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Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the...
06:55, 2010-Jan-31
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Everything, thought Brandin of Ygrath, of the Western Palm, weeping helplessly on his hill as he looked down over the valleyHe had been driven to this and had answered, had summoned all he had ever had to this final purpose, and it was enoughIt was sufficient and nothing less would have beenThere had been too much magic opposed to him, and death had been waiting for his people here
He knew what he had been made to do, knew the price of holding nothing backHe had paid that price and was paying it now, would go on doing so with every breath he drew until he diedHe had screamed Stevan's name, aloud and in the echoing chambers of his soul, before the summoning of that powerHad known that twenty years of vengeance for that too-soon shattered life were now undone under this bronze sun
There had been men dying below him though, fighting under his banner, in his name, and there had been no retreat for them from that plainHe had been chanel handbags collection driven to this moment, like a bear to a rocky cliff by a pack of wolves, and the price was being paid nowEverywhere the price was being paidThere was butchery in the valley; a slaughter of BarbadiansHe was a grieving, torn thing, all the memories of love, of a father's loss flooding over him, another kind of tidal wave
He wept, adrift in an ocean of loss, far from any shoreHe was aware, dimly, of Dianora beside him, clutching his hands between her own, but he was lost inside his pain, power gone now, the core of his being shattered into fragments, shards, a man no longer young, trying without any hope at all, to conceive of how to shape a life that could possibly go forward from this hill
Then the next thing happenedFor he had, in fact, forgotten somethingSomething he alone could possibly have known
And so time, which truly would not stop, for grief or pity or love, carried them all forward to the moment no sorcerer or wizard chanel pearls or piper on his ridge had foreseen
The weight had been the weight of mountains crushing his mindCarefully, exquisitely judged to leave him that faintest spark of self-awareness, which was where the purest torture layThat he might always know exactly who he was and had been, and what he was being made to do, utterly unable to control himselfPressed flat under the burden of mountainsHe straightened his back, of his own willHe tried to lift his head higher but could notHe understood: too many years in the same skewed, sunken positionThey had broken the bones of his shoulder several times, carefullyHe knew what he looked like, what they had turned him into in that darkness long agoHe had seen himself in mirrors through the years, and in the mirrors of others' eyesHe knew exactly what had been done to his body before they started on his mind
That didn't matter nowThe mountains were goneHe looked out with his own sight, reached back chanel messenger bags with his own memories, could speak, if he wished to speak, with his own thoughts, his own voice, however much it had changed
What Rhun did was draw his sword
Of course he had a swordHe carried whatever weapon Brandin did, was given each day the clothing the King had chosen; he was the vent, the conduit, the double, the Fool
He was more than thatHe knew exactly how much moreBrandin had left him that delicately measured scrap of awareness at the very bottom of his mind, under the burying, piled-up mountainsThat had been the whole point, the essence of everything; that and the secrecy, the fact that only they two knew and only they would ever know
The men who had maimed and disfigured him had been blind, working on him in their darkness, knowing him only by the insistent probing of their hands upon his flesh, reaching through to boneThey had never learned who he wasOnly Brandin knew, only Brandin and he himself, with that dim mulberry bayswater bag flickering of his identity so carefully left behind after everything else was goneIt had been so elegantly contrived, this answer to what he had done, this response to grief and rage
No one living other than Brandin of Ygrath knew his true name and under the weight of mountains he had had no tongue to speak it himself, only a heart to cry for what was being done to himThe exquisite perfection of it, of that revenge
But the mountains that had buried him were gone
And on that thought, Valentin, Prince of Tigana, lifted his sword on a hill in Senzio
His mind was his own, his memories: of a room without light, black as pitch, the voice of the Ygrathen King, weeping, telling what was being done to Tigana even as they spoke, and what would be done to him in the months and the years to come
A mutilated body, his own features sorcerously imposed upon it, was death-wheeled in Chiara later that week then burned to ash and scattered to the chanel classic flap bag replica wind
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