“To lie is to assume responsibility for the deceived, and for the outcome of the deception.”

-The Prophet Ab’s Second Law

243 YT: Somewhere in the Wanderer’s Vale, One week after the execution of Marga Zelenko

Hilda pulled her knees close to her neck and stared past the crackling fire. Beyond, Kamila paced around the makeshift tent – little more than a cloak staked to the ground with a few knives. She was not satisfied that it would hold, and she’d been pacing the area for minutes. Hilda’s hands and knees shook and her feet still ached from the few steps she’d taken earlier. After days on the road, with Invictan drugs in her blood, she was no longer at the edge of death. But the soreness was deep in her, and Hilda felt it would never leave again. She didn’t truly need it to – she had grown accustomed to the dull pain in her limbs and in her chest.

Her heart did not hurt. Indeed, it was that Hilda worried on as she shifted her gaze to the fire itself. Around the dancing, flickering orange tongues hung an aura of bright, rays in Hilda’s dimmed vision. Her breaths were slow and burned in the top of her lungs, building pressure against her bruised ribs. She turned her shoulders and pressed her hand against the ground. The unfamiliar, crackling pain was a wave through her arms – every muscle painfully tight, as if they could wrap themselves up to protect against the hurt.

Slowly, Hilda stood. With the drugs in her system, she could walk – her body mostly mended. She knew that her legs would not collapse under her because of weakness – they were not broken any longer. But she shook, the pain nearly blacking out her mind. She forced herself to approach Kamila.

“Hey,” she said as she came up from behind. Kamila yelped and nearly jumped in surprise, turning.

“Hilda, what are you doing?” she asked. Her voice shook with near-panic. “Sit down, you’ll hurt yourself!” Kamila abandoned her task and moved to grab Hilda by the shoulders. The younger Zelenko sister saw, for a moment, a flash of fire in her elder’s eyes, and those hands – they were sheathed in ever-shifting iron, covered in blood. Hilda’s blood. Hilda forgot the pain in her legs for a moment and jumped back, away from her sister’s reach. The image faded, and Kamila stood there, with no fire in her eyes, only shimmering water, and with no iron around her hands. Kamila turned away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please don’t try to help me. Just rest.”

Hilda half-walked, half-crawled back to the fire and sat back down. She watched the edge of the forest in the distance. A few sparrowhawks wheeled above the treetops there, hunting some tiny prey in the canopy’s shadows. Hilda felt a surge of sympathy for the creatures she couldn’t see – nervous and insecure and ignorant. She turned her head toward Etyslund – so many miles away now. “Do you think…” she started to say. “Do you think that Etyslund is still standing?”

Kamila didn’t answer.

“They must know we got away by now. They probably found those soldiers…” She scooted a bit closer jo the fire. Hands on her shoulders, a couple of dozen feet from the road, surrounded by open wilderness, Hilda felt very small indeed. “But they haven’t come after us, right? We’re…”

“We’re safe,” said Kamila. “And maybe the soldiers will try to take revenge. It’s awful, but it’s also not what we should be worried about right now.”

“What about Dad, or Aleks…?”

“They’ll manage.” Kamila didn’t sound convinced. Hilda almost pressed the issue, but… better to leave that alone for now. “As for everyone else, they’ll have to wait. It’s maybe a week and a half further to Kivv, and once we get there everything will be fine.”

“Will it?” Hilda averted her eyes from the flame. The warmth of it bathed half her face. The wind shifted, and the smoke drifted in front of her nose. She coughed. “I thought you didn’t trust Mirshal to help us.”

Hilda finally looked over to where Kamila stood, half-bent over the makeshift tent, one hand bracing her against the tree-trunk. “It’s not that they can’t help us.” She breathed in, a rattling laugh. “Let’s say we get every Reaper and Sower in Kivv to come down to Etyslund. Sweep through town. The Invictus wouldn’t stand a chance. We’d kill them all, but…” She made a fist and swung for the tree, pulling her punch just before she struck and shouting in frustration. Hilda’s hand deflected off the side of the tree, sending shards of bark flying off into the dark. “They sit in their houses and watch people die from afar and they haven’t done anything about it!” Hilda blinked and inched away from Kamila, the memory of pain weighing on her shoulders. “They have so much power, to save people, and they won’t, because of the rules! You won’t!”

Hilda made a noise that was somewhere between a chuckle and a gasp. “There are limits to magic,” she said, her voice small. “You know that… Besides, some things are…”

Kamila turned toward her, face pale and wan.

“Stronger,” Hilda finished.

“I’m sorry,” Kamila said. “I’m so sorry. Please… let’s not talk about this any more today.” She motioned to the tent, all prepared for Hilda. Kamila moved to the opposite end of the tree and lowered herself to the ground, feet digging tiny furrows in the dirt. She laid her head against the base of the tree. “Get some rest, Hilda. You’re getting stronger every day but you need to keep it up if we’re going to…”

“Yeah,” Hilda said, as she made for the shelter of the tent, as the fire began to die down in the corners of their eyes. She reached out to it, twisting the Veil’s weave, and smothered the flame until all that was left among the wood inside those stones was a few grains of sand. “I know.”

That night, Hilda dreamed.

In her dreams, she was running free through the streets of Kivv. The well-kept cobbled stone streets were secure under her feet. All around her was light and movement and life and joy. People gathered around the festival house to pay homage to the ancestors through celebration. As she dashed down the street, she passed by a pair of buskers. They sat against the wall of the festival house, arms linked together. The woman, hair coiffed, arms moving in a rhythm Hilda could scarcely follow, beat a set of drums, creating a sound Hilda could scarcely describe. A song in itself, the sound pushed at the edges of her mind. The man’s left hand plucked the strings of a zither, while clutched between the fingers of his right were two hammers, dancing and jumping with the beat.

The buskers sang:

“Oh, what can grow, a stream without rain?

A flame without air, a love without pain?

You’ll cry without tears, bent and deserted,

To know the winter’s comfort, the birth of a tree.

We are but children,

Reaching with empty hands,

Is this the start of some glory,

Or the end of everything?”

Hilda came then to the great doorway of the festival house. Inside, books lined the walls, and people thronged the inside. On a great stage a tight knot of men and women – six or seven all told – held their heads together and argued the meaning of memory. Occasionally someone in the crowd laughed or stomped their feet our called out a sardonic retort to one of the arguers. The words felt muffled to Hilda, and she held her hands to her head, turned, ran out the door.

Her sister stood before her, ten feet tall, glassy-eyed, and shrouded in black mist. “To act for action’s sake is to become a monster,” Kamila said, and leaned down, an enormous hand reaching toward Hilda from above. “But what is a goal but devotion?”

Someone from within the festival hall shouted out the familiar recitation:

“Devotion to a leader is foolhardy; to a nation is mindless; to a cause is risky; to an idea is just; to Life is pure! Devotion to Life is pure!”

“Say what you mean!” another in the crowd jeered. “Don’t hide behind sayings and pretend to be wise!”

Kamila’s hand wrapped around Hilda, enveloping her entirely. She tried to shout, but all air was pulled from her lungs. The darkness moved around her, and she stumbled out into the hallway of the Reaper Monastery, and standing before her, tall and stern, was Antonin Voloshko. “I think you’ve forgotten something important,” he said. “You’ll never really be one of us, if you can’t remember it.”

She turned and ran, down the hallway toward where her mother stood with outstretched arms. “You’ve crossed the river so wide,” Marga called as Hilda ran, “and now it’s time to return home. For behind you is a mountain you cannot move, and on its peak…”

The barrel of a rifle burst from Marga’s stomach and she screamed, collapsing backward over the weapon’s length. Zoe Bari stepped forward, dragging the corpse alongside her, the barrel of the gun running over with blood. “And on its peak,” Zoe said, “Home.”

Hilda turned around, and she was on a road, springing up the hill at the edge of Etyslund. In the valley beyond she’d left her family when she went for the day to gather fruit and herbs with Luca. But Luca was nowhere to be seen, and at the top of the hill…

Plato Arap stood, hands folded, kicking at a cairn. One at a time, the stones rolled and tumbled down the hill toward Etyslund. Each stone exploded on impact, and the houses began to crumble. “You cannot move the mountain because you are weak, Hilda,” Plato said matter-of-factly. “But for the strong, for me, it is simple. We just look at the rotten old world, and decide what we must do, and then we do it. And we cleanse the world with earth and ashes."

Struggling on the side of the ever-taller hill, Hilda tried to stand, but her legs buckled beneath her, broken bones jutting through her skin. It burned, until there was nothing left of her but the pain.

Hilda awoke to the sound of sobbing, and for a long time she thought it was her own. As she slid fully into awareness, the source of the sound became clear. Hilda turned toward the tree against which her makeshift tent was pitched and saw her sister’s shoulders shaking in time with the sound of her voice.