“No?”
Orbaranne chuckled. Her Avatar had remained in the dining hall, but Kaylin was used to conversing with essentially invisible Avatars. “Think carefully. What you desire in this moment is to open your figurative doors and encompass the homeless—people who are what you once were. And this desire is at the heart of the Hallionne. But it is the desire of a moment. When you arrived, you were confused and hungry. The hunger was the desire of that moment. When you are dressed down by your sergeant, you are frustrated and angry with yourself. You return to your home, but you do not shed that frustration or anger.
“All of these things are part of who you are. The anger. The hunger. The desire to help and protect. But they are very individual. There is some part of you that understands that there must be limits to their expression. Do you imagine that you could live for eternity with those limits? That your desires, your angers, your fears, would never exceed the boundaries that you choose to live within?” She waited for Kaylin’s reply, but Kaylin found she had nothing to say.
“Imagine, then, that those desires, those angers, those hungers, those hopes, move worlds. Imagine that they create worlds—and destroy them. Imagine that the boundaries which you set—boundaries which are mortal and confined to a handful of decades if you are lucky—are so small that they are all but invisible. An Ancient could not become a building such as the Hallionne, because there are no boundaries for the Ancients. No boundaries that cannot be crossed, no boundaries that can be enforced.
“If, in your momentary anger, you could destroy the entirety of your city between one breath and the next, what home, what protection, could you offer? The Ancients could not destroy each other so easily—that took effort, will, planning. Even luck. But their creations perished in their attempts to harm each other. Do not wish to be a god. It is not an existence that will bring you anything but misery, in the end.”
The Lord of the West March looked...surprised. And troubled. “Orbaranne,” he began.
“No,” she replied, before he could finish whatever he clearly meant to say. “I am fine. I chose this existence, and I understood what it entailed; in no other way could I have been recreated. Lord Kaylin does not. But I think it necessary that she understand as much of it as I can convey. Come, the stairs to the left.”
“Stairs?” The Lord of the West March asked.
“Given the difficulty Lord Kaylin had with a simple portal to the great hall, we are taking a modified approach to the interior.”
Kaylin was really, really grateful for it. Walking wasn’t a problem in comparison.
*
She was not surprised to see that the stairs led down. Although she understood that the portal paths existed in an alternate dimension, she thought of them as strictly basement entities. A cavern, even a well-lit one, seemed appropriate. Her arms, however, continued their dull glow, and given the muted lighting in the cavern, they seemed to have brightened.
Bellusdeo noticed, of course. Her eyes were orange, but hinted at gold. She did not feel threatened by either the Lord of the West March or the Hallionne. Or perhaps she’d become accustomed enough to living with Helen that she could almost relax.
She did smile when the stairs reached the floor. “This,” she said, “would make a magnificent aerie.”
“It might,” Orbaranne conceded. “But it is not open to sky.”
“A pity. Could that be changed?”
“Yes—but the sky it would open to here would not be conducive to the flight of the very young.”
Kaylin had been expecting forest, but said nothing. “When Alsanis counseled against the portal paths, did he—”
“He allowed them to leave. They are guests, now, not prisoners. He is fond of them; in the opinion of some of the Hallionne, too fond. Here,” the voice of Orbaranne added. The Lord of the West March understood that “here” was a specific location; to Kaylin, it all looked like slightly uneven rock. To her surprise, he knelt.
Sensing that surprise, he said, “I am not my sister, but it makes the opening of the pathways less onerous if one of our kin aids the Hallionne.”
“It is not necessary,” Orbaranne said, in a different tone of voice.
“If it were necessary, Hallionne, I would not offer. Do not,” he added, his voice warmer than his words, “argue against it. You know you will not win; it will merely waste time.”
“You need to conserve your power,” Orbaranne replied, clearly ignoring what Kaylin felt was probably accurate, if not good, advice. “It is not the first time—”
“My brother was not High Lord the last time an assassination attempt was made.”
“If you intend to support your sister—”
“My brother is High Lord, and it is clear what his decision would be.”
“He did not command you.”
“No. He is my brother; he knows me well. Come,” he said. He removed a dagger from a sheath that had been invisible to Kaylin’s eye, and ran it across the mount of his left palm. Kaylin sucked in air.
I am not the Consort, he said, his interior voice inflected with an odd, wry humor. She sings.
It’s better than bleeding.
She felt a wave of amusement, then. Is that what you think? Tell me, Lord Kaylin, when she sang to the Hallionne, did it appear effortless to your eye? No. This? This is nothing.
Orbaranne doesn’t like it.
I am her guest; of course she disapproves. Asking one’s guests to shed blood for you is not considered hospitality in any home of worth in any culture that I am aware of.
It’s her choice, isn’t it? I mean—this is essentially her body.
Yes, Lord Kaylin, it is. Do you think she is endless? You were here when things were at their most dire for her. Were it not for your intervention, there would be no Hallionne Orbaranne. We ask, we demand, we accept. But she is not a simple object, nor even a complex one; she is alive. Alive and encased, forever, in a small world of her own. I will not deprive her of purpose—but I will not demand more than I must.
Why is blood needed?
Ask the Ancients, Chosen. You have a far better chance of receiving an answer.
She thought, listening to him, that if he could free the Hallionne—if he could take her outside of herself without destroying her—he would do it.
“Yes,” Orbaranne said, voice soft. “He has always heard my voice, and he has listened no matter what it contained. It is for that reason that I hate to see him bleed.”
“I’d offer my blood—”
“Neither your blood nor the Dragon’s would serve.”
“And even would it,” the Lord of the West March said, rising, “it would never be accepted.”
“Oh?”
“The pathways you might open, in the end, are not the paths that were designed for our kin. I have often thought,” he added, “that Dragons, at their core, would make excellent Hallionne; they do not seem to suffer loneliness or isolation the way that others do.”