Blood and ruin. Steel and death. Father and daughter. On and on it went.
A mouth twisted in mute scream. Eyes filled with love, screams, shining with a coded message of a thousand life-lessons never to be taught, joys never to be celebrated, faith never to be reclaimed from the ashes.
"Danitha. Do your duty."
She couldn't.
"Our best hope is Ruzon," Marten had said. "It's one of the Denizes' largest ports. Northwest of here. Once we clear the Joryev forests, it's a day's ride, across the pastures and plains. Easy for everyone to make, even the wounded. It's a Coalition staging ground. If we march there, we may find shelter and provision."
Shelter and provision. High promises. Danitha wondered, without saying anything to Marten, who had seemed increasingly agitated in the previous few days, whether it was the right thing to do. Benalia's plains were beaming and fecund, and the promise of food—a bed—was entrancing. But it would be days yet before they reached the edge of murky Joryev forests, and even then, it was impossible to know what they would find—whether the same decimation that had met them in Croden would pursue them to Ruzon. But she said nothing, because Marten's eyes burned with some strange dark fire in them, as though he knew it was a risk and didn't care, as though he was grasping on to the idea of Ruzon, and if it was death then let it be so, and so she had said nothing.
So they marched, Danitha and the remnants of the town of Croden, across hard earth and through steely sea-cliff grasses. The stench of Phyrexia hung in the air: fuming rubber mingled with the sweet rot of decaying flesh. Death, everywhere.
Danitha mentally recounted those whom death had claimed—it was a good exercise, she knew, she heard a warm oaky voice from the past insist, for a ruler to know their logistics without their steward's help. (No matter how meager the leader is, she thought bitterly). Croden: a town of twelve hundred. Their initial party: three-hundred and twenty-four. After the first night: three-hundred and twelve. Six who had succumbed to wounds, bleeding in the dark and crying out for their families; two who, shouting over the roar of the ocean crashing against the cliffs, left the group to fend for themselves; one, the squire Jaren, who had died (by her failure).
And, of course, those lost to grimmer fates. Two, the first nights in the cave, whose wounds began in trickles of bloody red and then darkened and by the end seeped black. In the morning, they were gone, their possessions left entirely undisturbed, their cots encrusted with sludge. Left, presumably, to join the hundreds and hundreds of Croden villagers who had been swept in the torrent of Phyrexian death.
Payle—all the soldiers under her command—Aryel, her eyes shining in the flames—Teshar, sonorous voice, grandfatherly love. Weeping, crying, begging for her help, eyes turning deep onyx and words garbled in gasps of slime. Teshar, the peaceful man, the beautiful man, plated in porcelain, weeping oil, eyes screaming for mercy, voice crunched into a cacophony, breaking the Joren's neck, the boy he must have known, must have cared for, and laughing, laughing, laughing.
She wondered, as she knelt against one of the crackly pines that dotted the cliffside (Eladamri pines, she recalled from her geography lessons, after one of the heroes of the first Invasion), if there were more among them. More Phyrexians in waiting. She, Marten, Brother Merah had agreed to take a headcount each morning and each night to ensure that nobody had left and no new strangers had arrived—but there were too many people to count, too few people she trusted to do the counting, and too little time to double-check their work. Perhaps worse than the doubts that wobbled her mind, however, was what she did find. When she asked whether there were any wounds, any concerning symptoms, many met her with silence, sepulchral unmeaning silence.
Danitha couldn't blame them. Seeing protectors, leaders, friends, lovers, parents, children, blasted apart and turned to abominations, transmuted into nightmares like the kind that pursue you each night with no reprieve and which leave you crying, asking for your father, knowing he isn't there—it silenced all language. The only thing worse: thinking that it might happen to you. Silence, silence, and worse.
But Danitha could not accept that.
So here she was, kneeling against the crackled roots of the Eladamri tree, her hands folded in front of her as her eyes, dark like the tree bark, dark like his eyes had been, swept around the prayer circle. Brother Merah had invited the entire camp to a Serran service (a smoke-puff of normalcy? Consolation to those for whom consolation might mean nothing?). Fewer than twenty had shown up. Even those who had arrived, she noticed, seeing their faces, sunken with hunger, clammy from cold, bodies shaking with fatigue and fear, even they seemed to be here out of some sense of obligation, some instinct at the base of their skulls that insisted that they must. She observed, with a breath of relief, familiar faces, the baker Nathyn and their daughter, Elara.
Brother Merah was intoning the mass, his voice tremulous and weary, not like Teshar's, deep and sonorous (screams, wails, cackles, a thousand voices layered on his, spitting venom at her, begging for death). Around them, eyes, downcast. The spectral gasps of a faith half-empty.
The mass' words were etched in her being; had heard it recited in the mouths of a thousand different celebrants, standing alongside her father with a straight spine, like his, arms folded behind her, like his, face serene, like his. Here was her favorite part, when the celebrant rang bells of five sizes to symbolize how Serra's grace resonated through the dappled shapes of the universe. Here was his favorite part, where the priest invoked the names of the Serran heroes: stalwart Brindri, caring Angus, wise Urza, and, of course, as her father loved best, heroic Gerrard Capashen. (She had wondered, at age seven, when the name Aron Capashen would be added to the list. She knew, now, that it would never be).
"And, now," Brother Merah chirped, tapping his talons together, breathy, puffing out syllables like it would spray Serra into the air, finding nothing but empty breath. "And, now, siblings, we may, erm, bring Serra's grace, here to each other, by our words, for as it is written: Art, discourse, freedom, peace." Silence. "Has, erm, has anyone words, words of grace. Hm?"
Silence, silence, silence. Some silence, of course, was normal during the Attestation of the Faithful—sometimes because Serra's wings did not descend upon the faithful immediately, and often because the great orators among Benalia City's crowds needed to give the appearance that their carefully rehearsed bromides were from the heart. But this was more, an empty silence, the silence of words deadened. In Danitha's heart, she felt, without knowing why, an ache, a love, a need.
Merah nodded, moving to conclude the silence. Together, wordless, they prayed.
That night, the argent moon splashed silver light across a meager slip of sky, swallowed by the red rippling fury of the Phyrexian portals. Danitha, lying on her bedroll, legs aching from a day of clambering over uneven rocky earth, shuddered at memories, echoes of agony and prayers for mercy.
"Marten," she whispered. "Are you awake?"
Silence for a moment; or, better, the sound of one feigning silence, wishing for it. Then, his voice, quiet. "Yes."
Brother Merah's healing magic had finally gone to work on Marten's body, knitting together the flesh and bone that the Phyrexian obliterator had shorn apart back in Croden. But he had never been athletic, and no healing magic could change that—and so he had lagged behind Danitha today, sluggish, stumbling, grunting curses at himself.
"Can't sleep?"
A sigh, shallow, a simmer, quiet, like simultaneously he didn't want her to hear and needed to make sure she did. "No."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Silence. There hung between them a plunging gap, an abyss. It was a silence that spoke: the quiet fuming silence of one who not only does not speak but who resents speaking, who spits on it, who is enraged that anyone might have the gall to speak. There was nothing for her to say, nothing that would fill that void, and yet within her she felt that cry, that need, that she could not pin to reality.
"Please, cousin," she breathed. "I need you."
Pause. In that boundless depth, the waiting, all creation groaned.
"Do you still feel the wounds, Danitha?" he said. "When they heal you?"
"Hrm," she said, paused. A darkness in his voice, a pusling ebony eye inside his question. "Your wound should have healed. Do you need more time with Brother Merah?"
"No. Not like that. I haven't had it before, you know. Restoration magic. Not really. Just when I had pneumonia when we were young, from sitting out in the rain when mother said not to. I wonder if mother is alive. But no. When they heal you, when they heal wounds, I mean, I didn't think I'd still feel it. But I do. Not the hurt—it's not that, I've kept an eye out for infections and bleeding. But I feel it, like a buzzing, like that warm tight ache you get when you come in from the snow with the ice sticking to your fingers. I can't stop feeling it. It doesn't hurt—but I feel it. I feel the claws in me. I feel it all slipping away."
A catch in her throat, a burning in her eye. She slipped a hand beneath her tunic and felt for her wounds, but just beneath the skin, aching there, was a pit with no end, filled with inky darkness and love drowned in oil, something that could not, could not be cleared. Her father's face floated, drowned and bloated, at the top.
"Yes," she breathed. "I've felt it."
She could feel Marten shuddering from across the abyss. His breath shook, wavered asynchronously like his lungs were breathing separately.
"Will it go away? Will I be myself again?"
Chest heavy; all the words she knew, all the wounds she bore, smashing together in her mind, refusing to meld. Inspiration, that was what he needed; she had trained in it, in rhetoric and diplomatic care, but those memories were nothing but graves belching ghastly exhaust. But he needed it. She opened her mouth and began to tell him that, yes, he would be fine, that he could simply—
Truth must be set free. If the wings of Truth are clipped, the voices will fall silent. Canto 167. Her duty.
"No. It won't."
She slipped her hand beneath her tunic again. Suddenly they came on her, one after another, like voltaic surges: the rib the Phyrexian had broken in Croden, the leathery scar that a sleeper agent had left her with during the first Invasion, the reknitted wrist once fractured by a practice sword, held crying, with his arms around her, assuring her that all knights, yes, even him, got hurt; they could be broken, as she was, as Marten was now.
"It won't go away," she continued, letting the wind blow through her. "It won't go away. You'll carry it. But you will always be yourself, cousin. There is something in you, something true, and it doesn't get wiped away that easily."
Marten sniffed. She could see silvery light shine off the damp splotches on his cheeks.
"When I was there, in the chapel," Marten said, "When it was standing over me and it was the end, it was—there was, it was just, standing over me, everything fell away, and I stared into something terrible, it was something despicable, like it was something that felt like nothing at all. It was like a bad dream, except when you wake up you learn it wasn't a dream. Like this huge, dark shadow that was looking over me. And it felt like it was everywhere, like this horrible harsh light at the end of everything, and I was falling apart, and I was going to be gone. It was all—Nothing. I don't know what it is, Danitha. I just know—when it looked down on me, the whole world was just. Nothing."
They hung there, across the abyss. And then, she reached out her hand. Hung it in the air, a moment.
"I won't let it take you, cousin," she breathed. "It can't. It won't. Things—this world, it's—" She cursed within. She felt, not for the first time, indeed this feeling had welled in her with increasing regularity, like she was grasping in the darkness, the outer contours, the edges, of what she was saying, of this thing that he needed. She was pressed against it, it was right there, and if she could only wrap her hands around it and tell him, then maybe—but no. Her words died before they were born.
And they were there for a moment, for a minute, for eternity in silence. She wanted to speak, but the silence swallowed her.
And then. She heard—something. A rustle of pine needles. A crunch. The clang of metal.
Danitha had her sword in hand before she was on her feet. No time to click on her breastplate or vambraces, barely time to slip into her gauntlets and boots, had to gamble that Phyrexians would decide not to go for her chest or forearms or sides. Unlikely. The sword would be her insurance. In a moment, Marten was behind her, looking out, teary eyes shining.
The other members of the night watch were swept up in her wake, swirling into her surging run. They were reservists, less sharp than she was used to—movements sluggish, coordination sloppy, almost slamming into each other, and all dead tired—but as she hissed orders at them, they fell in behind her. She could hear labored breathing, gasping, chattering teeth, gasps of prayer.
Swords glinted silver and prismatic in the moonlight, casting light over the inky trees, seeming to reflect like phantom lights in the distance. There might be dozens out there. If Teshar was back, she doubted this rugged squad would be able to hold him off. Splintered bodies, twisted forms, Phyrexian laughter.
She saw a slip of shadow dart between twisted vines, then two more blurs behind it. She flung a hard up in a blurred gesture, praying that the squad would catch her meaning, and went low to the ground. Step around a broken vine, push aside an unsteady stone, press against trees to avoid detection, listen for whirs of machinery. Nothing; she heard only rustling foliage and clanking metal—the sonorous ping of familiar steel. Benalish steel.
Compleated knights? The lost soldiers at Croden? Aryel, come to visit vengeance upon Danitha for leaving her behind? Eyes that would drip sludge-soaked hate, images of faith and honor turned to obscenity, and her, needing to bury another blade into the body of another love.
A slip, a crunch, a yelp of pain from behind her. She wheeled around—but no, not a Phyrexian; one of her squad had slipped on the mud and plunged facefirst into the earth.
Element of surprise lost. She dug in her feet, took her sword in both hands. The shadows were approaching, gaining on them, seemed to surround them, she could dimly see the soft light of stained glass shot through with moonbeams. Get ready to kill, to die.
A shadowy form swept toward her. It was heavy, armored—and she wasn't. Best use that against it: she waited, pretended not to see it, then, as it came upon her, she slipped to the side and grabbed it by the collar, yanking down and sending it to the ground in a heap.
A yell, a roar—was that an order to stop? Who said to stop? No time—another form came down on her with a halberd, set with amethyst stained glass, and she deflected easily. She spun her sword in her hand, disorienting it, then slammed the flat end of the blade against its head. She wasn't ready. She couldn't kill them.
Another shout. Another blade raised, this time a sword. Steel met steel and sparks showered like stars in the darkness, casting light on their faces.
Not Phyrexian. Not corrupted. Human. Benalish. What was more: a dead woman.
"Well," said Lady Aveya Joryev, head House Joryev, warden of the south. "Funny seeing you here."
An argent moon in the sky, now shining down upon on another light: a fire whose half-living embers sizzled quietly, kept low so as to avoid attention. Two faces gazing at each other across the gasping fire.
Aveya Joryev had the bearing of a queen, her high, sharp features like bleached marble sculpted into a placid frown. Aveya was older than Danitha—in her forties, if she recalled Marten's dossier correctly—but age alone didn't account for the deep shadows set into her skull, or, indeed, the pallor that lingered over her face; Danitha, it seemed, was not the only leader struggling during the Invasion. Within the depths of Aveya's face, her violet eyes shone like gemstones in some dragon's hoard, swallowing all the light around them and reflecting it out with purified brilliance like the molten shine of a crucible. And still, Danitha dimly thought, the possibility that behind them was the inky black nothingness of a Phyrexian sleeper.
It was those eyes that pierced into Danitha now, watching, absorbing, cataloguing, as Aveya spoke.
"If my cousin Marana did her job," Aveya said, measuring her words, speaking in a lullaby rhythm even as amaranthine hate smoldered in her eyes, "you already know how things began. Strange symbols in our books, our armor, the environment around us. It was not paint, not even anything artificial. It was as though the Phyrexians had stamped themselves upon reality." Danitha remembered last week, last year, last millennium, the tome in whose pages the Phyrexian insignia rippled like an inky serpent. The omen of things to come.
"Thinking that this incursion was just a repetition of the last," Aveya continued. "We quarantined. It was a foolish assumption, of course, to think that you know what's coming even as a new reality presents itself to you. But we did. We rounded up all the members of the house, our most essential troops, and dispatched Marana to Benalia City to petition your aid."
Danitha frowned. "A negligible risk—that's what Marana said about herself. She didn't get the invitation to quarantine, I suppose."
Aveya shrugged, her face placid, as though she were not human but artifice. "I'm sure it seems clear from your side, Lady Danitha. But was I going to risk sending out my generals, or my administrators, or my family, when I knew that the Phyrexians might be upon us?"
Like I did, Danitha thought, her spirit twisting, and then boiling into a sudden torrent of rage. "And so you asked me to come, instead? To risk myself and my people, instead of yours?"
Purple eyes bored into her. "It was the only way I could ensure my house's security. I had a high estimation of your abilities. Who you chose to accompany you was entirely your decision." She left the final point hanging in the air, and though she hadn't outright insulted Danitha, though she spoke with such solidity that she might be reading a report, Danitha still felt a blade slipping into her sides. She remembered, hazily, as beaming through a mist—
"Some," he said in his soothing, thoughtful voice, the one full of hope for how intelligent a leader she might be, the one that would be turned to mechanistic monstrosity, "Some use their words like warhammers—loud ones, like Alvan Rosecot. Others use them like arrows—precise, deadly, like Cerise D'Avenant. But others know the deadliest trick of all: when to stop talking."
"Nevermind that. It was our mistake, of course," Aveya continued, before Danitha could conjure a response. "Quarantining all our essential house members simply made us a far easier target. When the skies opened up and they"—her voice, for less than a moment, foamed venom—"and they rained out of it, we were all clustered in one place. It was easy for them to choke through those halls that my ancestors built, move through, room by room, and slaughter us."
Benalish bodies piled high in corridors, ichor and blood running in rivulets down stairs and dripping through floors, adults and children begging for their lives, all her friends, all her family, cut down, Joryev bodies piled alongside Capashen, her brother and her knights and the countless dead whose suffering was only just beginning.
"Who escaped?" Danitha dared to ask.
"From what I can tell, only us. This cluster of one hundred. We have ten knights, fifteen men-at-arms, and a few squires—the rest are manor staff and family members."
"Your children? Your generals?" She didn't know why she asked, for she knew the answer, but there was some whisper in that darkness, some sickening urge to hear the truth. Purple eyes. Boundless.
"My younger daughters, Ayana and Coryne, are here," Aveya said, quietly. She stared across at Danitha, the golden-red of the flames seeping into her eyes and reflecting back out with mute fury, despair without depth. "But otherwise, no. General Demrov, dead. High Steward Jakub, dead. My sons—Jonys, Ursav. They're gone." She paused. Something in her face shifted, like the slip of a river of mud, and for the first time since they sat down, she looked away from Danitha, down into the flames, and spoke only to herself. "My poor Ursav. He was knighted last month, brave boy. Poor, poor boy. I saw them take him away. He was screaming my name."
Teshar, screaming, pulled into a cloud of metal. Danitha didn't want to speak; if Aveya didn't know what would happen to those the Phyrexians abducted, it would be better to say nothing. And yet, as Danitha looked into that same stubborn flame into which Aveya stared, and caught the depths of life in her eyes, and saw the black blood that streaked across Aveya's armor and sword, it occurred to her all at once that Aveya knew precisely everything she needed to know, and, what's more, everything she didn't.
"We escaped, with what little provisions we could manage. We've been moving at night—and now, we've found you. We hope to join with you, if you'll have us."
Danitha stared into Aveya's dark countenance, her sidereal eyes. She felt in her a flame, and she hated those eyes, hated them, and hated the soul which they bodied forth into the world—the soul which, in its selfishness and its misjudgment, had left a house member to fend for themselves, had called Danitha on this errand, had led Aryel and so many of her men to her death, had led all them to their deaths, really, for how could they escape this, all because this woman trusted Danitha, and that, that wonderful and true alibi, was what she despised most of all. She wished to spit, curse, leave her and her miserable troop her, or worse, strike her down, dethrone her, put her to death, send her over the cliff and into the water like Joren, poor Joren—
—Usrav, poor Usrav. Beaming purple eyes, not crying if only because there were no tears left.
A moment had elapsed. An eternity. Danitha stared, oaky Capashen eyes meeting Joryev purple.
"It's our duty. We can do no less."
They marched, the mottled company, across bloodstained earth. The dry cloying grasses of the southwest morphed, mile by mile, into tall silty foliage whose verdure proclaimed the distant fecundity of Benalish riverbeds. The wounds of the Invasion Tree gushed crimson light into the distant sky, but even their profanity failed to reach the vegetation.
It was, indeed, the perfect place to hide. Danitha and Aveya reasoned that the Phyrexians had no need for sleep, so traveling at night was pointless—instead, they cloaked themselves in the river forests' greenery and marched beneath the cool canopy. At the first sight of metallic light or the first sound of machinery, they clung to the dirt. At night, they clustered together in beds of moss or behind treetrunks, nurturing the dimmest of fires for warmth.
They attempted, ever so briefly, to forage for food. But, as it turned out, even the forest had been poisoned by Phyrexian hands. They found persimmons imprinted with inky sigils, rabbits whose snowy fur mingled with bleeding machinery, mushrooms whose caps were corpulent with ebon ichor. During mealtimes, Danitha split the provisions as best she could, weighing between the withered civilians and the sparse retinue of soldiers—who, she admitted disdainfully, her head throbbing with two decades' worth of lessons in supply chains, would need more food to stay upright. But the villagers—pants of exhaustion, bony ribs visible through clothing, vacant stares filled more with persistence than hope—when she closed her eyes, or began to think or even blinked, they were there, looming with spectral emptiness next to Aryel, Teshar, Aron.
"We won't last another day," Aveya murmured one night, as she, Danitha, and a wheezing Marten gathered around a paltry flame. Her sharp Joryev features deepened in light of the fire and the stars, and her purple stained-glass armor projected a vapor of ethereal radiance around her. "By tomorrow, the troops will need to break away from the civilians."
"No," Danitha said, boring holes into Aveya's deep eyes. "We won't leave them behind. They've come this far—they'll be dead out here."
Marten coughed dryly. "There's always Ruzon, of course—Lady Aveya. It's a large port. Should be safe, we think. It was well-supplied by Coalition forces, at least, that is—well, you know—erm, since before. It's a Coalition staging ground. Everyone should be able to get there. We'll find safety."
"Or more death," said Aveya. She threw Danitha a caustic glare. "If the Phyrexians sent a legion after a town full of civilians just to get you, surely they'd send enough forces to level a Coalition stronghold."
"What do you propose, then?"
"We ride northeast, across the highlands, into Llanowar. Considering the forest's strength, Phyrexians should be at loggerheads, and we'll be able to regroup. You and I take the lead, with our troops in tow."
"And I repeat: the villagers won't last another day out here."
Aveya looked at her, eyes steely. "I'm aware, Lady Danitha. I do not condemn them. But we cannot survive if we remained with them."
She fumed, fury bursting forth in blazing gushes from her breath and her eyes and her being. "They're your subjects—our people. If you don't care about that—"
"I know what you think." Purple eyes boring back into Danitha's. "You believe I'm congenitally cruel. I'm not. I'm not cruel, Lady Danitha, nor am I a fresh young idealist. I bleed for my people. I weep for the duty that I have lapsed in. But I know that my higher duty is to Benalia's honor. If we die, then the future of Benalish civilization dies with us. Perhaps for the final time. I won't allow that."
She pressed her lips together. Joryev silence hung in the air. A vacuum, a void, between them. Dueling eyes, battling wills. The voice of a father.
"Rosecots use words like hammers. D'Avenants use words like arrows. What about us?"
A smile. Knowing. "Capashens, my dear, use words like we use our swords. As lights in the darkness."
"No. There is more to us than that. I won't let them go."
The next morning, they rode for Ruzon.
Early morning, the pre-dawn twilight settling over verdant hills dotted with purple grain and honey wildflowers. In a circle, again, Brother Merah was leading a Serran mass. They knew that, whatever they might find in Ruzon, they would not be celebrating another service here in the wild. The crowd had swelled, from the power of novelty or nostalgia or both, but a pall still stood, mistlike and opaque, around them. Spirits wavered dimly like ghostly candles.
Brother Merah had passed around tiny stained-glass icons of Serra and Gerrard at the beginning of the service, and now, as Danitha kneeled on a rocky outcropping, ignoring the groaning pains in her legs, she looked down into Serra's shining visage, rippling with goldleaf thread and glass of crimson and blue. She was smiling, somehow, despite all the horror around them, the icon was still smiling, and it made Danitha moved and sick and tender.
"Your enemies will pound upon the door of your defenses," Merah was saying, his voice wavering but grasping tightly onto the words, an anchor in a storm. "But only you shall have the key, and it is the key of life." Canto 873, Danitha remembered dimly, as she stared into Serra's luminescent crystal eyes, and begged her for that key.
Merah was ringing, now, the bells, and swinging a censor full of smoking incense, its fumes spreading around them, mingling with that pall of darkness, somehow infusing it, enriching it. Danitha felt, suddenly, without knowing precisely why, drawn into the darkness, by those smells, the ones imprinted in her memory by time and love, and she felt something, at the bottom, there, staring into Serra's eyes and smelling the strange smell and hearing the sonorous tinkle of the dappled bells, and suddenly the sun crested over the horizon and gold light ripped across the darkness and shone over them in a rainbow, if just for a moment, before fading.
And here was Brother Merah, asking, once more, to the silence. "Now," he said, clicking his talons against the censor, sighing between breaths—and, Danitha saw, was shocked she had not seen before, looking over his shoulder for help, but nobody was there, because that was where Teshar would have been. "Now, siblings…we may…bring Serra's grace, here to each other, by our words. As it is written: Art, discourse, freedom, peace." Again, silence. "Any words of grace?" Quietly: "Please?"
Danitha looked at them, the faces, old and young and brittle and strong (more brittle than strong). She felt something that she could not have described, not even if she dredged all the words of all Benalia's greatest orators. It wore glittering cloth, shone with gossamer fragility like love of family and stood with the armored weight of duty. She saw all of them, here, and without knowing why she closed her eyes and heard a voice speaking and realized it was hers.
"Sisters, siblings, brothers. There are words which I live by."
Hundreds of eyes upon her. Merah, Marten, Nathyn, Aveya, so many others who she looked back into, as though all at once.
"When your world is broken and dark, it is difficult to live by anything. When a squire is knighted, they take an oath—one they create for themselves. When you swear these words, you do not always know what they mean, or all that you must do to uphold them, or how you can fail in doing so. You do not know what can be taken from you, or how it can be defiled, or how all those things which are holy can be smashed at your feet."
She paused. These people, around whose lives was suspended that shimmering veil of she knew not what, they surrounded her, were bound close.
"We take oaths to bind us to something greater than ourselves. These were my words—" She remembered. The solemn tap of blade on her shoulder, the shivered light of stained-glass faith, the look of a father beaming with pride. "I will protect the less fortunate. I will love bravely. I will face despair and fight on."
"For reasons I can't explain, not with the words we have now, that duty means something to me. I hold it close, even when the ground I walk on is falling out below me. Because—because something helps me hold on, and helps me reach out. Something real. Something I feel, here with you. I don't know what it is. Something like grace."
In her hand, the icon of Serra glittered in the morning sunlight, fiery pink hues washing over the crystalline eyes and splashing Danitha with all the colors of the rainbow.
"And so I will make this oath to you, once more. Even as our world crumbles, I will hold true to them. I will protect. I will love. I will face despair. And I will fight on."
A breath. Silence again. A look: eyes, gazing back to her, a sliver of grace, fully alive.
As Marten had promised, the march to Ruzon was an easy one. For the villagers, whose faces had grown long and gaunt under their meager food regimen, the abundant grain of the Deniz territory was a blessing. By midday, the caravan had stopped in a tall field where Benalish gain and corn were mingled, and the smell of crackling oats rolled on the gentle breeze. It was hardly a banquet, but they were fed.
Still, Danitha was uneasy. Moving from the steely pines of the Joryev heartlands into the wide expanses of Benalia's middle region—it brough relief from the austere coastal environment, but it also meant that they were out in the open. No clustered trees would conceal them from roving Phyrexian eyes, no coastal outcroppings would cover their escape, and, somehow, Danitha was most troubled by this, no pine canopy could shield them from seeing the rippling steel arms of the Phyrexian invasion tree. Before, the sky had only been visible in narrow strips and occasional flashes, allowing most of the villagers to ignore the burning sigils, even as they haunted Danitha's every thought, breath, movement. But now, it was plain for all to see: the Phyrexians hadn't simply destroyed their home, no, not something so small as that: they had made the world their own.
She marched, now, alongside Marten, who attempted to trudge through his limp and his poorly exercised muscles, and Nathyn, Marten's erstwhile nurse. Although Brother Merah had declared Marten fit to move himself and transferred his gurney to an old woman in the back of the caravan, Nathyn had remained behind Marten, clinging like a shadow, eyeing him, grasping his hand when he stumbled, ensuring he didn't skip any meals, no matter how paltry. And still, somehow, whenever they found a moment, Nathyn found time to cast their eye to Elya, their daughter, who was walking alongside the village matron who had taken charge of the children.
"Now, Danitha," Marten huffed. His face was bleached pink, scorched by the afternoon sun and distended by the exertion on his lungs. "Now, Danitha. Do you know what I'm going to do when I get to Ruzon?"
"What's that, cousin?"
"I'll tell you. I'm going to look around. I'm going to find a fountain. I'm going to dip my head in it and drink in some of that water, that good, fresh rainwater, and then I'm going to go to a tavern. You know, the Denizes, they have the very best taverns, all the sailors there, you know, it's all very well regarded—and yes, cousin, I know what you'll say, the strategy is that the sailors should be off to Vodalia to execute the maritime defense plan, but surely some will still be there, or at the very least the innkeepers will be. So, anyway. I'm going to have the biggest meal I can find, I don't care if it's meat pie or grain cake or Shivan dragon chops, I'm going to eat."
Danitha smiled, and she ached. She wondered how many of those mariners were in wooden crypts at the bottom of the sea, how many had been swept into the Invasion tree and were screaming in those horrible pods as black oil was funneled into their mouths and eyes, and how many, how few, were left without the words to tell the tale.
A deep, quiet voice. "Do you think. Um. Lady Danitha," Nathyn said, in a clip, circling between their language and the invisible codes that radiated around the nobility. "Do you imagine that, well. Do you think that the angels will be there?"
She pursed her lips. "It's possible. It will all depend on how"—she pointed to the sky—"All of this happened. They may still be there. They may have congregated in Sursi. They may be in Benalia City."
Nathyn nodded quickly, dropping their head down, dodging her glance. She smiled.
"I'll tell you this, though," she said. "Once we get there, I'll make sure Lyra Dawnbringer and your daughter get some face-to-face time."
Nathyn's eyes beamed, and they laughed a deep laugh, a hearty one, the kind that would boom even over the roar of bread ovens. It hung in the air for a moment like the tinkling of a massive bell.
But then another sound cut across the air, and the sound of laughter blurred into a scream up ahead. For as the sun had begun to set, spilling red-gold flame across the horizon, they crossed over a ridge and were afforded a view, unobstructed, of Ruzon, one of Benalia's jewels.
A city besieged. A city swarmed by Phyrexian metal and massive Invasion branches. A city burning.