Her eyes flicker.
She withdraws from me.
Damn it, how did I fuck up?
“You want me to join you to deal the Order a blow,” Eraya says. “For it to be my choice for the optics. You wouldn’t accept a person who kidnapped someone you consider yours.”
Ahh.
The responsibility of choice, and their consequences.
I’ve had five hundred years to process what I did, and still the notion of having to choose everything for myself every day is overwhelming.
“People can change,” I tell her. “That’s what we’re here for—to help them change bigger and faster. And that includes you. Not just because you’re a sage who can make that happen, but because you’re aperson.”
And I let the shield around us dissipate, let sight and sound come back in.
I’ve been going about this wrong, I realize.
Sages don’t lead from behind; they lead from in front.
That’s what was so backwards about Mujin putting the Sage of Compassion before him when she wasn’t in charge.
But it’s also what’s backward about me, a sage, trying to effect change without moving.
Or expecting Eraya to.
You can’t be wise about the world without moving in it.
What was it I told Jiran only yesterday?
For people to believe in impossibility, they need to have the space to dream.
I will give them that.
“Stop,” Eraya tells me in a voice that has none of her previous strength in it.
The Order draining her, or her own conviction faltering?
My course is the same.
She’s trying another form again, but so do I.
And this one, she won’t recognize.
“Whatever you’re doing—”
“Stop using compassion to wound,” I tell her, “and I will try to use wrath to heal.”
“Yora,wrath is for destruction.”
Is it?
Yes.
But I think I can choose my target.
Let me destroy complacency.
