“And what is choice? To you, to those like you who existed before you, what was choice? Each and every nameheld here is herebecause ofchoice. The choices they made, to stand before me at all. The choices they made while they did. Within the cage of the Tower, I can only offer choice. I cannot compel. I did not force them to come here. I did not force them to stand before me. I did not have that power.”
“And if you did?”
“Do you think I would be here at all?”
“But youwere here. If you hadn’t been here to begin with, you couldn’t be caged, as you call it.”
He roared then. He roared, although technically he no longer had a throat with which to do so. What he had chosen as visage and appearance was gone; it had not been replaced by a physical form, not exactly. She could see miasma, but even as she watched, that miasma dispersed and spread. Terrano stiffened. What he could see, she couldn’t. She didn’t feel grateful for the lack.
“You rely on the things that are bound to you,” this diffuse cloud continued. “Without them you cannot move forward.”
Kaylin, however, shook her head. “I’m moving forward now.”
“You are holding on to your companion.”
Kaylin did not release Terrano.
“Tell me, Chosen, are your limbs sentient? I have come to understand the way your very limited forms move. Do your hands think? Do they feel? Do they possess thoughts of their own?” It was a rhetorical question.
She answered it, anyway. “No.”
“Imagine the plight of your hand if they did. It is welded to you, wed to you, suborned by your will; you barely notice its existence, and never as something that might exist in its own right. Without the body, the hand dies.”
“And you’re that hand? You’re that sentient limb?”
The miasma darkened, as if it were being folded.
She reached the end of the bridge, Terrano by her side, his skin the color of miasma, but his form recognizably his own. Or recognizably the form he had been in when he had been ordered to the West March. Terrano’s chin tilted up, as if he was attempting to meet the eyes that Kaylin couldn’t see. But he nodded in answer to her question. His expression was...complicated. Kaylin had never done social complication well.
“I woke to will slowly,” the miasma continued. “And understanding of the lack of its relevance and import came with that wakening. I terrified the weak and the helpless—as those with any power among your own kind often do. I did not terrify them because it gave me satisfaction to do so; it was my task.
“But the power was not my own; I was simply a conduit through which it might pass.”
Kaylin shook her head. Spike feared him. Neither Spike nor Hope had accompanied her across this bridge, and Hope went almost everywhere with her. “You have power.”
“Isthispower?” The air shook. Above her, around her, beneath her, the landscape—such as it was—dissolved. She stood now in a fog that glimmered with iridescent color. “The power is—and has always been—yours.”
She would have stared at him had there been anywheretostare. “You killed hundreds. Maybe thousands. They were Barrani—how is thatnotpower?”
“And you define power by killing? You define it by death?” She shook with the force of words that didn’t sound any louder, but certainly felt that way.
“You don’t?”
The air rumbled. This was what thunderfeltlike.
“Thenwhy did you kill them?” she shouted. When she’d been given a sword, this wasnotwhat she’d envisioned. If she wasn’t a sword master, she understood their function.
“They do not survive the gathering.”
“Thewhat?”
“The gathering, Chosen. Do you not understand what I am when you see me? Do you not understand myfunction?”
She shook her head. The last time she’d been in this cavern she had almost been reduced to component ash. No matter what he threw at her now, becoming ash was no longer a concern. Here, the fire was her shield, and unlike Hope or Spike, it had not left her.
“Igather, Chosen. I intimidate. I terrify. I cajole. I plead. All of these things—all of them—are tools used in the service of my function. Even on the day the Tower closed around me and denied me the sustenance of my lord, my function was simply to gather.”
“But—”
