“Open the library, Arbiters.”
Kavallac cleared her throat. “It is not,” she said gently, “your command to give.”
“It was a request.”
“Very well. And it is not a request to which we can accede at the current time.” She walked toward Killian and stopped as she approached the Arkon. Although she was pale and ghostly—as she had been the first time Kaylin had seen her cohere from the pages of a book—her eyes were a luminous gold.
“Lannagaros,” she said, voice gentle. “You are Arkon. You are Arkon in a time of peace. Will you relinquish that responsibility?”
The Arkon turned toward Kavallac then. His eyes were a color that Kaylin had never seen Dragon eyes take. No—that was wrong. She had—but the Arkon’s refused to remain in any of the many color states; they were a flickering of colors, a constant shift, as if no single emotion could anchor them for long enough.
He was the Arkon.
Kaylin understood, at this moment, that Kavallac was asking him to walk away from that. While he considered her words, Kaylin approached Emmerian. Bellusdeo had eyes only for the Arkon.
“I don’t understand,” Kaylin said quietly.
“I think you do. He has been the Arkon since the end of the last of the wars between the Barrani and our kind. He has held the medallions of the flights, gifted us in times long lost to ancient history. Kavallac now asks if he can relinquish the one responsibility that has defined him to the Dragons.”
“Okay, yes, I got that part—but why?”
Emmerian’s smile was slight and informed in every motion of lip and eye by melancholy. “Do you think that he could command the Arbiters to remain without reason? Do you think that he could do so only because he carries those books?”
“...Yes?”
“Yes, perhaps. Perhaps that might be true of you, had you continued to carry them. Understand what this place is.”
“It’s a library.”
“It isthelibrary, Lord Kaylin. Corporal Neya, if you prefer. It is the library of his youth; it is the library that existed before war all but devoured us all over the passage of centuries. This, then, is the place that he was forced to leave to go to war. This is the place that was lost—forever, he thought—when the Towers rose.
“And he stands here, now, in a place that was not destroyed. Lost, yes—but it has been found. He has returned.” Emmerian hesitated. “You understand—you understood—that the Arkon’s hoard was the library and the things it contained.”
She nodded.
“He built it in both sorrow and rage, in regret and, yes, desire. What could be saved, he would save. What could be learned, he would learn. What could be taught, he would teach—or failing that, allow others to teach. He could not build this place—none but the Ancients could, and when the Towers rose, the Ancients faded. Had he been offered the chance to become what Killianas was—and perhaps will be—he would have taken it in an instant.
“No such offer was made. No such campus was built. He understood—as all must—why the Towers were created; what use was knowledge if there are none to learn it, none to question it?”
“And he can’t be both Arkon and chancellor?”
“No. He cannot be Arkon and chancellor both—and yes, I believe that is what he has been offered.”
“So...who would be Arkon?”
“That is a question that I cannot answer. So few of my kin survive, and of those, half sleep the long sleep, while the ages pass around them. You do not ask who might be chancellor in his stead.”
She shook her head. “I think... I think I’ve seen this before.”
“Ah—you were present when Barren became Tiamaris.”
She swallowed and nodded. “But—it’s different. I don’t...” The words faded. Tiamaris had found the heart of Tara, and Tiamaris had—at that moment—desired to possess it, to protect it, to know it.
This was not the same.
“He was always, of all of us, the most quietly responsible. Irascible, yes, and opinionated. But in his fashion, indulgent and even, for a Dragon, gentle. But this is what he wants. This. It is the thing that he will willingly devote the entirety of his remaining life to, the thing he would die to protect.”
“The thing,” Bellusdeo said, speaking for the first time, “that he would kill to protect.” Her eyes were copper and gold. “And they know it. All of them understand—the Arbiters, Killianas. Us.”
