While the dragons talked, the world held its breath.

  Vermilion had retreated to the far wall. Not fled, just retreated. There was a difference, and it was the difference between someone who'd lost and someone who was waiting to see how a much larger game resolved before deciding their next move. His shadow-creatures clustered around him, puppet-slack without active direction.

  Vane had disappeared entirely. Su caught the tail end of his exit—expensive robes, ledger clutched to his chest, the exit strategy of a man who understood that some meetings were above his pay grade.

  The corrupted Sky-Dancers stood motionless. Storm-Plume had gathered the survivors into a tight formation and was doing the impressive thing of looking simultaneously like he wanted to attack everyone present and understood that doing so would be catastrophically stupid.

  Resplendent Feather had freed himself from the shadow-tendrils at some point while everyone was watching the dragon situation. He stood a few feet from Su, and she could feel him not quite looking at her.

  The binding still held. Obsidrax's work. It didn't hurt, exactly. It just sat around her like a room she couldn't leave. Fernando had managed to right himself in a new crack of crystal that had formed during the roof explosion. His fronds were trembling in a way that had nothing to do with wind.

  Above, the two dragons occupied the open sky in silence. The silence of two people in the same room who have been not-talking for so long that beginning feels impossible. Yvan had asked Obsidrax to speak. About the last conversation, about what she said, before the Stone.

  Obsidrax was quiet for a moment that stretched. Then he said: "She told me I was being an idiot."

  His voice was even, careful. The voice of someone handling something fragile.

  "I had just helped her destroy the fourth kingdom. Or the fifth. I've lost the exact count." A pause. "She was exhausted but it didn't slow her down. But there was something in her eyes that had started to go—I don't know the right word for it. Like a room after the fire goes out."

  He looked at his own claws. "I told her we should stop. That we'd made the point. That Raymond was already hiding, that Donovan had gone to ground, that justice had been—" He stopped. "She laughed and said, 'Justice. You think any of this is justice.'"

  The Hall was very still. "She said, 'I can still feel the moment he died. I'll always feel it. Every kingdom that falls, I feel it again and it's still not enough and it will never be enough and I know that, Obsidian. I know that and I cannot stop.'" His use of the old name was clearly unconscious. "She called me Obsidian when she was being honest. It was shorter."

  Yvan hadn't moved. His eyes were on his brother and his expression was the expression of someone hearing something they already knew and finding that knowing it didn't make hearing it any easier.

  "She said, 'I'm going to lose myself completely very soon. I can feel the edges going. When that happens, promise me you'll find a way to stop me that isn't killing me, because I don't think I'd survive knowing you'd done that to yourself.'" Obsidrax's voice was steady. "I told her I promised. She said, 'Good. Now stop following me around with that face and go do something useful with your grief.'"

  He looked up at Yvan. "Those were the last words she said to me before you sealed me in the tower. Go do something useful with your grief."

  A long silence. "What did she say to you?" Obsidrax asked.

  Yvan was quiet for long enough that Su thought he wasn't going to answer. Then: "She told me the same thing she always told me. When I asked why she kept trying to kill humans when it’s you who taught me how to protect them, even though they kept making the same disasters." He paused. “Because I don’t kill humans, she said. I remove the ones who make humanity impossible.”

  "That sounds like her."

  "It does." Another pause. "She also said, 'Don't be sad about it. I'm already mostly gone. You're just keeping the rest of me somewhere safe until I can figure out how to be a person again.'"

  The words landed quietly.

  "She said it like it was a temporary situation," Yvan continued. "Like she was asking me to hold her coat."

  "She always talked about terrible things like they were minor inconveniences," Obsidrax said. "It was extremely annoying."

  "Yes."

  "I miss it."

  "Me too."

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Su was very carefully not thinking about anything in particular. Not about a girl named Lily who died saving her sister. Not about the orphanage. Not about the specific, persistent, inexplicable loneliness that had followed her through three lifetimes like a smell she couldn't locate. She was definitely not thinking about any of that.

  Fernando's voice appeared in her mind, very quiet: "Su."

  "Not now."

  "Su, I need to tell you something."

  "Fernando, I am literally held in a magical binding while two ancient dragons—"

  "The Lens," Fernando said. "You used the last charge on the binding, but before it ran out, I saw something. In the threads. In the architecture of what holds you."

  Su went still.

  "The curse-signature," Fernando said. "The original one. The three-hundred-year-old one from the Sky-Dancer transformation. It doesn't match the others."

  "What do you mean it doesn't match."

  "The other cursed Sky-Dancers, their signatures all look the same. Like copies of the same template. But yours—" Fernando's fronds shifted. "Yours looks like the original. Not a copy of it. Like—" He seemed to be searching for the right way to say it. "Like the difference between a key and the lock it was made for."

  Su processed that. Then said: "That's very interesting and I'm going to set it aside for now because if I think about it I'm going to start screaming."

  "That seems reasonable."

  Above, Yvan said: "I want to propose something."

  Obsidrax looked at him.

  "Not opening the Stone." Yvan's voice was careful. "But speaking to her through the seal. You and I, together. Before any decision is made." He paused. "She should have a say in what happens next. She always should have."

  Obsidrax was quiet. Then: "You think she's still—coherent?"

  "I think she told you she'd figure out how to be a person again. I think that was probably not an empty statement."

  Another silence.

  "And Su Ian Hoo?" Obsidrax asked. His eyes moved down to her, and there was something in them that she hadn't seen from him before. Something that looked, almost, like recognition. "What about her?"

  "The binding releases when we begin the communication sequence," Yvan said. "That was always in the architecture. You designed it that way, a partial opening of the seal to allow voice through releases the external constraints."

  "Yes."

  "So when we speak to her, Su goes free. Then that's the first condition." Yvan looked at his brother. "She goes free first. Everything else after."

  Obsidrax looked at Su for a long moment. She looked back at him. The man who had manipulated her, used her, told her truths wrapped around omissions. "All right," he said. "She goes free first."

  The binding began to dissolve, coming apart carefully, thread by thread, with the same precision that had built it. Su felt it go, and what came with its absence was not relief exactly but something more complicated. The full weight of her own body returning. The void-energy settling back into configuration. The three lifetimes of accumulated self landing fully back in her bones.

  She stood up. Her legs held. "Right," she said.

  Fernando let out a breath that plants weren't supposed to have. Resplendent Feather said nothing, but some of the tension went out of his posture.

  Su looked at the two dragons above her, at the ruined Hall, at the surviving Sky-Dancers watching from the far wall. Storm-Plume met her eyes. She had no idea what he was thinking. She suspected he had no idea either. She looked at Obsidrax. "The Stone is north of here?"

  "Two days. In the valley where the cult built their second site."

  "And when you open communication, what does that look like?"

  "It looks like a temporary door," Obsidrax said. "Voice passes through, not presence. She can speak. We can speak. No one crosses."

  "And she decides," Su said. "Whatever happens after... she decides."

  Obsidrax looked at her steadily. "Yes."

  "That wasn't in your original plan."

  "No," he said. "It wasn't."

  Su nodded once. Looked up at Yvan. "You're coming."

  "Obviously," Yvan said, with the tone of someone who found the question slightly insulting.

  "And you're not going to do the mysterious timing thing where you wait until the last thirty seconds again."

  A pause. "I make no promises about timing. But I will be present."

  "That's the worst answer."

  "It is an honest one."

  Su picked up Fernando's bucket. The fern's fronds were still trembling. She looked at him for a moment. "You okay?"

  "No," Fernando said. "I haven't been okay in weeks. I'm a potted plant who survived a forty-story fall and now I'm apparently going on a two-day journey to a cursed stone that might end civilization." A pause. "But I'm coming."

  "Knew it."

  She started walking toward the Hall's exit. Resplendent Feather fell into step beside her after a moment. She didn't tell him not to. Storm-Plume, after a pause, began organizing the surviving Sky-Dancers to follow.

  Vermilion hadn't moved from his corner. Su stopped in front of him.

  He looked down at her. His dead eyes held something unreadable.

  "You know the Chancellor's plan fails now," she said. "Whatever he promised you."

  "I know."

  "What will you do?"

  Vermilion was quiet for a moment. Then: "I haven't decided." His gaze moved to Resplendent Feather, and something passed between them. The long, complicated acknowledgment of people who share something they'd both prefer not to. "But I'll decide without the Chancellor's hand in it."

  Su nodded and walked past him.

  Behind her, the purple dragon and the golden dragon rose together into the sky above the broken Aerie, two ancient things moving in the same direction for the first time in three hundred years.

  Neither of them looked down. But Su, who had been carrying a strange and specific loneliness since before she could name it, looked up at them once.

  Then she faced north, and walked.

  SYSTEM UPDATE:

  BINDING: DISSOLVED

  QUEST: THE UNMAKING

  STATUS: APPROACHING RESOLUTION

  CURRENT OBJECTIVE: REACH THE WEEPING STONE

  NOTE FROM SYSTEM: We still don't know what you are exactly. But we're starting to have a theory.

  We'll let you know when we're certain.