Isati Chaudri, second child of Abadi Chaudri, heir to the Jarles kingdom, is climbing an old, familiar path when she feels it: a snap. It's the whip of a belt, the slap of cold metal. She stops on this treacherous path, amongst sliding rock and trembling stone, and leans her head back, feeling the sunlight, the wind, it, it, it.

It's more a beginning than an end, a releasing, a loosing.

Oh, she did it. Oh, oh, oh, she did.

The path is easier after that, almost nothing in this glowing aftermath, this heady culmination.

Dead, dead, dead, and us, alone, in a universe of bodies, the only things thinking. At last, at last.

She doesn't mind that nagging thing, that unexamined question shoved to the corner, her brother's face behind the staff of flowers, bruised and bloody.

Isi, Isi, are you okay—?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, she is.

Isati Chaudri pays no mind to the billowing smoke down in the valley behind her, nor the black, jutting structure just behind her that emits all that negative space, that gaping nothingness, where there used to be suffocating pressure.

There is infinite possibility now, so many choices, and yet, only one still. One she climbs toward, carefully, faithfully.

When she reaches the top, when she climbs up, onto the Sun Dais, she sees her waiting.

Dark armor, pale face, hunched over, calculating gaze out, out, over her dominion—our dominion—watching, waiting...

For me.

"You made it," the Paragon says, as if there was ever any other possibility, any other choice.

"I brought you a gift," Isati says, moving quick, careful, steps lighter now, lighter than anything, and she throws the Chieftainess's helmet at her feet. "Why have one kingdom when we can have them all?"

The Paragon stares at this, gaze lingering on the dark stains, the clinging wisps of gray hair.

"Any one else?"

Isati thinks of the blond woman, of cleaving her bird but missing her head, Lei interfering, Lei jumping in, Lei—

"Not yet; I didn't want to have all the fun."

She's watching Isati now, her irises black, face almost ghostly in the red sunlight.

"You did well," she says.

Pride flushes through Isati, rushes with a heated flush, a potent certainty, and she takes another step forward, extending her hand. The Paragon takes it, hand warm, flesh alive, and Isati pulls her to her feet.

She's close, closer than ever since Isati had realized, since Isati understood.

All my hard work, Isati thinks, relishes, all my careful planning, all my pain, for this, for this. The culmination of all things, the conclusion of a fight well fought. A fight Mother would have never understood, never anticipated—

Dead, dead, dead, oh, yes, oh, yes.

The Paragon is looking at Isati's face, her wounds.

"You took them all out," she says.

So Mother couldn't see, Mother couldn't find, not until it was too late, until there was no one left on the Plinth to save her, protect her.

"I kept one," she says, pulling the sliver of metal out from beneath her breastplate, offering it to her, her equal, the only. "Just in case."

Just like you kept yours. Our tether, our connection.

The Paragon takes the metal from her hands, holds it, between hers.

"Where is the mother metal?" she asks.

Isati takes her there, up in the Dais, past the bleach white columns, through the crumpling ruins, the dust, to the dial holding not time, but the mass of shimmering, murmuring alloy that had been stolen, sieved from the Throne. Another betrayal of Mother, carefully hidden amongst bruises.

The Paragon steps up, onto the platform, hands set on either side of the dial, and for a moment, Isati watches her, lit by sunlight, face down, watching the shimmering metal shifting between her palms.

How much of this did you foresee? she wonders. How much did you understand of where we could take ourselves before we got here?

Isati steps up, next to her, looking down, hearing in that low other sense, the deadly beat, how the wills inside this metal quaver and quake at the Paragon's grip. But her dark brow is furrowed—not, Isati knows, in concentration, but in concern, fear of all the other ones not under its sway.

"They'll be afraid of you too," Isati murmurs low into her ear. "We'll make them too afraid to tell you to get back in your box."

But she still harbors concerns, worries—they crinkle on her forehead, curve across her mouth.

"I can't let them control me," the Paragon says.

"They won't," Isati promises. "They can't. You cut it off." Your face, the fake one, the pretense. Its all gone, all gone now, and there's just us now, just us—

And the Paragon turns, face lit by the ghostly alloy glow.

"I buried it."

Something echoes across the tether, something not of Isati or her; it's a flash of a young face with wide eyes.

[You know what to do.]

And for one, strange moment, Isati wavers, doubts. Because that didn't come to her through the tether, did it? The Paragon never gave Isati's conduit back.

[Then how did it?]

Something is probing inside her head.

"Isi," Lei asks, face bloodied but young, impossibly young, like he's nine again and she, ten. "Are you alright?"

I should have killed him, she thinks, afraid now for some unknown reason. I shouldn't have hesitated, I shouldn't have walked away—

"Weakness," Mother whispers, but she's dead, dead, dead. "The heart, that fickle, beating thing. I told you, Isati. I told you what happens to those who follow it. They were too weak to last, too feeble to endure..."

"We'll make them afraid," Isati tries again, tries to reassemble her expression, which has cracked, twitched. "No one will control us again."

The Paragon nods, steps back from the mother alloy, and sets those hands on either side of Isati's face.

"I will," she promises.

They twitch, just for a minute, those hands that cradle her face, fingers curling forward, as if beckoning something toward them. And then they're tight, firm as the metal spears up from the dial and runs through Isati's sternum.

Breath whooshes out, expelled in a gasp—a gasp of surprise, of fear, of wonder—and, released, Isati falls down, falls back onto cold stone, into a cloud of dust. Her chest seizes, lungs contract, and one of her hands, trembling, makes a futile pass at the dark wound, as if to check that it is real.

"I'm sorry," the Paragon says, only a shadow now, looming over her. "This is how it has to be."

Isati sputters feebly now but, amidst all the twitching of nerves and sinew, there's calm, and somewhere in the back of her mind she hears the crash of waves on a distant shore.

"In the end, you won't be controlled," the Paragon says, "and, in the end, I would not try."

A/N: Listen, guys, I'm just dead inside. There's nothing left in here.

Also: HIIIII. So sorry everyone—long story short I've had some work chaos, my birthday, and other personal emergencies in the last three weeks and I'm just breaking the surface and spluttering around now, wondering how it got to be so long since I posted. There was good mixed in with the stressful (the birthday was pretty rad) but I've been running on fumes a while now and I've been trying to hit the "reset button" for the past couple of weeks but I keep missing it for some reason.

All that's to say: hi guys, I wasn't ignoring you, my bandwidth was just at zero. I've missed you. And I swear my character murder rampage is dwindling. A lot of consequences just played out in like the span of 3 consecutive chapters. It's funny how that works out sometimes.

Also, anyone watch Witcher? Did a binge and boy is Henry Cavil having the time of his life in it. I also alternate between loving and wanting to murder the minstrel. Toss a coin to your witcher...

As for the next chapter: we shake things up structurally as two characters converge on the Paragon.... and stumble upon all her bloody aftermath.

Chapter notes: Abadi Chaudri warns about the dangers of the heart in Partisan's "Choice" and "Unstoppable Forces and Immovable Objects." Isati dreams of shores in Prodigal's "Belonging That We Seek;" she talks of fake faces in "Cut Off You Face" and of ensuring no one controls her in "Smile Sweetly;" she also just fought poor Lei-Lei in "Broken Buckets (Practice Sticks)" and killed Aren Dost in "It Wasn't What I Thought," making her all-in-all much more productive than I have been recently. Allayria also first decides to bury the ugly choice in Prodigal's "Ascendant." The mother alloy is mentioned in Partisan's "Mother, I Incubate" as well as Prodigal's "Smile Sweetly."