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Aftermath: Forsworn Water trickled through the clock. Two dead men before him, and the accusing gazes of the company on him. Ripling breathed and studied the crowd assembled before him. Or about him. A single man—borne by the Emperor’s mercy—in a crowd at night, beneath the flickering torches. The sort of image that stuck with you, that might be carefully, painstakingly polished into a poem. The post of lieutenant might have been wine in a jewelled cup. Or it might have been poison. A powerful image: you never knew which the world presented to you. Only the Emperor, in his beneficence. You had to cling to that, to that bedrock. Ripling’d lied about the search he’d conducted with the Captain’s signet seal. But no one had to know. No one, apart from John Bluhm, who’d been so silent that in speaking up now, he appeared to be almost a different man. Perhaps it was just the night. “I had a dream,” Ripling whispered. Lost in the noise, as the others, Mallard, Gaovaris, Fletcher, and John Bluhm all argued about what to do with him. Squabbling beneath the wavering light of the torches. Above, the silver light of the moon, and the quiet trickle of water through the clock. The sort of thing you might have expected the Banished Immortal himself to have captured in his poetry. A sort of immanence, just shy of transcendence. It was all in the ephemerality of it, the transience. (Only the Emperor himself, the splendid scion of the Eighty Suns, was eternal.) Breathing in, Ripling enjoyed what might well be his final moments alive. “I had a dream!” he declared aloud. Blinking, they all turned to stare at him. “Eh?” Mallard managed, at last. Odd, that. You’d think those people’d dreamed more often. “I dreamed that Fletcher was trying to kill me,” Ripling said. Not a lie, this. Odd dream, but one that had remained with him, this Hour. Supposed he should’ve demanded the search, instead of trying to get a spot of sleep. Some remnant of it remained with him, even now. You could imagine dreams were messengers, whispers of the eternal realm. Fragments of the world where the Emperors resided, after they passed from this world and returned to the Eighty Suns in glory. “Kill me, if you must. The Emperor smiles upon me, even in death. Can any of you say the same of yourselves?” Water trickled through the clock. Fletcher the Fetcher had lived a very long time. He wasn’t loyal to the one they called the General. He hadn’t been loyal for a very long time, not since the day his oaths had died. You believed in things, once. You would die, would surrender anything, just anything for your cause. He collected artefacts now, sold some of them. There was a trace of that in Yuen’s remaining loyal soldiers. You could see it in the way they spoke, in the way a man five years dead still moved them to betray new oaths sworn, and to kill. Some part of him wanted that, that memory of what it felt like to believe without constraint, with all his heart, in something. Anything. But there was Kezin too. Cold, they’d said, when he executed Randen without a moment’s hesitation. No doubt that Kezin would kill every last one of them, if he felt it was necessary. Dead eyes. Fletcher knew what it was like, to be forsworn. All of which meant he needed to cut and run. Fletcher did consider it. Not enough Investiture, though. He’d had a little jar of unkeyed Dor, buried at the bottom of his pack. Not enough to get off Sel, perhaps. Maybe enough to get out of this camp. He’d stayed because…because… Well. Enough of that anyway. This was cutting things too close. He reached into his pack for the jar of unkeyed Dor. No point trying to stay, now. Time in the Rose Empire had been good to him, and there was a seal he had been trying to acquire, but it was clearly time to move on. A flash of pain in his fingers. The jar, breaking. Radiance spilling out, leaking. Rolling like quicksilver on the floorboards, among the glass shards. Clutching at his fingers, Fletcher swore. Blood leaked through his fingers, mixing with the Dor. A small jar of unkeyed Dor. Once, it would have been enough. Fletcher breathed. Water trickled through the clock. “He was trying to escape, Captain,” Gaovaris reported. Kezin remembered Jiang’s reports on the man: sloppy swordsman. That’d have to be reviewed, among other things, afterwards. If there was an afterwards. Fletcher sprawled on the dirt of the courtyard, bleeding out. “There was a strange substance on the floor of the sleeping quarters,” Ripling reported. “Bright enough to illuminate, as though it were the Emperor’s eighty virtues. But it was elusive to the touch, and…rolled, despite being liquid.” “So you have no idea if it was a poison and you touched it anyway.” “Sir, we used a stick,” Mallard said. “That wasn’t a duck we wanted to leave about, if we could.” Kezin grunted. “So he was trying to escape. And you know this how?” “Packed his things,” Mallard said. “Gaovaris saw him slip off while everyone was debating. John Bluhm’s dead, by the way. Almost forgot.” Kezin himself had almost forgotten that Bluhm existed. The man had been far too quiet. “And you think Fletcher did it?” “We have an alibi for everyone except Fletcher, sir,” Ripling reported. Largely because everyone in the courtyard had been trying to kill him but the Captain certainly didn’t need to know that. Kezin considered it. “Good enough,” he said. He looked down at Fletcher. “What do you have to say for yourself?” Fletcher looked at him. For a moment, Kezin saw his own eyes reflected: the tiredness that had sunk into his bones, going on. Betrayals that could never be taken back. You were forsworn. And then life, however unfairly, went on. Sometimes you were even rewarded for doing so. Sometimes, oaths were the most cruel thing you could do to a man. Fletcher shrugged. “Gaovaris was trying to kill me,” he said. Kezin didn’t bother glancing over. “Gaovaris?” “He lies, sir,” Gaovaris spat. “I was never alone with him, and didn’t need to hit him in the hand with a knife if I was trying to kill him. As the Sagacious Ci said in his Washing Away of Wrongs, when the testimonies of three are coherent and one is not, the one that is inconsistent is the liar. Sir.” Fade was at the back of the crowd. Kezin met his eyes. Fade nodded. Kezin drew his sword. A single swift stroke. A sharp glint as the keen blade flashed. Fletcher collapsed, blood spraying. “Good work,” Kezin said. “I believe this is the last of them. Someone clean that up, and I want one squad stationed on alert. Otherwise, I think we are in the clear now.” He watched the way they held themselves: the way Gaovaris’s shoulders instantly slumped, the way Ripling drew himself up and started calling out orders in the Emperor’s name, the way Mallard sighed in relief. Enough had died, Kezin thought. The General was dead, five years ago. He’d obeyed an order to betray his oaths, to stand down. He’d clashed with Fade, that day, all the same. He’d watched the corpse drag out, felt the hammering of his heart in his chest. Enough had died. “We are sworn to the Empire, Lieutenant,” General Yuen had said. “Not to me.” There was the implication: the Empire demanded cruel things. Or the factions did. Perhaps they were all unworthy of her. Enough would continue to die. The eighty suns continued, one after another, to bless the Empire with their life-giving light, a single day at a time, before retreating beneath the world, where they fought the darkness, emerging triumphant in glory, in radiance, in light ever after. Fletcher the Fetcher / @|TJ| was executed. He was a Yuen Loyalist! John Bluhm / @Amanuensis was killed! He was a Discovery Soldier! The game has ended! Congratulations to the Village for a near-sweep! And thanks to @Araris Valerian for being an excellent IM I now have filled my dance card with every IM except Striker