The Gu’s eerie eyes passed across body after body, lingering, sorting, the white wings trembling, the hall holding its breath. Across the kneeling Swords. Across the shrouded personages. And then they locked, all of them at once, onto a single figure. A burly, muscular woman near the throne, powerful and broad, a long fish-like tail coiled beneath her where legs should have been.
The Gu Archaeognatha cried out!
WUUUU!
It was a horrific sound for so small a thing, a high grinding shriek that scraped at the ear and did not stop, a noise of pure accusation, and every eye in the hall snapped to the fish-tailed woman.
She played it off at once, drawing herself up, her broad face creasing in defiance.
"This is preposterous!" she bellowed. "I serve THE Source! I serve her Majesty! I have served for ages! I have bled for THE Swords! I..."
She did not get to finish.
THE Queen Regnant locked onto her, and the immensity of her power crashed down and sealed the entire hall again, time and space and motion pinned beneath the will of THE First Sword. The fish-tailed woman froze mid-word. And THE Queen Regnant’s eyeless mask burned with an anger so vast and so wounded that the tendrils of it shivered, and she asked, silently, into the woman’s mind alone, a single word.
Why?
And the exposed Follower stopped.
The panic drained out of her all at once, the bluster falling away, and a strange unfathomable calm settled over her broad features, the calm of a being who had been found and had decided, in the finding, to stop pretending. She met her Queen’s fury without flinching.
"You ask why," she said quietly, "as though there could be a why that would satisfy you. There isn’t...there isn’t. There’s only what’s true, and you’ve never wanted to hear it." Her voice was steady, almost gentle.
"I have watched the ages turn, Queen Regnant. And I have understood, the way you refuse to understand, that nothing lasts. In the end, when every Age has burned down to its last ember, only one will reign supreme over all of it. Only THE Sealed One. I simply chose to kneel early, while kneeling was still a choice and not yet a mercy. That is the whole of my why. He wins. He always wins. I only...wanted to be on the right side when he does."
"..."
There was a silence. Then...
THE Queen Regnant crushed her.
She did it with all the grief and fury of a being unmaking something she had loved, and the terrible part, the part that made it so much worse, was that the Follower did not struggle. She did not fight or flee or beg or erupt with any authority.
She simply let it happen, calm to the last, certain to the last, and that serene unresisting certainty was crueler to THE Queen Regnant than any battle could have been. She even saw a tear and relief on that calm face as if they were glad everything was over!
And in her mind, THE Queen heard...
’Thank you. Forgive me. Forgive me.’
THE Queen Regnant bellowed as she did it, a vast wounded sound that shook THE Hall of Swords to its ancient foundations, grief and rage and betrayal poured into the act of ending one more being she had chosen and trusted and lost!
"..."
And then it was done, and the hall was quiet, and another voice was gone into THE Drowned Choir.
THE Mirthful Antiquity crossed to her, the little Gu folded away, and laid a hand on one slick tentacle shoulder with a perfectly judged blend of anger and cold fort.
"Sis Regnant," she said softly. "Listen to me. THE Originals received your message. This is not a burden for you and your Swords to carry alone, and you will not be allowed to try. I am only the first line of support, but I am here, and I am yours in this for you to mand. The others will send their own. We shoulder THE Sealed One together, the way it was shouldered the first time, or we do not shoulder it at all." She squeezed the shoulder gently.
"I have also been tasked with something else. The safety of the New Sword who brought you all this news. I know you sent him on to THE Effluvium Sanctum, and I only passed through here to say hello to you before going to him. I will set off now, to make certain there are no abnormalities around someone so important. Are you all right here?"
THE Queen Regnant rose up from her throne, and as she rose, her imperious and regal allure returned in full, the grief folding back beneath the magisterial weight of THE First Sword, sovereign once more over a hall she had just bled to keep clean.
"Existence is vast," she said, her voice steady and grand again, "and full of terrors. We have said those words to one another across eons, and this time is no different from any other. We endure it as we have always endured it." The writhing mask inclined toward the slender woman. "Go. Be safe, O Ryaenara."
Ryaenara.
THE Mirthful Antiquity had many names, gathered across more ages than most beings lived. Ryaenara was only one of them, one mask among a wardrobe of true things, and she wore it now as warmly as she wore all the others.
She nodded, and bowed once more to the being who trusted her, and vanished.
A moment later she appeared high above THE Hallowed Demesne, the vast ordered sprawl of it laid out far below her in its slow golden obsidian geometry, the wind at this height carrying the clean cold scent of the deep Source Lands. She looked down at it, and then out, far into the distance, toward the unfathomable reach where THE Effluvium Sanctum waited and a budding True Lifeform sat refining himself in a storm of his own blue flame.
And THE Mirthful Antiquity hummed to herself, that same tuneless little melody, and smiled.
"Step by step," she murmured to the golden dark. "Step by step."
Then she set off toward him!
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