[b]Kingeater Castle![/b]

Thunder rattling the trees. Rain, pouring down on the ruin.

Where there was a castle, there is now devastation. Everything was uprooted, down to the dungeons, down to the very foundations: the earth is a loose slurry being churned into mud. Trees have fallen, the stables have been washed away; come morning, there will be nothing to say that Kingeater Castle was once here but the mudslide drowning the earth.

Night on night pierces the darkness, forcing it open like the wedge of an axe’s head, and from it pours innumerable silver grains of sand, glowing from within as if imbued with moonish light, as if the stars themselves had been crushed to powder, and the murmur of their rush, hissing and tumbling over each other, is a hymn: [i]all hail to the Mother of Deserts, all glory and power to the Edict Fount, may her body stretch into the shadows of eternity.[/i] And behind the ten sleepwalkers who stagger out into the sand-clogged mud, a presence rises, night blotting out night, and its tears are sand, and its mantle is the color that remains when all other colors have been eaten, and the sand surges forth like a high tide, hungry, inexorable, infinite; but the one who walks last, so that none will be forgotten as they walk single-file through the body of the Mother of Deserts, who alone did not slip into the cold waking dream of the rise-and-fall, the spell of the place where everything is the same as everything, she raises one hand and the door closes behind them, the ten of them, mortals and dragon-children and demons alike, and then there is nothing but the rain in the almost-light before dawn and the driving rain and the exhaustion, the bone-deep exhaustion, of walking the devil’s road out of Hell.

For the Mother of Deserts is the sister-bride of the Broken King, and she drapes herself around his bones like a suffocating robe; and her dictate is that those who leave must walk her road, and stand in her waste of ruined stars, and suffer for daring to leave, which she may never do, being now infinite. She could drown all creation beneath her weight and still only have extended the merest finger out of their prison.

The spell that the one wrapped around the nine was a mercy. Better to walk through that wasteland dreaming than to feel it bearing down on you, than to be tempted to collapse, than to be forced to understand the length of the journey.

***

[b]Giriel![/b]

Objectively: days. But also objectively: it’s maybe been an hour since you left. Subjectively: you are exhausted. You walked last in line, holding a candle, and you saw the shadows heaped up on themselves in the distance, horribly suggestive of entire civilizations drowned beneath the sand. You heard the sand-hymns and were coming dangerously close to understanding them. You held back the attention of one of the creators of the world with a candle and a waking dream, with blood and will and Peregrine’s help.

Peregrine. She stayed behind. She’s almost certainly got business with that warlock, who ended up escaping Uusha. She’s there because she’s got her hands in the guts of some interesting experiment, down to the wrists, and she’s there because— well, the last time you saw her was when she was abducted by that strange heavenly spirit, and there’s a connection there that you’ve almost hit, but it’s slipping through your fingers like smoke.

But can you be blamed? You’ve just walked for days without stopping, beating the responsibility of everyone’s safety on your shoulders, keeping [i]all[/i] of them safe. And are they going to understand what you just did? Are they going to be grateful? Or are they going to listen to the dragon-blooded girl who looked at you with hate in her eyes? (Peregrine would understand.)

You’re sitting down. You don’t remember when you sat down, but it’s a thing that’s happening now. Sat down in the sandy mud (muddy sand?). You did it. And now it would be very appreciated if the world stopped requiring you to do things, because you’re going to need someone’s help to stand [i]back[/i] up. Your thighs and feet have decided to go on dockworkers’ strike together. And the conversations happening all around fade in and out, cut together with the song of the sand.

That’s why you don’t notice what’s going wrong until it’s too late.

***

[b]Piripiri![/b]

Naji has wrapped herself around you, and you are sinking into her coils. Your hand throbs; your legs ache. The world has been too much, too loud, for too long. You need to dig your roots in and drink deep (metaphorically speaking).

Here’s a fun question to consider, though. You’ve been traveling through the Demon Desert for… folklore says it’s at least three days. The witch wrapped a simple enchantment over your eyes to protect you from the journey, but time still passed. If you sleep for three days and then awaken, are you still a hostage? Are you still required by honor to remain? Or does it even matter, did the witch break the oath of protection that stood between you and Uusha?

Naji nuzzles you with her body and you can [i]feel[/i] her anger radiating off her. It’s not directed at you. It’d be nice to think it’s at the witch, wouldn’t it? Devils don’t much care for oathbreakers, after all (though they resent the oaths they are forced to swear). She probably deserves to be untied and told what a good girl she’s been, doesn’t she? It’s just that your fingers are so thick and heavy right now.

It’s the warmth of her fury and the softness of her flesh that drown out the signs you should have picked up on before it was too late.

***

[b]Fengye![/b]

You’re small again. But, luckily, Maid Confined in Yearning is smaller. She tugs at you, trying to pull her wrist out of your fingers, hissing— and she’s got more energy than you do, because walking through the desert (Zhaojun knows more) is harder on you comparatively fragile mortals than it is on them. So you’re forced to shift your footing and try to keep her from pulling you onto your bad leg.

Which is why the crossbow bolt screams through the place where your head was, before ending in a meaty thud that meant it [i]hit[/i] someone.

Maid Confined screams and her helpless, pliable body throws itself of its own accord into your arms; she buries her face in you even as your leg goes out from under you and you both collapse into the muck, and she’s screaming so shrilly that you can’t hear yourself think, and you’ve got to wonder: is this how you die? With a former part of the Broken King’s soul squealing and kicking her feet on top of you while people get shot at?

***

[b]Han![/b]

The fire within you is waning. You won’t be able to stay like this for long. It feels achy, like you held a stretch too long, like you’ve been holding a muscle in place and now it won’t relax. It’s… fuzzy, memories of walking through somewhere dark and empty, like a tunnel, but with no walls, and there was this song—

Melody shifts on your back and sinks her fingers into your mane. Her chest rises and falls; she’s actually asleep. There. That’s something you can focus on. You didn’t manage to punish the rotting bastard who did this to her, but you saved her. That’s enough. She’s safe because of you.

Then pain explodes along your neck, crackling, burning, and Melody screams herself awake because her wrist’s caught in it, and everything— as the saying goes— goes to [i]Hell.[/i]

***

[b]Kalaya![/b]

The world swims into existence. Rain hammers down onto your face. Pain swims underneath the bleariness of the world. But you’re home. You’re definitely home. The Flower Kingdoms, where the rain never stops during the rainy season. You push yourself up onto your elbows—

And Uusha grinds her boot down onto you, sending your head thudding back down against the mud. “Stay down, beetle,” she hisses. She looks about as bad as you feel: her face is bloodless, her eyes are half-shut, her stiffness is the fragility of someone who knows she is brittle. And even so, if you tried to get back up again, she would beat you into the mud until you stopped moving. Again.

The clash of your sword against her spear! The whirl, the execution of moves known by heart, the reserves of strength you pulled from again and again! The thorns that snapped from her armor, the bruises that blossomed on her skin like opening petals, the elegant arcs of her spear’s heads through the air, the whine of the wood put under such pressure! You fought like devils under the green light of Hell!

You can’t really be blamed for losing, you know. You were fighting the Stag Knight. One day, you’ll be as good as she is; one day, she was where you are now. She’s got long limbs and experience on the battlefield and a relentless fire in her heart, and that’s a lot to stack up against love.

(Love: Ven got away. She’s safe. You did it.)

Uusha opens her mouth to say something to you in her brittle, burned-through-anger voice, and you, through those bleary eyes, get to watch as she painfully turns, as she grabs at the air, slowed by exhaustion and the fatigue of fighting you. You hear the crunch, the way the air is forced out of her lungs in one sharp exhalation, as the bolt punches through a weak point in her armor, just a hair too fast for her to catch. You see the moment when she decides to lean into the momentum, so that instead of standing like an idiot who will get shot more, she topples like a falling tree and tumbles down a muddy slope.

And you hear the roar of the Imperial Legion.

***

[b]Kingeater Castle![/b]

Han is having a very bad time; she shakes and flails and roars to topple towers as the thunder bolas constrict about her throat, as a confused Melody screams in agony and tries to pull her wrist out from underneath the lines crackling with the power of a trapped lightning bolt, as Uusha topples into the dark bleeding from her side, as Imperial legionnaires reload a bolacaster and close in, ready to kill everyone. They’d do it, you know. Without so much as blinking.

And that’s when Cathak Agata rides into the scene on her coal-black horse (an already unusual animal to see here), rain hissing into steam in a halo around her body, and vaults from its back, does a somersault in the air, landing squarely on Han’s back.

The Red Wolf’s sword bursts into leaping flame and she raises it high. And with her in the midst of you, crossbows are lowered and shields are hammered into the mud, soldiers forming a ring of pikes to keep you hemmed in while their glorious leader plays her part.

“Hold still!” she says, pulling Melody to one side, and swings her blade down. The bolas explode into thrashing, arcing things like eels boiling in a pot, agony lancing through the air looking for victims, and in that moment, this is true:

Cathak Agata has Melody held tight to her chest, and is prepared to defend her from such things as a rampaging dragon out of her mind with pain.

After all, she’s the hero.