They are at the top of the tower. News has traveled quick, traveled on wings and through minds, and the breaking, quavering serenity that had hummed through Ben this morning has been set aflame in the iron grip of furious, anguished rage.

But the slim man who sits across from him seems unperturbed. If anything, the way he pushes his spectacles up the ridge of his nose is slow, thoughtful, as if he is leveraging the moment to get a good look at the specimen in front of him, analyze its quirks, its foibles. As if he still believes he is in control.

"Who was it?" Qui Wren asks, mild even in the face of all these foes. "Who has betrayed me?"

And Ben's mind flickers to the quiet soldier sitting in a small office, diligently tallying inventory, allotting quantities and routes at the dynast's command.

"Would you even know their name if I told you?" he sneers.

The man blinks.

"No, I suppose not," he admits. "Still, it would be nice to know."

Qui Wren smiles when silence only greets him.

"I thought this might happen eventually, once the crossbows started showing up in Solveigard City," he confesses. "I had rather thought you would be courteous enough to allow us to finish our business with the Jarles beforehand though, but I can see you are... eager."

"We destitute call it opportunistic," Ben throws back. "It seems your general is a long ways away from here, Your Highness."

"So he is—was," The dynast agrees. "But I can see you have already heard the news from Solveigard City."

"GEN. BEINSHO – DEAD," the Beast-caller had wrote out, his eyelids fluttering as his hand scrawled across the page for the group huddled around him to read. "PROTECTOR—ALIVE. URILONG –ALIVE. IAV—OOT. MEG—DEAD."

Ben feels it all over again, the sharp slide of pain, the gripping stutter of his heart.

She died fighting, she died believing, he tries to tell himself, her wicked smile flickering in his mind, her mulishness impressed on his now vacant right hand side. It feels like a gaping wound, a vibrating sore. She died crippling them, and soon I'll have done the same here in her honor.

"So I did. With the Chieftainess out in Jarles, your list of allies grows thin," Ben says.

The dynast nods once.

"Likewise."

He's trying to provoke you, a sly voice murmurs in his ear, calculating even as parts of him boil, watching with cold accuracy as the dynast's gaze flickers casually up to his expression. He's looking for a weak spot.

Foolish of him to think he'll have time to find one.

"You should know why I am here," he says instead.

Qui Wren's brows rise.

"Funnily enough, I don't. I would have thought you would want to bleed my supplies a little further before burning down the factory."

Ben smiles.

"We have enough."

He tosses the pendant necklace onto the table between them.

"You're lucky," he tells the dynast. "I am looking for someone. Someone whose location you know. Tell me, and we'll leave you in one piece."

"A whole, breathing piece?" the dynast queries, quickly narrowing in on the left out qualifier, the unsaid assumption.

Ben's mouth twitches into a smile, even if his eyes remain cold.

"Certainly," he amends.

The dynast looks curiously at the necklace and then back up at him.

"Who are you looking for?" he asks.

Ben's smile is real this time.

"They called him Olcay a long time ago," he answers. "Though I suspect he goes by a different name now."

Qui Wren's expression does not change, but Ben senses an almost imperceptible click, as if levers have locked into place, missing things have been found.

"I haven't heard that name for decades," he replies. "A nobody who wandered even further into obscurity, with no bearing or mark on current events. I'm curious—what would compel you to look for him?"

He knows. If he didn't before, he does now.

"I heard he's talented and likes killing nobles," Ben lies instead, shifting tract. "I thought about offering him a job."

"I don't think he'd be interested," Qui Wren answers. "He seems to have left that last bit behind. And besides, I'm afraid he wouldn't quite live up to your morals. He was always in it for himself."

They let the silence sit for a moment, a long beat of nothingness.

"I'll ask him myself," Ben says and he adds it in at the end, as if it's a throwaway query, a casual question: "So, where is he?"

The dynast has looked away, out toward the open window over his shoulder, and the golden sunlight glimmering through it.

When he turns back there's a secretive smile on his face.

"I'm not telling you that."

Ben's face feels like a mask, wiped blank, and he's careful not to tighten the grip on his knife.

"Are you certain about that?" he asks.

The sunlight is shimmering in—somehow brighter, as if a cloud has been brushed away—and it hits all the tinkling, delicate things inside this room, glittering on their glass cylinders, their delicate metal spindles.

"Oh, I think so."

One of the instruments, a heavy vial, with a thin, spindling network of metal limbs attached to it, chirps on the table, arms shifting as if disturbed by a low breeze, liquid sloshing in its hard glass base and the dynast lifts a hand, tinkering with lazy fingers.

"People are selfish," Qui Wren declares into the silence. "They do things for marginal benefits, things that have catastrophic implications for others. They lie. They steal. They cheat. In the end, no matter what kind of world I build around them, they are always going to ruin it, if only in some small way."

He looks up at Ben.

"They'll ruin whatever you try to do too," the dynast tells him oh-so casually, as if they are discussing rain, or the slow turning of the suns. "They don't deserve your imaginary world. They never did."

Ben thought he could not get angrier, that the burning, knife-sharp pain and consuming fury left in Meg's absence were the limit to his feelings, the ceiling of it all. But Ben looks at this man's face, this man who never struggled for food, shelter, warmth in his life, and he feels his hands shake with it.

"You don't know what we deserve," he hisses. "And you know nothing of what we desire."

"They were never your people, dynast," Ben says, and he holds up a fist, listening as those that stand behind him follow his cue. "But they have always been mine."

The dynast contemplates him.

"Perhaps you are right," he admits in the end. "You are much more like them than I ever could be."

And it's only then, only when the man smiles, that Ben realizes the thing on the table has stopped chirping. It's only then that he sees Qui Wren's hand on its glass base.

He doesn't have time to scream it, whatever command that surges to his lips to try to stop what happens next. It's no sooner that he sees the glass in the fist than he sees it thrown and something like cold instinct clamps down on calculation and thought, taking over motor functions as he leaps back, stumbling behind bookshelves and as far away as he can go before the glass makes contact with the ground.

When it does everything blows apart.

Ben can smell the acrid smell of smoke and something else as he blinks his eyes open to a shattered ruin of glass and wood. Something—a cabinet or shelf or wooden contraption—has collapsed over him, a tumbling that had been meant to destroy but had, in reality, protected. The shimmering tinkling in the room has only intensified, interspersed with the sounds of popping, cracking, and Ben knows the instruments are on fire.

He unearths himself, heaving and scratching his way out of the muddled collapse, breaking out for air to survey his own damage. Some of his team caught on, or had understood on that blind instinct too—he spies Davelin exhuming himself from a similar situation in the aisle across from him. Others had not.

Ben spares a glance at the clearing where he had stood not a minute ago. It's a black char, and he already knows what's smoldering there. He doesn't need to walk over to confirm it.

Davelin is cursing, his arm bleeding, his face turned back to that space, looking even though he really shouldn't. It's this and the news, the heavy weight of disappointment and despair, that weighs on the Smith Skiller's shoulders, driving the anguished expression on his face.

"That fucking coward," Davelin spits out, but Ben can't really find it in himself to agree. "That weak—"

Something crashes—another trinket set aflame, and it blooms up, a quickly spiraling inferno. The others are crawling to their feet and Davelin has his hand out, fire dancing on his fingers too, and he's pointing into the room, something cold and ugly on his face.

"NO!" Ben shouts, throwing an arm to block the Smith-caller's movement. "Save it! Save all of it!"

The man's expression is of indignant disbelief, but Ben moves past, treading further into the splintered chaos, moving back to the scene of initial destruction. He moves past the burning bodies of those who had not acted fast enough, through the spot where the table had once stood, and then stands over the blackened soot that was once a dynast.

"Save all of it," he repeats. "Bring me his notes, his journals. There is still hope."

A/N: The body count grows. Adieu, Qui Wren. You went out like a baller.

Has anyone noticed anything different about Ben's picture? :) (Yes, I have no chill.)