Let me destroy false sense of security.
Let me destroy the belief that we have to sacrifice people and freedom forany goddamn reason.
Is wrath only destruction, though?
We’re about to find out in a really dramatic way.
Zan is in the sky, occupying the priests, but not, I notice, killing them.
A show for Crystal Hollow, that thereisanother way.
Even if this way is much more dangerous for him.
But I have to trust him—trust that he wants to survive this, too, if not for himself, then for me. And for me, he will support Crystal Hollow, too.
So I can have a place.
And if I have a place, then so does he.
It’s time to do my part in truth.
“I am the Sage of Wrath,” I say clearly, for anyone who can hear me. “Let me show you what that means.”
As I spin into a form, Eraya reacts, too, falling into her own, and now that I’m looking for it, I sense her power flowing into the priests again too.
I see the component parts of her kata, recognize what they’re building towards, and it makes me angrier, even as I adapt my own form to prepare to absorb it.
It’s a kata that will drain all of her power. She’s pouring her whole self into it simply to stop me—
But when I actually look at her as a person, and not merely a sage, I realize that’s not it at all. Or rather, not all of it.
I see in her gaze that she knows this will be futile, but that she’s doing it anyway.
It willalsoprevent the priests from using any more of her.
And it belatedly occurs to me that when visible, she can’tnotbe seen to oppose me,becauseMujin holds the strings of her power.
This, then, is a kind of gift to me: taking herself off the board.
Compassion through an attempt to wound.
She’s been listening to me after all.
At the last moment, I adjust my kata’s course.
Not to repel her Compassion, but toabsorbit.
Erayaeruptsin a shower of gold, like being hit with fireworks at close range.
And I spin, and spin, feeling the zings in my aura.
But instead of snuffing them out, my aura encloses them, wraps around them.
And grows even bigger, using her Compassion like seeds.
I don’t know the name of this tree, but I am growing it.
But as I return to the form I had started before, now with even more power, too late I realize that Mujin has in fact been attending to us, to Eraya’s use of her power, rather than to Zan, who isn’t killing them.
