The command screamed inside of Anddyr, unlike anything he’d ever felt before; a single word that froze him utterly, rendered him incapable. Stop. It wasn’t audible, it was only in his mind, but it sounded as though it were both screamed in an echoing room and whispered intimately in his ear.
There was nothing, nothing at all, he could do to ignore that command.
His mindless, desperate flailing toward Etarro ceased, and the scream that had been shredding his throat silenced. He twisted his head in sick compulsion, unerringly finding the source of the command: she glowed with the same blue light of humanity, but black ink wound through her like snakes, and the edges of her form were jagged, incomplete.
Even as far away as Anddyr was, he could make out the smile on her face.
The preachers and blades pinning him down faded away to nothingness, the battle around him disappeared, his own body seemed to disintegrate. All that was left was the command, and the woman with her hand like a vise around his soul.
A second command came, just as simple and just as unrelenting: Give.
Anddyr felt all his power, everything he had, begin to flow from his hands toward the woman, a trickle at first and then a terrifying rush. It had been the same in the cellar, when Neira had pushed at the barrier so that it pulled and pulled, drawing his power from him like a thread—
Thoughts raced desperately through his spinning head, frantic and keening, whirling and colliding and dying. His body was gone, his limbs were dead, and all he was capable of was giving her everything that was in him. Dread crawled sickeningly through Anddyr, made all the worse by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do.
Neira glowed with flickering and flashing lights now, blue and black and white and colors that had no names, colors that existed only in the smoke-swirling world of unsight. She was incandescent, coruscant, glowing brighter than gods—lit by a hundred lives, and more and more flowing into her, filling her, overfilling, so the light-spark colors swirled and swelled around her, a tempest, a resplendent and a terrible beauty. Anddyr ached to give her everything he had even as something in him wailed and railed against it, but Anddyr had always been weak.
Dimly—so, so dimly, like little more than a tickle—Anddyr became aware of something pressing into his stomach, right below his ribs, pressing just hard enough to make a hitch in his already labored breathing. And he knew what it was: a stuffed horse that he had been given and had given away and had found again, impossibly. Knowing Sooty was there with him, at least, gave him a shred of comfort—and then a flurry of mind-searing hope.
Anddyr had learned how to fight from the very best. Not with a sword—that was something he’d never learned how to use or wanted to—nor with the magic he’d been given by his god and his blood—with that, he’d only ever been good at destroying things.
No, Etarro had given him Sooty and Etarro had taught him to fight, and the young boy-twin had so much experience in fighting for his own freedom.
The compulsions of Stop and Give pulsed through Anddyr like the beating of a second heart, ceaseless and inescapable—and yet.
Anddyr ground his teeth, and his fingers turned to claws, and tears streamed from the eyes he had taken for a different kind of freedom, and slowly he began to scream, No. He had fought so hard for so long, and he had gotten so very good at fighting.
His body returned to him piece by piece, and the hands pinning him were gone, busy fighting, raging and racing. The woman glowed with more light than she could hold, more life than anything could hold, and still she demanded more. It flowed from inside the mountain and from without, the mages who had filled the room fading or faded, the light gone from their forms; and more spilled into the cavern, seeping through the walls of Atura, pulled somehow from mages beyond the mountain, how—?
A small cry stabbed into Anddyr’s ears, and he twisted to see the dais, and the end of the scene playing out on its stage.
A small body, no longer glowing, sprawled clumsy. Another form, almost identical, still standing and still resplendent. A giant of a man before the much smaller one, and in his hands a sword that devoured the darkness from the world around it, a glow so bright that shadows could not hope to withstand it. And the sword cut through the small form, the shadow-killing light burning through the beacon-glow, and the body tumbled beside the first. Its light was gone, and so was the sword’s, and Anddyr felt a new scream tear from his throat.
His limbs would not move fast enough.
A new light hovered over the fallen forms, bright and furious, twisting into two matching shapes that pulsed with a seeking anger. The Twins, expelled from their stolen hosts, searching for new life, new freedom—
A lance of swirling and varicolored light shot through the cavern and pierced them both, and Anddyr saw their mouths open in fear and impotent rage as Neira, holding unspeakable power, bore them out and away.
Anddyr was part stumbling, part crawling, part dragging himself along the floor. The battle swirled around him, steps and swords missing him somehow, a cosmic choreography that brought him scrape-handed to the edge of the dais. He dragged himself up, his whole body shaking—he felt so weak, she had taken so much from him already—and he grabbed at the small bodies before him. They were identical in death, Etarro and Avorra indistinguishable.
Stop, something in him wailed. Give. It was not a command, but a plea.
Anddyr felt himself pouring from his fingers once more, all his power, everything he had left, a trickle at first and then a relieving rush. “Now fight,” he said, before the shadow-swirling world dissolved around him, and there was only a silent nothing.