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Menagerie
1. a collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition
2. a strange or diverse collection of people or things
Lyon is a collector. As a child, he collects pebbles and animals made of wood. And then he collects people like him, whose world Deliora destroyed.
Lyon is a collector. As a child, he collects smooth pebbles from creek beds and colorful feathers snagged on bushes and little animals made of wood. Sometimes, in the winter, as he stands in the snow and sticks out his tongue, he catches snowflakes in his hands and wishes he could collect them too. They melt into his skin and vanish, dampen his gloves, spread across the floor in little puddles. They always disappear.
When he begins learning ice-make magic from Ur, he leaves behind his childish collections. Instead he collects skills, spells, ideas. He collects animals made of ice instead of wood, a menagerie of creatures glittering like glass. Things he can use to grow stronger.
He will surpass Ur one day. He will be the strongest ice mage there ever was. Sometimes, while he lies huddled beneath the blankets in the dead of night with the icy wind sneaking through the cracks in the cabin walls to scrape up and down his spine, he tells himself that one day he will be the strongest mage that ever lived.
When Ur dies—when Ur is murdered by that selfish brat Gray—Lyon can't surpass her anymore. He can't be the strongest ice mage there ever was, much less the strongest mage that ever lived. He doesn't know how to surpass a ghost.
Not until it occurs to him that the only way to surpass a dead person is to surpass what killed them.
And so he begins a new collection. He collects people like him, whose world Deliora destroyed. He collects the broken and lost and grieving. But mostly, he collects the vengeful. He gathers them and, after years of plotting and searching and debating, plops them onto Galuna Island. Along with Deliora, still encased in Ur's ice, which is the crowning jewel of his macabre menagerie.
They put years of effort into melting that unmeltable ice, one little bit at a time. And then, just as they're reaching the pinnacle of their triumph, Gray and his friends sweep in out of nowhere and make a mess of everything.
Lyon tries to kill him, although maybe not as hard as he could have, but Gray survives. Survives and ruins everything, just like usual.
He shatters Lyon's ice creatures to pieces, his friends knock aside Lyon's followers like bowling pins, and they stand against Deliora only to watch it crumble. It crumbles away to dust like it had never been, like it hadn't once been strong enough to tear Lyon's life to pieces. Ur's ice melts and flows away into the ocean. She has been gone for a long time, but now the last of her streams through Lyon's fingers like sand in an hourglass, as impossible to stop as time itself.
And Gray walks away at the end with little more than a backwards glance and a few words of parting advice. He always was the one Lyon had never been able to keep. In the end, nothing much is left at all.
Despite all his scheming and collecting, Lyon has never been able to keep much of anything.