Stay with me.

He mouths the word, his voice lost in the buffet of icy wind and the thundering of broken tree limbs and crashing stone. Just above it all is the high, keening wail of a wolf.

Allayria, stay with me.

Ben's face is the only thing she can see, close and peering into her with those brilliant gray eyes. His brow is crinkled, in that quiet way that speaks of caution and alertness. The wind whips his hair down across his forehead, which is suddenly flecked with blood.

Hands made of bone and stringy flesh clamp down on her upper arms, cold, so cold, and they're squeezing in, pulling her back. She wheels around, pushing against it, heels burrowing into the squelching, chilled grass and it's Hiran she sees, and Fae, and Tara, and Caj, and Finn. They're dragging her, fingernails digging in deep around her arms and ankles and thighs, they're pulling her over the edge of the cliff.

Stay with me, they mouth, eyes wide and blank. Stay with me.

They all fall over and Allayria jerks in her pallet, eyelids flung open wide against the pressing blackness. The fire is out. Whoever is supposed to be on duty has fallen asleep.

It takes her a moment to really remember where she is—who she is with. After her conversation with Keno and a night spent cooped up in trees on the outskirts of Solveigard City, she, Hiran, and Finn had made it back to the others. In one piece, as she pointed out to Lei. They are on the move now, winding ever so closer to Helm's Hollow, ever so closer to—

She sits up, her forehead feeling clammy as her knees tuck up and her arms loop around them. She rests her head in the cradle they make for a minute, not knowing exactly how she feels, only that she is not okay. Not okay. She rolls up to her feet and strikes a light on her fingers.

Weaving around slumbering bodies toward the fire pit, she kneels down at the stone ring and reaches in to the depths of the twigs and lumber inside.

She's working the flame on a bit of kindling when she hears his voice, just hands-breadth away from her.

"You're awake."

Allayria glances over, tensing more than she ordinarily does—the aftereffects of the nightmare, she reasons—and catches the faint gleam of Caj's eyes in the firelight. He's sitting up, leaning against his pack.

"I was going to relight it when my watch was over," he tells her, voice low and melding in with the surrounding forest sounds. "I like it better with it out."

"Why?" she asks and her voice is rough from sleep. She would think a Smith-caller out of anyone would appreciate the warm glow of fire.

"The smoke blocks the stars," he answers, tilting his head up toward them before returning back toward her. "And you hear more of the forest with it out."

She murmurs wordlessly to this, reaching back in to quell the new flames and shifting around the wood to better protect the simmering embers.

"Having trouble sleeping?"

It's a surprisingly personal question from him, and Allayria glances over before she answers, trying to decipher his expression in the darkness. But he's hard enough to read in daylight, and she only picks out his faint outline.

"I sleep on and off when I'm traveling," she lies. "I got up because the fire was out."

He murmurs to this too, and she hears him shift his legs in his blanket.

"I sleep better in trees," she tells him.

"Trees?" His voice tilts with the word, rising up in surprise. "Never tried that before. Seems dangerous."

"You only have to roll out once to never do it again."

"You also only have to roll out once to be dead."

A ghost of a smile passes across her lips.

"True."

She hears him shift again and thinks she can discern his arms folding across his chest.

"Where did you sleep... before all of this?" she asks.

"In the dirt," he answers. "Bushes, underbrush, anything that would best conceal me. Except caves. Caves attract too much attention. I liked big rocks the best—ones you could squeeze between or lie on top of and look at the stars."

"Sounds awful," says another voice out of the darkness—with a feminine throatiness that Allayria thinks must be Fae. A body rustles in a sleeping bag next to them, rolling up into a sitting position.

"Was I too loud?" Allayria asks. "I didn't mean to wake you—"

"Don't worry about it," Fae responds, her voice stretching into a yawn and then being muffled briefly. "Laugh all you want, but I really can't get used to sleeping out here. I don't know how you both did it for months at a time."

"Years," Allayria corrects quietly, leaning forward into her knees so her fingers stretch alongside her toes. "Until recently, I hadn't consistently slept in a bed since I was twelve."

"What about you, Caj?"

"Years," he answers shortly.

Allayria wants to ask Caj more, more about where he's traveled and what he's seen, but with Fae awake he's retreated into his usual surliness. Fae seems to have realized this—perhaps she was awake longer than she let on—and she jokes about sleeping on rocks and roots the whole night to fill the awkward pause.

"I'd still take this over sleeping in a tree," she adds.

The discussion dies off after that, and Allayria retreats to her sleeping bag, lying back against the dewy grass, awake enough to know she won't go back to sleep, and staring up at the stars. Caj was right; they're easier to see this way.

It's a shock, the first Cabal-owned city they walk through. City perhaps isn't the best word: this is no Solveigard City, no Thalassa with the wide sprawl of people and places. It's smaller, with a little of the rustic still hanging about it, though the buildings are climbing up and crawling closer, spiraling toward that divine goddess called metropolis.

But now, after all that hard work, all that winnowing, red banners hang down the streets, splotchily dyed in what must be dye—surely should be dye, and not blood. They hang out of scorched windows and crumpling walls, the antlered, dripping sign etched on them.

They've painted it on the walls too, across doorways and on the cobblestone streets. We resist, the town whispers as it crumples in on itself, we resist your control.

Lei is like live wire next to her and it's so like Ben that it jolts her every once in a while. But while this would have set Ben alight with fevered glee, Allayria only finds nerves in Lei's expression. He eyes the walls in suspicion, his back too ram-rod straight, his hands lingering too close to his knife.

She places a hand on the back of his neck and he literally jumps, eyes wide, but she grips tighter, bringing her mouth to his ear.

"You need to appear more relaxed," she whispers. "Keep walking like that and they'll know exactly what you are. They'll know you don't belong."

He shoots her a look that is at the surface defiant, but panic lurks at the edges in it, in the cool brown depths of his irises, much like prey caught in a corner. Lei has never known how to relax.

She gives him a sharp look and then very slowly tucks her hands into her pockets, slouching over a bit. He gleans what she means quick enough and follows suit. He's not a sloucher.

Allayria sighs, pulling his hood up over his face. As long as he stays in the center of the pack maybe people will overlook him.

"They're not exactly friendly, are they?" Hiran murmurs, slipping up next to them as he glances around, unabashed. Every so often they catch glimpses of people peering through curtains or the cracks of doors, but no one smiles, no one waves. They pass a market that's nearly barren, the remaining vendors slumped down with several other people lurking around their carts—guards, with staffs and knives.

Liberation is no utopia, it seems—though Allayria can already hear Ben's retort, his point that it would be, if they weren't afraid of their freedom being taken away again.

Are they waiting for the Roften soldiers to storm back in? she wonders, and her eyes alight on the shell of a cart, broken beads strewn around its shattered ramparts. The realization is like a knife, clean and slippery, sliding through her. She has been here before. She twists, looking around. This was the place Meg had swiped that blue beaded bracelet for her, the city they had slunk through before going to Solveigard City.

Suns and moons, where did all the flowers go? The animals?  She looks around, and a shiver seems to prickle across her face, her shoulders, ending in a shudder. A banner hangs across the town square, and it only says: Give us freedom.

"It's all changed," she whispers, and Finn glances around at her, eyes wide.

"I don't understand why Roften hasn't come through and reclaimed it yet," Fae murmurs on the other side of Lei, leaning in so her words are not heard outside of the pack. "It's one town—it wouldn't be hard."

Allayria expects Tara to answer, or even Lei, with all his military knowledge, but it's Caj who speaks up, though he keeps his gaze averted.

"It's not valuable enough to waste the manpower on," he says. "Look around: they've destroyed everything that mattered to Roften in the revolt, and with the Jarles pushing into their borders the Roftenian military doesn't have the resources to spare. They'll be left alone until the tides turn in the war, or the Jarles or a bandit gang reaches them."

"I wonder if they'll still be so keen on revolt if either of those last two come to pass," Hiran murmurs slyly. "They may miss the Roftenian arsenal when Jarles warscreamers are on their doorstep."

He opens his mouth to say something else, but he catches sight of Tara's face and drops it. The Roftenian hasn't spoken since they've walked through the city, but she has the look of someone who recognizes something that has been lost. Allayria wonders if she has been here before as well.

She glances up again, at the loud bray of black and red, the shout of their sigil. Ben's sigil.

"I want no limitations," she murmurs. "I want no kindly guide. I want the opportunity to make my own way in the world and be what I can be, not what they expect me to be."

She feels Lei turn, peering at her under the drooping hood, but Ben's words hang heavy around her, shuttering her in.

It all sounded so sweet, she thinks, staring up at that sign, which once had, in its own perverse way, meant hope to her. But it's soured in reality. Do you know that Ben? Or do you still think you can make this happen?

But she knows the answer to that, knows it in a way that sends a visceral crawl of skin up her spine, twisting in that unconscious jerk of the neck, that instinctual pull away from the grotesque.

He's shrewd enough to realize what Caj said¸ she thinks. So what is his plan for when the Jarles comes, or Roften, or bandits? What clever scheme does he have to save them? Or has he left them to rise or fall on their own?

"People are starving," Fae suddenly cuts in, leaning into the group. "Can't we do something to help them?"

"Are you sure they'd want your help?" Hiran asks, his gaze traveling back up to the banner.

But it's Caj who really answers her, Caj who pulls his pack up, casting a perfunctory look around.

"There's no point in helping them," he says, his tone flat. "They're all dead anyway."

Allayria meets Lei's questioning look before glancing around at the other members of the team, gauging their reactions. Fae's got bright splotches across her cheeks and a wisp of curly, brown hair falls across her nose.

"How can you say that?" she hisses, leaning toward him. "They're alive, they're breathing and they need help, even if they're too proud to admit it. How can you leave them?"

Caj's gaze barely flits to her face before it slides away, seemingly looking anywhere else.

"He's right," Tara suddenly says, speaking for the first time since they entered the town. She pulls her pack up too and there's something hollow in her eyes. "Jarles, bandits, food shortages. If one thing doesn't get them, one of the other two will. It's a waste of food. A waste of time. If you want to save people, we need to go do what we came here to do. Let's go."

They leave after that and, as they walk along the sunset-painted path, Allayria hangs back, falling in-step with Fae. She glances over at the Keesark native, whose jaw is set in a grudging, immobile line, and whose gaze looks to her left, out into the forest, determinately away from her companions.

"Nothing is set in stone," Allayria tells her, and her fingers twitch against the cloth covering her sternum.

A/N: 10K reads on this and 50K on Paragon! Thanks so much to everyone who has stuck around this far , I'm doing the stupid happy dance again.

We get a Cabal banner in the header art this chapter, plus some more callbacks—we first see this town in the "Only Souls in the Universe" chapter of Paragon and we hear Ben originally say Allayria's quote in the "Removing the Linchpin" chapter.