Page 160 of Cast in Conflict

Today, she felt their weight. They’d become so heavy she was forced to her knees; this wasn’t what the marks normally did.

But she couldn’t wait, couldn’t sit here and let the marks themselves decide what it was she was supposed to do. She knew what she had to accomplish.

She didn’t know how.

Words were tools—but they had to be understood, right? She had to understand them, to put them together, to make sense of things. That was the point of language.

Why the Ancients had thought it was a good idea to have so damn many different languages was a constant irritation. But she didn’t want to give up her mother tongue; she couldn’t reasonably expect others to want to give up theirs. She’d learned how to speak Leontine, Aerian, Barrani. She needed to learn how to speak...

True Words.

What, then, did she need these words to do? What could she ask of them? “Make my voice louder”? “Make my words clearer”? But if she said the wrong thing, if she couldn’t break the cycle of anger and rage and pain, volume didn’t matter.

Yes, she needed to communicate.

But they had to be willing—or able—to listen. Kaylin in a rage didn’t think clearly; Bellusdeo in a rage didn’t either.

She had no idea what Emmerian did with rage; whether it ruled him or he ruled it. At the moment, she was pretty certain it was the former. He’d immediately turned on Karriamis when the Avatar had appeared. Bellusdeo hadn’t been far behind.

Hells, if normal daggers could injure the Tower, Kaylin might have been tempted to join in. But only briefly.

What she really needed was a giant bucket of extremely cold water that she could just upend over the damn crevice. Something entirely different from what the three Dragons were doing now—which probably involved claws, teeth, wings, and fire. Things that caused a different type of pain, maybe in an attempt to avoid the deeper one.

Kaylin understood this.

She hadn’t expected it of Emmerian or Karriamis, the latter of whom was ancient, which meant old enough to Know Better.

But no. Old or not, ancient or not, they were people, and people who’d had more than enough time to amass a world of pain. Kaylin had had two and a bit decades, and mortal memory being what it was, she probably didn’t remember a lot of it clearly anymore.

She was pretty certain that the marks themselves wouldn’t turn into a giant bucket full of ice-cold water. They probably couldn’t be used as a bracing slap in the face either. She needed something...something...

Silence.

Silence. Quiet. The peace that existed when the silence wasn’t a product of conflict. The whole of the congregation of moving, circling marks stilled. They began to recede, to once again occupy her skin—all save one.

It would have taken hundreds of words—she’d’ve spent them gladly if she were good with them—to describe what she now felt, to define it, to speak it clearly in any of the languages she knew. And even then, she thought she’d fail to fully explain, to fully capture, what this particular silence was.

She might have expected that it would be a simple rune, not a complicated one; she’d’ve been wrong. It was dense with lines and squiggles, and three dots were set in an almost triangular pattern contained by the rest of the structure. But if she thought more about it, this made sense: silence had many textures, and peace had many textures.

She caught the rune in the palm of her hand and quickly brought her second hand to bear, because the mark grew, maintaining the pattern, but...enlarging it. Here, lines that resembled delicate brush strokes became solid enough to carry the weight of an entire department’s worth of coats. They became substantially heavier; she was glad that she’d already dropped to her knees to brace herself, because it was necessary.

“I could use a little help here,” she grunted.

Hope sighed. He could hear her clearly, and she could hear him, although the Dragons hadn’t become significantly quieter. Not yet.

I do not believe it is wise to send Bellusdeo out of the Tower at this precise moment.

“We don’t know what else is attacking—no, shut up.” The mark wavered, becoming momentarily transparent. She lost the thread of the thought that had allowed her to even find the damn thing, and struggled to bring it back.

Hope snorted. This, I can do. You are a very odd master. I am not displeased with you, but cannot decide if you are kind or cowardly.

She knew the moment he began to transform. He became equal in size to most of the Dragons.

The size was helpful, and the wings—in other circumstances—allowed flight when he was willing to carry her. She thought the mark was heavier than she was, or was becoming heavier.

It has not changed, Hope said. It is your perception of it that has, no more. You could do this without my interference, but you rely on the paradigms with which you are familiar. You are very odd, he repeated. He set a clawed paw beneath the weight of the mark. You are certain?

She was.

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