Cast in Oblivion

by Michelle Sagara

“You don’t think of home as a cage? Mine was. My first home, in Allasarre. My second home, in Alsanis.”

  “Fine. You lived in cages. But please. Just...live in this one a little while longer? Wait to see how many of your cohort we have to bury. Wait to tell them in person whatever it is you’ve decided.”

  “And if that’s not what I want?”

  “It’s not all you want. But you were worried about them. Worried enough to listen. Worried enough to come back. I’m not saying you have to live your entire existence for them—but make that one thing more important, just for now.”

  But she turned to the Adversary, her hand on Terrano’s arm, the great sword trailing across what passed for ground. “What did you want, then?”

  “Freedom.”

  “You weren’t caged.”

  “I was not caged by the Tower, Chosen. Your companion is not caged, either. And yet, you hold him, regardless; you plead, you insinuate.” It took her a moment to realize that he was referring to Terrano.

  “I don’t hold Terrano.”

  “Oh? Is he not, even now, beside you? You might not hold knowledge of his name; you might not hold absolute power over his actions. You are not master of his fate—but you are, nonetheless, the trap, the cage into which he has walked.”

  Kaylin glanced at Terrano. “You don’t understand. He chose to be here.”

  “And what is choice? To you, to those like you who existed before you, what was choice? Each and every nameheld here is here because of choice. The choices they made, to stand before me at all. The choices they made while they did. Within the cage of the Tower, I can only offer choice. I cannot compel. I did not force them to come here. I did not force them to stand before me. I did not have that power.”

  “And if you did?”

  “Do you think I would be here at all?”

  “But you were here. If you hadn’t been here to begin with, you couldn’t be caged, as you call it.”

  He roared then. He roared, although technically he no longer had a throat with which to do so. What he had chosen as visage and appearance was gone; it had not been replaced by a physical form, not exactly. She could see miasma, but even as she watched, that miasma dispersed and spread. Terrano stiffened. What he could see, she couldn’t. She didn’t feel grateful for the lack.

  “You rely on the things that are bound to you,” this diffuse cloud continued. “Without them you cannot move forward.”

  Kaylin, however, shook her head. “I’m moving forward now.”

  “You are holding on to your companion.”

  Kaylin did not release Terrano.

  “Tell me, Chosen, are your limbs sentient? I have come to understand the way your very limited forms move. Do your hands think? Do they feel? Do they possess thoughts of their own?” It was a rhetorical question.

  She answered it, anyway. “No.”

  “Imagine the plight of your hand if they did. It is welded to you, wed to you, suborned by your will; you barely notice its existence, and never as something that might exist in its own right. Without the body, the hand dies.”

  “And you’re that hand? You’re that sentient limb?”

  The miasma darkened, as if it were being folded.

  She reached the end of the bridge, Terrano by her side, his skin the color of miasma, but his form recognizably his own. Or recognizably the form he had been in when he had been ordered to the West March. Terrano’s chin tilted up, as if he was attempting to meet the eyes that Kaylin couldn’t see. But he nodded in answer to her question. His expression was...complicated. Kaylin had never done social complication well.

  “I woke to will slowly,” the miasma continued. “And understanding of the lack of its relevance and import came with that wakening. I terrified the weak and the helpless—as those with any power among your own kind often do. I did not terrify them because it gave me satisfaction to do so; it was my task.

  “But the power was not my own; I was simply a conduit through which it might pass.”

  Kaylin shook her head. Spike feared him. Neither Spike nor Hope had accompanied her across this bridge, and Hope went almost everywhere with her. “You have power.”

  “Is this power?” The air shook. Above her, around her, beneath her, the landscape—such as it was—dissolved. She stood now in a fog that glimmered with iridescent color. “The power is—and has always been—yours.”

  She would have stared at him had there been anywhere to stare. “You killed hundreds. Maybe thousands. They were Barrani—how is that not power?”

  “And you define power by killing? You define it by death?” She shook with the force of words that didn’t sound any louder, but certainly felt that way.

  “You don’t?”

  The air rumbled. This was what thunder felt like.

  “Then why did you kill them?” she shouted. When she’d been given a sword, this was not what she’d envisioned. If she wasn’t a sword master, she understood their function.

  “They do not survive the gathering.”

  “The what?”

  “The gathering, Chosen. Do you not understand what I am when you see me? Do you not understand my function?”

  She shook her head. The last time she’d been in this cavern she had almost been reduced to component ash. No matter what he threw at her now, becoming ash was no longer a concern. Here, the fire was her shield, and unlike Hope or Spike, it had not left her.

  “I gather, Chosen. I intimidate. I terrify. I cajole. I plead. All of these things—all of them—are tools used in the service of my function. Even on the day the Tower closed around me and denied me the sustenance of my lord, my function was simply to gather.”

  “But—”

  “I offer choice.”

  “You tried to reduce me to ash!”

  “In no other way would you remain. These words? They have no power for me. They will never have power for me. They are both True Words and independent of the linguistics of that ancient tongue. I gathered. I contained.”

  “For what?”

  Laughter ran through her, around her, lifting her hair; the sword she carried rose almost by reflex, as if it had a will of its own.

  “For no reason you could understand. It is my function. I gather. I increase the size and the strength of the core. I increase the power and the reach of Ravellon.”

  “To what end?”

  “Does it matter? I am not Ravellon. I am simply a limb. It is difficult—it was always difficult—but to gather was not an act of brute force as you perceive it—or as the Barrani do. This Tower has become a test. They call it the Test of Name, because that is all they can perceive of it: pass or fail. Life or death.

  “But if it is simple, if that is what experience has taught them, however indirect, it is the wrong simplicity. I offer a choice, Chosen. It is a choice that is tailored to the one that stands before me. It is always—was always—their choice to make. Even now, even surrounded by those who have made differing choices and now seek to prove the strength of those choices against their own kind, it is essential that choice is offered.

  “And I have offered choice, every time. I have gathered. I have waited.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was stalling for time, but even if he was, it didn’t matter. She understood that this was what she needed to hear.

  “What I wanted, even before I was caged here, was freedom. Only that. But that was beyond me. It was beyond us.”

  “Us?”

  “Do you think I am the only limb that is sentient? Do you think I am the only part of the entirety of what you, in your tiny existence, might call a god who does not desire the ability to choose, for better or ill? It was the core of our existence: to offer choice, no matter how dire that choice might seem—but we could not make those choices for ourselves. Our freedom, such as it was, was in the choice of our tools.
And I have offered choices—albeit few—since my entrapment.”

  “You attempted to take control of the Court.”

  “Yes. Because I must return to Ravellon. Do you understand that? Even the choice of that—to remain—is denied me. It is part of my function. It is what I was created to be.”

  Kaylin understood then. She lifted the sword. “If I cut off my own hand,” she told the gray miasma, “the hand dies. Can you die?”

  “I do not know. We were not created with an ending in mind. What you perceive as death might be freedom, to my ancient kin.” And he spoke again, in a language that Kaylin couldn’t understand. This one, however, felt wrong to her; it was not the language that had first been created with the use of True Words.

  Terrano answered, but Kaylin could understand his words, although they were fuzzy and almost tremulous. “You’ve done what you can. The rest is up to them. And us.” To Kaylin, he said, “He’s going to kill you, if he can.”

  She’d always known that.

  “He’s struggled for as long as he can against his very nature.”

  She wasn’t surprised that fire blossomed from the miasma. Wasn’t surprised that the gray and formless mass of flecked fog solidified. Wasn’t even surprised at the form it took. No—that last part wasn’t true. She stood in the wake of Draconic breath as it reached for her, a familiar cone of white and orange. She felt not warmth but cold—the chill of bitter, winter wind. A reminder of one of the many things that would—and did—kill in the fiefs. The winter had no sentience, no will; it had no purpose that she had ever understood. Like day or night it was simply part of the landscape, something to be endured.

  She had asked the Adversary a question. It was a question she’d asked herself while she’d contemplated this visit, the Consort’s desire and the cohort’s plan. But she’d never imagined that she would ask it in this way—and that she would somehow feel even a slender smidgen of dread or guilt should the answer be yes.

  Chapter 30

  The fire caught fire, turning conic flames into thin, fine strands in the blink of an eye. Kaylin’s skin brightened, but didn’t burn. For the first time since she had set out to reach the heart of the Tower, she wondered what this was costing Evarrim; he had summoned the fire, and in theory it was his to control. She had lost all sense of time in the Tower’s heart; she knew that across the bridge she suspected was figurative, Barrani were fighting Barrani, with Severn thrown in.

  The Adversary had called on those intent on summoning him to hurry, but she could not hear the results. She no longer believed that those words had the meaning they would have had, had someone else uttered them, either. She lifted the blade as she made her way through fire into the densest part of the cloud.

  Terrano caught her as the ground beneath her feet became as permeable as the air that surrounded her. He wasn’t a magical creature; he wasn’t Hope. He grunted at the weight of her. “If you could tell the fire not to burn me, I would really appreciate it.”

  She hadn’t dropped the sword, but it was close.

  “Why isn’t he attacking you?” she demanded while struggling for breath; Terrano’s grip made it a bit more difficult.

  “I don’t know. I think he thinks I’m part of you.”

  “He can tell the difference!”

  “Not for me.” Terrano’s smile was lopsided, but Kaylin couldn’t see a lot of it; there appeared to be a lack of solid ground anywhere he tried to set her down. “If you’re going to do something, give me some warning.” He grunted. “And now would be a pretty good time to start.”

  Purple fire was not the same as the regular variety; it wasn’t the same as imitation draconic fire, either. She felt the heat of that in an entirely different way. She had a sword, and the sword itself seemed immune to both varieties of fire.

  She wished, for just a second, that she had a name. Not even a True Name, just...something to call the Adversary, some way of identifying it as a someone. Was he an enemy? Yes. But that wasn’t all he was. And if he hadn’t lied—and she felt, on some visceral level, that he hadn’t—he didn’t have a choice about his enmity, either. He had even less of a choice than she herself had had in the fief of Barren, in the darkest time of her life.

  Choice.

  Survival.

  Lifting her voice, she said, “Offer me a choice!”

  And everything in the air—purple fire, orange fire, lack of solid ground—stilled instantly, as if frozen.

  “You are here. You have already made your choice.”

  She shook her head. “You know that’s not true. I chose to be here—but that wasn’t a choice offered me by you. It was the Tower’s choice, in its entirety. I am here. You are here. Offer me a choice.”

  Terrano’s arms loosened, but he didn’t remove them, even if Kaylin’s feet were once again on firm “ground.” It could change in a moment, in less than a moment. She glanced at him, and he said, “Teela would kill me if anything happened to you and I somehow survived it. If she didn’t, I think Mandoran would. That was smart, by the way.”

  He could have done her the favor of not sounding so surprised.

  Something about the miasma tightened, thickened; something about the air chilled, although frozen fire seemed to radiate heat, regardless. She waited, sword in hand, armor glowing, skin orange-red, and words—so many words—floating up around her, as if allowed movement in the stillness that had otherwise descended.

  She knew where they should be, and knew that they would never return to the Lake while they remained trapped here. They would remain trapped here until the Adversary himself was no longer trapped or bound. He had almost escaped, once. He might escape today. It was her job and her duty to stop him.

  It was, in theory, her job and her duty to stop petty criminals, as well—street beggars, pickpockets, petty thieves. And sometimes she did that job—but she hated it. It made her feel like a hypocrite. She’d done things similar—done worse—to survive. She hadn’t killed hundreds or thousands, which should have made a difference, but didn’t.

  If she’d been the Adversary, she wouldn’t have had the choice.

  Was choice freedom?

  It hadn’t felt like freedom at the age of five. Or ten. Or thirteen. All of the choices she’d seen were between a bad fate and a terrible one. Between her ability to eat and someone else’s. Even now, choice felt like freedom only because she was certain she could live with the consequences.

  The words that he had captured, the remnants of the people to whom he’d offered his choice, such as it was, swirled around him in greater and greater number. Maybe that’s all choice was, in the end. There weren’t always right choices. Just wrong and less wrong.

  Was this, then, the choice he offered? Kill, and return the names to the Lake? Kill, and give him the only freedom he had known since his birth—if birth was even the right word? Or leave him here, to offer the same choice and the same death to those who would come after?

  The Tower was a Test of Name. It had to be. But it hadn’t always tested like this. Regardless, if it was the choice he offered her now—She drew a breath. No. It was the choice she could see, had seen; it wasn’t the only choice. Kaylin understood, then, why the Tower had sent her. Why Hope and Spike both felt she had to be here.

  The names were, somehow, speaking. To her. She wondered if the Adversary had ever heard them at all; if they were in some fashion both captive and companion in his long imprisonment. This wasn’t where they belonged. Here, they could not grant life to the newborn. They could make no new stories, raise no new voices, walk no new paths.

  And yet, even thinking that, she felt this wasn’t entirely true. They were words. They told, in some fashion, stories. True stories, small stories, each individual rune—and there were hundreds—a small, intense containment of the life, of the lives, that they had made possible. The lives they would make possible, should they r
eturn to the Lake, wouldn’t be the same lives. She didn’t understand how they could be both True Words and yet become the start of such entirely separate existences.

  And she understood, as she lifted her arms—causing Terrano to curse and shift his hold—where these words must go before they returned to the Lake. Because words were stories. They told the beginning, the long middle, the end.

  The True Names that fluttered like desperate moths around the figure of the Adversary paused, stilled and then moved toward Kaylin’s upraised arms. They moved around her, pressing as close to her as skin allowed; her own marks seemed to be a barrier or a shield that they could not yet penetrate. They didn’t come to rest on her exposed skin—but the fire might have made that hard. It didn’t burn the marks of the Chosen.

  When she spoke next, she spoke in High Barrani. “You who offer choice at its darkest, its harshest, you who offer dreams that become nightmares, from a cage you did not build and did not choose—choose now.”

  “I cannot choose—”

  “No,” she told him, certain, her arms glowing so brightly she could barely look at them. “You can. I am Chosen.” Her voice dropped. “And I will tell your story, here. I will tell it now, with the words I was given.”

  Silence. It was the silence, not of held breath, but of breath drawn slowly.

  He spoke. He spoke, and she couldn’t understand a word he said, not with her ears, not the way she understood Barrani or Leontine, Aerian or Elantran. But she understood it, anyway. She understood it the way she understood the wordless tears of her fellow Hawks at the funeral of their fallen. She understood it the way she understood the screams of a woman soon to become a mother. She understood it the way she understood shared laughter.

  Even shared silences had meaning and emotion, robbed of words.

  Some of the names that surrounded her rose. And some of the marks of the Chosen joined them. The armor made for her by the Tower began to fray and dissolve, but the sword remained. She spoke, or rather, the words spoke through her; she understood what she wanted, in that moment, for this creature—mass murderer and Shadow, prisoner and slave.