Page 189 of Cast in Conflict

“Kaylin—”

“No, you don’t understand,” she snapped, one hand becoming a fist around the neck of the bag she’d been handed. “He’s staying because he wants to die.”

“He’s an adult. He’s allowed to make choices. But we shouldn’t be staying because we don’t want to die.” His grip tightened. “Look, Teela will kill me if I lose you here.”

“Then leave. Take the books.”

He is right.

I don’t care. You don’t have to die here.

Did you not understand? I cannot leave. Here—here is the only place I do not hear Ravellon’s voice. That voice has driven all who can hear it to madness. It is here I must stand if I wish to die as myself.

She should have accepted that. She knew it. But she could hear what lay beneath perfectly reasonable words, none of which were lies. Bakkon did not want to leave. He fought now because survival was so instinctive it had governed the entirety of his life, from birth.

No, he wanted to die.

Just as she had wanted to die when she had first entered the Hawklord’s Tower. Not for the same reasons—his reasons were murky and he didn’t put them into thoughts she could touch and hear—but the emotion, the despair, were almost identical.

Mandoran was right; Bakkon was not the child she had been. But that child had lost the life that had given her any meaning, any hope. Absent that life, she had struggled to survive in the fief of Barren, and she had done things in the name of survival that she would never do again while she lived.

But she was grateful that the Hawklord hadn’t killed her. Hadn’t even tried. She was grateful for the life she now led, and she tried—in all the ways available—to balance the harm she had done with help. She couldn’t erase the damage to other people. She could stop herself from doing that damage to anyone else.

She was certain that the Wevaran who had survived the fall of Ravellon and the rise of the Towers would be beyond grateful that Bakkon had survived—but only if he did.

Your friend is correct. I do not want to escape. More web rose; Bakkon began to build a translucent dome in front of and above himself. The Shadow attacking them could be seen through it.

Did you know that Shadow? Did you know what it used to be?

Yes.

You don’t want to kill it.

No. What they do now they would not have done had they not become prey to the madness of the fallen.

Can you wrap them in your web?

If I have no other choice. You must leave.

Wait—what madness?

Bakkon didn’t answer. Maybe Bakkon couldn’t answer. But Spike probably could. He had been captive to Shadow, and had been freed from it.

She felt an eddy of confusion, and realized the Wevaran had caught that thought drift, or had been caught by it. She could feel the sudden turn of his thought, the dangerous edge of hope. Can you—can you free them?

“Mandoran—do you understand what Terrano did when he freed Spike?”

Mandoran said nothing.

“This—whatever it is, the moving blob over there—is caught the same way Spike was. It was Terrano who freed Spike, mostly. Can you do what he did?”

“You freed the thing in the basement of the High Halls.”

She wasn’t certain she had. “Spike did that.”

“What did Spike do?”

“I don’t know. It’s why I’m asking you. What did Terrano do?”

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