Ashiakin turned. Denebriel stood before him, her red hair and elegant red dress contrasting starkly with the pale white of the stone chamber and the gray light that streamed in from the balcony behind her. She looked like some angel appearing out of an ancient gloom. She was smiling at him, in that knowing, condescending way that always irked him. Although a part of him had known that she must have been here--how else would he have been healed?--the sight of her did not fail to surprise him. I'll never understand why you brought me here, he thought. Not even if you tell me why.
"We could have traveled here together if that was what you wanted," he said, holding back his anger as best as he could. "It would have saved me so much."
"It's never been my job to save you, Ashiakin. I have in the past because I cared for you. I still do, after all this time. You were always worth more than my all my lieutenants together."
"I don't understand why I'm here. You can't mean for me to do this."
"I want you to figure it out, Ashiakin," she said, walking slowly toward him. She placed her hand on the grip of the sword that hung in the keyhole. "Will you do this for me? That is what I am concerned with."
He looked away from her, focusing on the gray skies and the battle fires that reigned in the distant sky. If the scene moved any slower through the view of the far balcony, it could have been a painting. "I will not."
Denebriel narrowed her eyes at him, but then she grinned absently. With a flick of her wrist, she turned the sword in the keyhole. Ashiakin's heart lurched, but the blade snapped and nothing happened. She turned to him, still smiling wryly with the hilt of the broken sword in her hand. "It was never real," she said. "You could have never opened the Vault and whatever catastrophes it contains. I wanted to see what you would do."
"You lied to me?" he asked, rounding on her angrily. "I can't tell you what I've been through for this! Why... Why did you do this to me?"
"After you escaped from your prison, Ashiakin, it was almost two years before you tried to contact me. You avoided me. You avoided all of us. They all though we had lost you... But I had hope. Unfortunately, I had to capture you instead of you coming to me directly, but the result is the same. You have erased all the doubts I ever had about you."
"I'm sorry, Denebriel," he said, biting his lip and lowering his head. "I was foolish after I was first freed from my bonds. I was afraid of being imprisoned like that again. It was arrogant of me to no end. I thought of seeking you out often, though I obviously never did. That is all I can offer."
"It is enough," she said, sliding her hand around his and interlocking their fingers. "You traveled here, through countless trials, the betrayal of a companion, a deep wound, knowing that you were uncertain you could obey my final orders. But I do not know a reason besides loyalty to me that you would have come all the way to Vha Khotur anyway."
"Yes," he said, looking at her curiously. "I cannot deny that."
"Come," she said, pulling his hand and walking with him across the brilliant stone hall to the balcony.
They stood there together, overlooking the town below and the barren fields of rock and snow that stretched out in all directions beyond it. The battle below was drawing to a close. The Church strike-force had penetrated deep into the town, their red banners flying high above the faltering blue of the fading defenders. Many of Vhakh's larger buildings were now aflame, spewing gray smoke into the gray sky. Vha Khotur, through some betrayal, was already in Denebriel's hands. There would be no surrender below, though. The royal guards and the milita would guard Vhahk and Vha Khotur above it that they did not know had already fallen with their lives, as if the great fortress was the last temple of a dying religion.
"Do you remember how this would have looked all those years ago?" she asked, sliding her arm around his waist and gazing into the smoky sky. "The town below us a vast citadel of learning instead of this miserable hovel, the sky blue and clear, the horizons filled with hints of the great land that we knew in our hearts was ours, always would be?"
"I remember it very well, Denebriel," he said.
"My plan... My real plan, Ashiakin, is for that to be real again."
He said nothing, though questions formed in his mind like spider webs, linking thoughts, catching others, dissecting them. The sounds of the dying battle were becoming fainter. After the defenders of Vhakh had all fallen, they would not be heard again. Their memory would recede with time like the last ring of an echo. Those things would have happened, vanished from the present, ceased to exist in the reality before him. What could ever bring them back?
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