Elias knew that Stormfall was under a Heavenly Restriction, but it was the first time he had gotten all of these details about it.
He could not understand the mechanism of control that the Royal Houses and other powerful forces used for control in their domain.
The repercussions of these were vast and terrifying, but Elias did not focus on that for the moment; this trial must be given everything that he had.
He had placed the Heavenly Restriction to be the seed; the realization had to come from them, and now, with their stage acknowledged, he could begin to move them.
"This creature is bound to Mist Phantom," he said. His voice was low, but in the listening silence of the pit, it carried as if the walls themselves were repeating his words for him. "It is bound by the laws inscribed into the bones of this city. We will not get a second chance to fight a thing of this scale at a stage we can match. There will not be another."
Sera's grip on her hilt did not loosen, but her shoulders shifted by a hair. Elias noted it and knew that he had them.
"It called you brother," Theron said, flatly.
"It did."
"Are you?"
Elias did not turn his head. He watched the temple, the ridged hill of flesh, the eyes inside the mouths that were still tracking him with unhurried patience.
There were many ways he could answer this question, but at the moment, Elias decided to speak a bit of truth, not because he thought it was the best option, but because he knew that at the moment, it was not the best answer that was needed, but something honest.
"I do not know what I am," he said. He had learned from his master that the truth, paid out in measured coin, often bought more than a lie, "I know what it is. It is a finger of something larger, the same as I am. The difference between us is which hand we belong to."
"That is not an answer," Elara whispered.
"It is the answer I have. Take it or leave it on the wall."
A pause stretched out. The mountain of flesh in the temple breathed, and the breath of it was the breath of the chamber, and the chamber breathed with it.
Theron muttered something under his breath that was not quite a prayer, then said, "If we go down there and that thing is still talking to you, I am going to be very unhappy with everyone here, including myself."
"Note your displeasure," Sera said.
"Noted."
Elara was the last to speak, her voice small. "We came to find what was at the bottom. This is the bottom. If we leave it here, it follows us out." She did not look at Elias when she said it. "The choice was made when we crossed the rim. This thing ate my mother; it must die."
Kaelen said nothing. He only shifted his hammer to his off hand and flexed the fingers of the freed one until the joints cracked.
The line on the wall had decided. Elias felt it. He did not need to celebrate it. He needed to use it.
"Then we go," he said. "Through the horde until we kill it."
Tarian had been silent through all of this. His pale gold eyes were on the temple, but his stillness had a different quality now than the stillness on the rim. He had been deliberating for a while, and now he had reached a decision.
"I will clear the way," he said.
Everyone here went still and turned to him, even Elias.
"What?" Theron said, and then, because the word had not been enough, "What did you say?"
"I will clear the way." Tarian was not looking at them. He was looking at the ceiling of the chamber, and his face was strangely calm, like someone who had already made a decision they did not plan to change.
"From the rim of the temple to the eastern pillars. I can give you a path. I cannot give you anything else after I give you that."
"What does that mean?" Sera said.
"It means I will not be standing, at the end of it, and whatever the rest of you do down there, you will do without me." A small, dry smile. "It means the prince is leaving the field."
Kaelen, very quietly: "Is this what you truly want?"
"It is."
"Then you know what it costs–"
"I know," Tarian said.
Elara, half a whisper: "Tarian–"
"Do not argue."
"You said–"
"Do not argue," he said again, and this time the goodwill of a man playing prince was stripped out of his voice, and what was left was the flat command of a son of Calyx Arathor. "If you argue, I will lose the will to do it, and the thing here will kill us all. We do not have the time for an argument."
He raised his right hand and seemed to be testing the wind.
Above the rim of the pit, far above their heads, in the space of perpetual twilight that had been the sky of this district for as long as the trial had run, something began to gather. The candidates outside the pit could not see it directly. They could feel it.
Suddenly, the rim of the pit darkened as if a lid were being closed over it; the dim red glow that had lit the temple from below dimmed for an instant, as if the temple's own light had taken a step back to look.
Elias suddenly felt it in his bones; he had instinctively known that Tarian had the potential to kill him, and now his perception was telling him that the air over the sealed district had begun to move and someone was telling it where to go.
"He is calling weather," Theron whispered. "He is calling the weather."
"Quiet," Sera said.
Tarian closed his eyes. He raised his left hand to meet the right. His blue hair, grey with ash for the last three hours, was no longer grey; the ash was lifting from him, sloughing off in drifts as if a wind that did not exist were stripping him clean, and what was beneath it was bright, blue, and electric.
Then his feet left the outcrop.
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