Page 109 of Cast in Atonement

Kavallac was red-eyed; it was clearly a conversation that would have caused a deafening argument between at least two of the Arbiters.

The chancellor cleared his throat. He might have roared, but there was already one distinctly angry Dragon in the room; if she had little effect, his input wouldn’t change anything.

Instead, he began to speak. “According to Killianas, Azoria was obsessed with the Lake of Life when she arrived at the Academia. There was, in her family—as in many Barrani families—pressure. Everyone wanted the Consort to come from their family line; the perceived power would elevate even the most minor of families.

“She was not considered a suitable candidate, but another family member was. This did not work out. She had considered a marriage alliance, but could not find one that suited her; Killianas believes no eligible Barrani would. Her interest in Arbiter Androsse was less academic than ideal—but she was the woman she had been raised to be: power was compelling.

“Being trapped in a library for eternity was not. She was pragmatic. But she became very, very interested in the genesis of Ancestral names. In Barrani history, many men and women of power sought freedom from the vulnerability, the weakness, of the True Name, to great ruin, for themselves and those around them. They sought to remove themselves from their name.”

Androsse nodded. “Azoria understood that my people gained power with the acquisition of words, but the words were not our weakness. Should one of our kin know our name—an analogy—it could not easily be used to control us; our names evolved. Our lack of Barrani weakness was not because we divested ourselves of the essence of our lives—it was because we expanded upon it, building sentences, paragraphs, poetry that could not be spoken with the will and power to grant another command of us.

“What she did not—or could not—understand was that that option was not available to her. Not at that time. Tell me, Corporal, what did Azoria look like when she died? Did she look Barrani at all?”

“You already know the answer.”

“I do. But were Terrano to join you in the library now, neither would he. I have never seen Valliant take a different form. I have never seen Serralyn do so, either. I am certain An’Teela does not. And yet, I am equally certain that they could, should they desire to do so. Do you believe it was her form that defined her?”

Kaylin frowned.

“If she had one flaw,” Androsse continued, “it was her vanity.”

In Kaylin’s opinion, she’d had a lot more flaws than one. A lot.

“She desired to be more than she was born to be. It is a common desire. Did you not, in your childhood, desire the same?”

Kaylin shrugged. “I don’t care if she wanted to be what Terrano is. I care that she murdered dozens of people—of at least two races—to do it. It’s not my job to tell people who they should or shouldn’t be. It’s my job to tell them what they should or shouldn’t do.”

“Very well. Azoria failed. But she clearly found tools that could have pushed her across the boundary of failure into success.” Androsse turned to Starrante. “You believe that Azoria found a fallow birthing space, for want of a better word.”

“Bakkon suspected it; his recent visit confirmed that suspicion.”

“And she built her house in it?” Kaylin was surprised, and shouldn’t have been.

“If you were under the impression that her manor was a mortal building, you are mistaken,” Androsse said, frowning. Kaylin guessed that mistaken was not the first word that had come to him. “The acquisition of her home and the building of it imply that this fallow space was discovered recently.”

“Those spaces are not easily moved.”

“Can they be moved with difficulty?” Androsse asked the Wevaran.

“I would have said they could not be found—or moved—at all.”

“The flower from the green couldn’t be grown outside of the green, either,” Kaylin pointed out. She exhaled. “What we now have is a set of assumptions. Azoria found an...extradimensional egg. She moved it. She used something that was contained in the egg as the atmosphere in which she built her manor. We don’t know if there were actual Wevaran in the fallow egg.”

Starrante’s eyes instantly rose in a wave across his body.

“They might have all died, right?” Kaylin asked. “If they hadn’t, the egg wouldn’t be fallow. There would have been a Wevaran baby.”

The Arbiter said nothing, his eyes waving like a field of bloodied stalks in a gale.

Kaylin’s frown deepened. “Could the hatchlings survive if they couldn’t devour each other? They don’t seem to need food the way our young do.”

“Not enough is known. We remember the struggle to become, and we emerge. Our accounts, our studies, are always written by those who did. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. It’s possible that instead of one being emerging as the strongest, there are two, and the number of siblings each devours is even. If that was the case, it is possible that proto-Wevaran could exist in an unhatched egg. I remind you that the egg analogy is simple because it is wrong.”

Kaylin nodded. “If she found almost-Wevaran in that environment, could she devour the partial names?”

“I am not at all certain it would have the effect it would for our own immature young.”

“Which is yes?”

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