When the door closed Alize sank to the floor where she stood. To her surprise, Kell and Davram did the same, each cradling his face in his heads. And against everything, Alize felt admiration swell inside her. They would move against Icar, despite their comfort in Parousia. They had a choice. They could stand aside and let fate determine their futures. Yet they had taken the weapon offered to them.

And Alize could wield it too. She could conquer the winds.

“How can I help?” she asked.

Kell looked up at her, his gaze soft and melancholy. “Do you know why the Deku are killing the Hrumi?”

Alize shook her head, for in truth, despite all her fears, she could only venture guesses. “But it is not their only attack on the Hrumi since the Temple Battle. And I, in their cursed citadel, I did not even know their transgressions against us until I spoke with my surviving sisters.”

Kell looked up, “Then there are survivors?”

If Alize had ever doubted him, those half-formed suspicions fizzled with the relief that swept his features. Alize wanted to press her hands into his and relish the small mercy of reprieve with him.

“Yes.” She almost felt a smile forming, that same sad smile of dispirited loneliness that had flickered on Greer’s face. But it faltered as she recalled her sisters who had not survived, of all the burdens still crushing her.

Kell sat back on his heels and rubbed his face. “While you were gone, Icar granted the Deku full access to the Hrumi prisoners. That was why he called me to meet with him the day you left Parousia. I asked him their intentions and he said they meant to soultruss the Hrumi.”

“Soultruss us? Can they?” Alize asked.

Davram and Kell exchanged a glanced.

“By all appearances,” Davram responded, “they cannot.” He watched Alize with newfound attention.

She drew her shawl around her, wondering his purpose.

Kell’s dissecting expression mirrored Davram’s. “Not a single woman’s body has survived the procedure, and by my understanding, that means the souls die too.” Kell sighed. “I can’t stop them, Alize. When I objected to Icar, he revoked my responsibilities and my dungeon keys.

“And when Kell refused to obey,” Davram added, “Icar ordered him whipped.”

Kell clenched his jaw. “Now Aghta is in charge, and the Deku are relentless.”

Alize studied the new welt in Kell’s face. She could see another disappearing down his neck, under his collar. Her rage rumbled up from her heart, directed not only at Icar but at herself. Her own accusations against Kell, shouted only moments earlier, still reverberated in her ears. Was she so utterly incapable of extending him the same generosity he gave her over and over?

Kell flinched under her gaze, the welt constricting even his pain. And Alize realized that Kell too craved comfort. He had defended the Hrumi, had raised his voice fully knowing the consequences that would follow.

For that, Alize owed him her deepest gratitude, not her unbridled suspicion. “I’m sorry for doubting you,” she said. She knew as soon as the words came from her mouth it was a pitiful recompense for his suffering.

“He did all he could,” Davram declared, resting a hand briefly on his friend’s back to offer the comfort that Alize blundered to provide. “Now, let us speak frankly. The Deku have begun to assert that the Hrumi have no souls, but Kell and I suspect something somewhat different. Is it perhaps the Hrumi do not house their souls in their bodies?”

Alize drew her knees to her stomach and locked her gaze on the floor. She needed to weigh her options. That meant remembering why she could not afford to help Kell. She could not even help herself.

“That would explain so much,” Kell added. Anticipation grew in his voice. “Especially given the reaction we’ve seen you and the other Hrumi have over the past few weeks. And I think,” he spoke with hesitant caution, “I know why you don’t want to tell me.”

Alize raised her eyes to his sharply.

“The Hrumi fear the Sargons as soultrussers, but we have never had the capacity to commit such a crime. That remains the realm of the Deku, and the Kogalok Soul Eaters. The Kogaloks have only been around a generation, which begs the question, why did the Hrumi feel the need to protect themselves against the Deku?”

“Against the Sargons,” Alize corrected, desperate to suppress his words, to keep her precarious world from wholly collapsing. “We always believed the Sargons soultrussed us.”

Kell just shook his head as if he had not heard her. “If the Hrumi have immunity to the Deku, that suggests they needed it. It suggests the clans have been living in close proximity.”

“Stop,” Alize whispered.

Kell continued nonetheless, but he spoke without triumph. “The Deku live in the protected mountains.”

Alize clenched her eyes shut. Kell’s voice rankled her, not just for the words she feared would come, but for his soft tone. He breached this topic and believed it was the course that would save everything. Alize was not so sure, but she could not deny his uninvited kindness, gentle as moonlight. She scarcely had the courage to face it.

“Where no prince,” Kell murmured so quietly that even the gods might not hear him, “would dare search for a children’s camp.”

The muscles in Alize’s body seized. She faced the Sargons gulping down every reaction she had. Anger, denial, humiliation, repugnance, and terror all swept through her, but she waited for something worthy of her friends. An acceptance, a truce that she could extend, despite her misgivings. Despite all the factors beyond her control.

Finally she nodded, mutedly. That was all she could bear, in that moment.

Kell grasped her hand, his own warm and strong. “I suspect that no one else has made the connection. And, I know you couldn’t trust me before, but I know now, and nothing you can do will change that.”

He left so many promises unspoken, that he would not reveal this last precious refuge to the forces that could destroy it forever. It would be nothing for him, but he granted Alize that covenant as if he had never considered another option.

“But,” Kell continued, “if you can trust me now, we may be able to work this out together.”

“I always trusted you,” Alize whispered. For better or worse, it was true. Whatever Iedaja insinuated about Alize’s judgement, about who she chose to trust, Alize did not regret trusting Kell or Davram. “I just couldn’t make that decision for everyone else.”

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Kell’s responding smile looked unconvinced. It was such a cruelty that Alize’s heart could break in such total silence, with foolish stillness painted on her face.

Kell had no reason to notice. “Then allow me one last assertion.”

When he rose to his feet, Alize observed he moved somewhat gingerly for his wounds, but only winced once.

She met Davram’s eyes and he smiled in encouragement, with such hope that Alize nearly did not recognize him. He had reassembled himself in her absence, had built himself stronger foundations than even those she had seen the day they first met in the dark woods.

Alize rose to her feet as Kell returned. He clutched a worn wooden box. Its sides were decorated with elaborate carvings of a hunting party pursuing a stag. The lid bore the last scene, the stag pierced through with the hunters’ spears, surrounded by hounds forever frozen in silent howls. The stag itself appeared pathetically complacent to his fate. His head bent downwards, eyes open, no utterance of any death cry.

Alize regarded Kell in confusion.

“I should have given this to you immediately when you arrived, but with everything going on,” Kell stammered, “it felt like the only part of you that I had gotten to keep.” Kell pressed the box into Alize’s hands.

She grasped it uncertainly, not yet understanding Kell’s meaning.

Kell withdrew, leaving her holding it alone.

Alize turned her attention to the box, her feeble fingers finding the uneven edge of the lid. She pressed it open and caught her breath.

Her dagger lay within.

Alize could almost feel it humming as she reached for it. When her fingers grasped it, the relief to reconnect with her soul flushed through her with sweet bliss, the first rays of sunlight on her skin after the winter left her deadened. The connection reverberated into her core, restoring the darkest recesses of her mind and bestowing a lightness that left her giddy.

But another sensation rushed her before the first began to subside, this second not so sweet. It bore power, adamant and unyielding as sullen rage. It scraped her insides raw and chewed them like tough meat.

Her soul was alive, in the very act of living, the force of living. And it dragged Alize towards a truth she would deny until the world itself eroded.

Her soul was hungry.

First it called the echoes.

They poured in through the walls surrounding Alize and the Sargons, glowing like fervent starlight. Alize held out her hands, desperate to hinder their unbidden assault on her body. Her mind reeled with the memory, the searing fire that burned like live flesh writhing over vaulting flames. She could neither stop, nor refuse that unholy consumption. There was no safety for her, no safety because she herself embodied her own danger.

But fight she did. Though the effort left her gasping, dripping sweat, around her the echoes slowed, and then halted, suspended in the air. When she opened her eyes, a galaxy surrounded her, thousands of pinpricks of magic undulating around her, no longer moving but not quite still. They shimmered and illuminated all the room’s surface with radiance. Even through her terror, Alize could see its staggering beauty.

“Stay calm, Alize,” Kell murmured, his voice so intimately close to her unraveling. She remembered his hand slipping from hers in the Temple as the echoes set her alight. “You are in control.”

“I am not,” she whispered.

In her moment of weakness, the echoes edged closer.

“And if I release my dagger,” she gasped, “will I lose what little power I have?”

The hovering echoes cast dancing shadows on the Sargons faces. “It’s your decision, Alize,” Davram said, his fear more evident than Kell’s, “choose wisely.”

Alize nearly winced. She knew the Davram could not fathom the full gravity of the situation, for her danger was his too. Her soul was Deku, her hunger Deku, gnawing at her very being as it never had before the Temple Battle.

Alize could feel her soul’s hunger, and even though she did not touch Davram, his identity itched her, called her. She sensed that to accede, to take his soul for her own, would be the most gratifying experience of her life. Alize had hoped she would not feel it so strongly, that the Deku needed physical contact, as Viken had said. But Alize felt the hunger twist her innards. The proximity tempted her so much it nearly obscured the role of her own choice.

Nearly. It could not yet overshadow her disgust for her Deku heritage.

As she fought the echoes, she fought against that hunger.

Because Alize knew if she faltered, if she yielded, the last Ginmae prince would not survive her failure. Her tenacity now held consequence far beyond her own fate.

But the effort to withstand both the echoes and her own instincts bled through her muscles until they throbbed in tandem with the pulse in her ears. She could not maintain this truce, this liminal moment. She had to either drop the dagger and pray for respite, or wait to lose this battle. She stood on a precipice, forced to decide between two futures that each stood utterly contrary and utterly uncertain.

Around her the echoes hummed in the stillness, brimming with urgency, impatience, undeserved entitlement.

Alize drew a deep breath.

Her dagger hilt hit the floor, clanging flatly.

For an instant the echoes seemed to grow brighter, rippled in the air, and then they faded back. They disappeared as they had come, now lacking their brilliant anticipation.

Alize stayed as she stood, blinking, lowering her hands arms. All her panting could not yet hamper the world’s whirling around her.

And then Kell moved beside her, smoothing his hands down her sides, steadying her. In this moment she valued his reassurances a thousand times more than her beleaguered pride. She rested her head on his shoulder. It was a tiny respite in a sea of agony.

“So it’s true,” Davram whispered.

Alize could barely stand to look at Davram. She was still haunted by her desire to harm him. The turmoil in her body subsided slowly, twisting and untwisting her hopes and apprehensions. It took a long time for her to find her voice again. She squeezed Kell’s wrists gently before pressing away from him to stand on her own.

Alone. Bitterly alone. The winds would never quell for her.

She was the wind.

“We have always bound our souls to our daggers,” she explained, her voice cracking. They were long past denial. Besides, she would discuss anything to distract her from her own wickedness. “It is our tradition. The clans believe it protects us from the Sargons, and it works against the Kogaloks and Deku as well. It is,” Alize whispered, “our most important protection. That’s why your grandmother never told you.”

Kell exhaled as he digested her information. He still stood close enough to Alize that his breath tickled her hair, reminding her of her physicality, grounding her.

She preempted his question, “And you’re right about the Hrumi camp. It’s the only safe place in we knew – or rather it was. The Deku attacked it, sometime after the Temple Battle. They took prisoners and left no survivors. We do not know their purpose. But I fear,” Alize choked, “if they are seeking new victims in Parousia, they must have exhausted those they already had.”

“They are trying to break the Hrumi magic,” Kell asserted.

“So it would seem,” Alize conceded. “Kell. Where are the Hrumi daggers?”

“They are locked in the prison. And I forgot,” a sad smile teased Kell’s lips, “to give Icar the only existing key.” He held it up for Alize to see.

Her eyes traced over the corroded metal and profound relief washed through Alize. Not quite solemnly, she knocked the key to the floor as she embraced Kell. In this moment she felt neither remorse nor shame for this breach in decorum. Kell’s suspicion, his insight, could yet save over a hundred lives. And his arms held her tightly.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“But, Alize,” Davram ventured, “what of the echoes?”

Her elation abated as she heard Davram’s question. Wincing, she tugged away from Kell to face the Ginmae prince and her own growing sobriety.

Alize resisted pressing her hand to her heart. The echoes were her heritage, and her heritage was sacrilege against him. “I’m sorry. I have no explanations for you.” That much remains true. “The echoes come to me.” Alize flushed to remember that only that evening she had wished for their power. A farce, to think she could control it. How cruel that such power rendered her more powerless than ever – not because of lack of options, but lack of strength.

Her dagger lay discarded on the floor.

Alize gestured to it. “I must trouble you to keep this for me. I feel it was enough to restore me, for a time, but I no longer can wield it.”

As Kell collected the dagger, Alize again startled at his ease in handling it. She had burned the great Conjurer Omurtak with the hilt when he held it. Kell gripped it with the confidence of a sword, a tool, but he bore it delicately as he returned it back to the box. As if he felt some fragility in it.

And Alize felt the remnants of his hands touching her waist.

“When you need it,” he said to her, his face grave, “it will be here.”

Alize bent her head in acknowledgement. “I will accompany you to see Prince Tamer.” Her voice grew stronger. She had summoned the fire and this time held it at bay. Only a fool would mistake that for control, but neither was it total submission.

She had a place to start from.

“Well, now that we’ve cleared that up,” Davram clapped his hands together, “it’s time we talk strategy.”