“So Crystal Hollow still wasn’t free,” I murmur.
Zan regards me. “Is that what you tried to do?”
I blink. “No one knew?”
He shakes his head, not taking his eyes off of me. “There were so many rumors. Enough for me to form a picture of what they had likely asked of you, but too many to be sure.”
I wonder how close his picture came.
I swallow my next bite—it’s a lot of flavors, but it’s growing on me—hard. Suddenly, I wantsomeoneto know.
“I am Wrath incarnate,” I say quietly. “I can walk through a battlefield and cause an opposing army to be so overcome with fury that they start murdering each other indiscriminately. It isn’t even hard; that kind of thing, it’s as easy as breathing.
“So when the Order learned—or fabricated—threats of rebellion, they wanted me to turn that against civilians. To walk through a town instead of a battlefield, and harness their wrath, and turn neighbors on each other. To use me as a threat to keep the empire in fear: Obey, or Wrath will make you kill everyone you love.”
Zan’s expression has gone hard. “That tracks with what I learned. But you didn’t do that.”
I close my eyes.
No, I hadn’t done that.
I had destroyed Crystal Hollow and isolated them for generations.
But I hadn’t made them murder each other.
The next bite goes down a little easier.
“I told the priests that I thought I could do it on a larger scale,” I say. “That I could unleash Wrath on the populace everywhere, so they would only have to do this once to quash rebellion—no waiting for people to learn what had happened, to question whether it was real. Let everyone experience it at once, and the whole empire would know the threat was real. Rebellion would be crushed swiftly in a single, devastating blow. I told them I wanted to meditate at Celestial Sanctuary to focus my Wrath. The temple was a common place sages trained back then.”
“But that isn’t what you wanted to do.”
His gaze has gone intense again. Hesoundsvery sure.
It’s a relief, that he believes well enough of me to take that as read.
Or maybe he feels like he knows me, too.
Even if it’s misplaced.
“Sanctuary Mountain is a volcano,” I say.
“I know.”
I suppose a dragon who can fly to the top of it would.
“I was going to use my Wrath to unleash it and destroy them all.”
Zan blinks.
I have surprised him after all.
Critical thinking I may have been capable of, but I was trained a certain way. I hadn’t had the experience to imagine a way to use my power thatwasn’tdestructive.
I still don’t.
“You didn’t, though,” Zan finally says.
There’s a beat of silence, like he’s considering.
