," Arha shot back, her words dripping with bitter venom. Then, her shoulders slumped, and she leaned back once more, her body drained of energy.

At that, there was a moment of hesitation - and then Gekto simply rose to his feet, cracking his knuckles as he did so.

"Guess I am," he said, with his trademark half-smile back on his face. "Anyway, I've got things to do. I'll have people watching your cell, though, so there won't be any further uninvited guests."

And as though that were sufficient goodbye he turned on his heel and began to stride away, his boots clicking noisily against the stone with every step. He was nearly out the door when Arha's voice, strained from exhaustion and heavy with sorrow, rang out from behind him.

"You know something funny?" Arha called out. And for whatever reason, the First Shadow paused to listen, though he did not turn back to look.

"I thought of him as my father," Arha said, shaking her head and smiling without mirth. "Even said it to his face, every now and then. And I think it's fair to say most others thought the same. But you know what? I don't think he ever called me daughter. Not once. Student, pupil, disciple. Eltok, lately. But never daughter."

Gekto paused for a moment longer. Then, wordlessly, he slipped out of sight, and the clicking of his boot-heels faded gradually into silence as the door slammed shut and Arha was alone once more.

The Third Eltok sat there unmoving in the darkness for a long, long time. And then, when she could stand neither the silence nor the impotence of it all, she forced herself to climb quite painfully to her feet.

And then she set to work.

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It was hours later that Ralan, longtime bodyguard and Shadow to Grand Lord Bartok, opened the cell door to find Arha drenched in sweat and midway through her thousandth push-up. Their eyes met and the Third Eltok was on her feet at once, reaching up and brushing aside a loose strand of hair as the Winnower looked her over without comment.

"Well?" Arha demanded. "It's time?"

"It is time," the laconic Winnower confirmed.

"Finally," Arha scoffed, striding forward before the other man could say another word. "Let's get this over with."

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Only fifty-seven Winnowers were absent that day.

All others were packed tight beneath the archway of the Terminux Citadel, a gargantuan enclave of sheer bone and the only building large enough to possibly house all three combined Hosts. The Citadel's hallowed walls were inscribed with truly a truly uncountable number of engravings, some names and some oaths and some prayers and some even vulgar graffiti; above, the vaunted ceiling was a latticework of interconnecting bone strands that jutted off in directions that seemed all but entirely random. Blue flames roared in lanterns hanging on chains the size of men, and the heat was all but a physical force pressing down on all gathered beneath.

The Hosts were assembled into three parallel lines, each five wide and each helmed by the Eltok's respective honor-guards. They made for a vast and terrible panoply of multicolored paint and yellow bone and gritted teeth and hungry eyes and saliva and sweat and blood and yet all of them were cowed into silence and stillness by the importance of that in which they were now participants. Among Winnowers, a duel was the answer to most disputes, and thus an actual trial was a rare and significant matter.

At the far end of the room lounged Bartok in a throne hewn from a gigantic slab of bone, flanked by Tekarn on one side and Kelsen on the other. While the Grand Lord commiserated with the latter in hushed, whispered tones, the former simply stared straight ahead, unflinching and unmoving. None dared meet his black eyes.

Finally, after what felt like hours of waiting, the great doors creaked open and the Third Eltok was brought forth.

At the sight of her, Grakke's rational, far-thinking mind was gone at once, obliterated utterly by the bone-deep rage for which he was known so well. Though the Third Eltok stood haughty and imperious, her chin held high, her entire body was but a patchwork of discolored bruising and dried blood. Her hair, once a striking signature of brilliant red, was now but a matted and disheveled shroud of dull burgundy hanging over her shoulders. And her face - this was what truly brought the Third Shadow's ire to a boil - it was but a mask of dried blood from which only a single grey eye stared out.

The Winnowers of the Second Host jeered and mocked, albeit in low voices, while those of the Third simply stared in horrified disbelief - before, with visible effect, anger and outrage began to ripple throughout their number. There was nothing a Winnower understood better than an insult, and for the best among them to be mutilated and paraded before them in such a fashion was surely an insult of the highest offense.

As before, it was only Draven's hand on his shoulder that stopped Grakke from charging across the Citadel and rending Kelsen to pieces with his bare hands.

"Any excuse," Draven whispered, his voice at once both gentle and firm. "Give them any excuse and they will slaughter us all where we stand."

"Let 'em try," Grakke seethed, through gritted teeth. There were veins bulging in his forehead and neck. "I'll kill everything in this fuckin' room."

"The Third Host looks to you, Grakke!" Draven hissed, tightening his grip. "You are Eltok now! If you fight, they fight. If you stay, they stay. You have a responsibility now - for all their lives, not just their own!"

Even through the haze of rage, Draven's words rang true - and so, with every ounce of self-control Grakke could muster he managed to remain still as the Grand Lord began to speak.

It was, for all the ritual and self-seriousness, a fairly brisk ceremony that followed. In a booming voice that rattled the lantern-chains, the Grand Lord outlined in short, simple terms the nature of Arha's crime. Lord Kelsen had come bearing evidence of a plot by the Third Eltok to assassinate the Grand Lord - via poison, concealed in his wine - and elevate the First Eltok to his place. While killing a Grand Lord in open combat was not only condoned but expected, to dispatch the highest-ranking Winnower with such cowardly and underhanded methods flew in the face of everything the Worm and The Master had ever decreed. It was a sin of great and loathsome magnitude.

Three of Bartok's slaves had confessed to their involvement in the plot, and thus been ritually flayed and burned and was tradition. Tekarn, of course, had remained oblivious to the machinations of his former pupil, and in swift order exonerated himself beyond a doubt by breaking his student into submission. Thus Arha now stood alone, the sole recipient of the Grand Lord's judgement.

As Bartok spoke, the reactions of the Honor Guard were varied. Grakke seethed, his shoulders heaving and falling with every breath, but with clenched jaw and tightened fists he somehow managed to remain still. Beside him, Makran was perhaps even angrier, at all times letting loose a near-constant stream of curses and declarations of violent intent. Nageth, by contrast, was merely grimacing all the while, shaking his head periodically as the charges were brought forth. Zekval was silent, a shadow of his former self. And Draven was whispering to them all - be calm, be patient. Don't lose control. Don't spend your lives. We can still survive this, all of us. The Third Host can yet live on.

Finally, when all was said and done, the disgraced Third Eltok was given a brief moment to offer any words in her defense. And to that she turned her head, looked Tekarn dead in the eyes, and loudly spoke:

"You insult me. You mock me. You craft falsehoods of my name. Yet were there a sword in my hands, not one of you would dare speak to me thus. Were he not a gutless coward, Lord Bartok would face me in battle, putting his very life on the line for his venomous lies. Instead he merely sits there and declares it so, all with his loyal pets at his side." She hawked and spat. "I've nothing more to say. Kill me and be done with it."

That was it, then. Without further ado the Grand Lord rose ponderously from his seat and began the Final Proclamation.

"Arha, of the Third Host," Bartok boomed, and all at once fell rapturously silent. "You sought to defy the Law of Strength through conniving and treachery. You are a weak thing, masquerading as strong, and though you feel the great and ceaseless hunger of the Worm you do not abide by the principles by which The Master proclaimed we should feed. I dub you an abomination, and I dub you a failure."

"Lying bastard," Grakke growled, under his breath. Draven hand remained upon his shoulder.

"Thus I condemn you, Arha of the Third Host," Bartok declared, and a moment's pause stretched on for boundless infinity. "To exile!"

The entire citadel simply exploded into noise; arguments and protestations and declarations of confusion and anger and all of it flowed freely and without restraint because not one Winnower present at that hallowed ceremony had expected anything less than a summary execution. Grakke's heart surged with something too bitter to be relief - and he saw Kelsen's lips moving as the Second Eltok began an animated protest, only for Tekarn to shoot the young general a withering stare that sent the teenager straight into mute and motionless acquiescence. All around Grakke, there were murmurs of relief from Arha's closest, who at the very least would be spared the sight of their leader flayed and burned on this day.

Of course, exile to the Seven Wastes was all but certain death anyway. But nobody - not that celebrating, and not those protesting - bothered to dwell on that particular thought, not in that moment of thunderous bewilderment.

"Silence!" Bartok bellowed, smashing his fist against a bronze gong hanging beside his throne for exactly that purpose, and that was what he received at once. If the Winnowers were enraptured before, they were now hanging onto every one of the Grand Lord's words as they waited to see what would happen next.

"Who shall stand with it?" Bartok demanded - the pronoun already shifted to properly denote that Arha was no longer by any measure a human being. And before the last word had even left the Grand Lord's mouth Grakke was storming across the chamber, fists clenched and gaze lowered and Draven staring despondently as the towering Shadow moved to take up his proper place once more: at the Third Eltok's side.

Ralan did not interfere as Grakke put a hand on Arha's shoulder and leaned in close, the two of them exchanging brief words - words meant for them and them alone - before Grakke stepped back and folded his arms, a resolute Shadow to his oldest and closest friend once more.

"The rest of you," Grakke ordered, fixing the honor guard with an iron stare. "Come."

Makran didn't need to be told - she was at Arha's side just as quickly, now hurling slurs and invectives at Kelsen, at Tekarn, at the Second Host, and even the Grand Lord himself. If anything she seemed almost eager to stand outnumbered and isolated against the whole of her peers. Next came Nageth, steady and reliable as always, who with Grakke exchanged a small nod and from Makran received a welcoming pat on the back.

"Zekval," Draven said quietly, meeting the younger man's trembling gaze. "Don't throw your life away. Please." His voice broke. "I can't stand to see you all-"

But then, despite his mounting terror, Zekval forced himself to turn away, and with great effort crossed before a thousand leering eyes to join a group of people that he had, in the deepest chambers of his heart, quietly dared to consider a family. Nageth wore a rare grin as he told his brother that he was proud to stand beside him, and Makran was shaking him both violently and affectionately by his shoulders. Despite it all, Arha's heart swelled at the sight of them, surrounding her now like a wall against the forces that conspired against her.

Only Draven remained now at the head of the Third Host. And it was only through great effort that he managed to lift his head and meet Arha's one remaining eye.

Her gaze asked but a single, simple question: Well?

"I can't," Draven said, shaking his head. His shoulders sagged, and his head slumped, and he could not look into their eyes any longer. "I just...can't."

"Fucking coward," Makran spat - but Arha held up a hand for silence.

"It's alright, old friend," she said, and for the first time in twenty-four hours there was a hint of a smile upon her lips. Not happy, not relieved - but wry and accepting, nonetheless. "Someone needs to watch over them while I'm gone, after all."

"I will," Draven nodded. He still couldn't look at them, not at any of them. But there was steel in his voice. "I'll keep them safe. All of them."

"That's good enough for me," Arha said - and then her smile faded, and she turned to face the individuals who had all but razed her life to the ground.

"So?" she demanded.

And then something shifted.

In unison, every brazier went out. Darkness fell upon the assembled. The air seemed to grow thicker, heavier. All present knew without knowing that this was the ill omen. This was the final cessation. And Bartok was but a looming shadow with eyes like twin pinpricks of light as he spoke thus:

I taught you to struggle.

And so you did.

You struggled for so, so long.

You had climbed nearly to the pinnacle.

And I was well pleased.

But now, that time has passed.

You have come down from the mountain.

You are nothing.

Nobody.

You have no soul.

You have no heart.

I have taken them from you.

You are no longer human.

You are the antithesis of a Winnower.

You are the antithesis of me.

And you are going to die in that desert.

Goodbye, Arha.

Now get out of my sight.