*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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Ben thinks a thought he's often thought before, though he doesn't know it. It's a thought that springs eternal from a rapid, streamlined mind; a tinkering thing of mechanical wonder that zips and whirls in elegance and deadly precision.
He thinks:
It seems inevitable it should come to this.
And it was, wasn't it? Though, the Ben before, who has thought this thought many times, would have never thought he would follow it to this door. This foreign, unforeseen conclusion.
Sure, death dealt to his beloved—that was always in the cards, the inevitable conclusion concluded a thousand times over in anger, in grief, in resignation, in acceptance. Killing Allayria is a familiar frame.
But not this why.
For all the cold, machine-like wonder of Ben's mind, it is also thing of fancy. That deadly machine bent its brilliance toward a construct built in the clouds of his mind—an end utopia where a man has the opportunity to make his own way in the world and to be what he wants to be, not what is expected of him. Ben dreamed of killing Allayria to achieve this end, this great leveling of the board he ever sees himself on.
He never dreamed of killing her to atone for his sins.
Sins? That thought had never crossed his mind either—not in any real way. Certainly he had committed some—some very serious ones, he would not deny that. But these sins, they could be borne before in that cold, clear thinking for that dream.
The one he atones for cannot.
Maybe you proved to Allayria that your way of thinking wasn't going to work out too well for her, so she chose another. Another in which she's guaranteed to win.
Yes, Ben has blackened his hands with many sins.
It makes him think of another indictment, set upon him nearly a year ago, a mark laid upon him by a strange man with his own black fingers and white, milky eyes.
Your new world will be made of blood and bones, and nothing green will grow there.
Yes, it seems inevitable that it should come to this; inevitable for anyone who was truly watching.
But the watchers are all dead, aren't they? Most buried by his own hand.
I have killed every ally, every voice of reason we could have used against her, he thinks, counting Ruben, Balder, Abe, and Wren. All the counterbalances quietly set in place.
He thought they were counterbalances to himself only—obstacles on his board, on his way to take the king. He was blind to their protection. Blind until it was too late.
Ben has spent many hours thinking over his conversation with Baulieu. Many hours turning the words over in his head.
"I have been a fool," he tells the darkness for, since that very conversation, he has been truly alone. "A monster and a fool."
When he thinks around it, to the ever-spiraling consequences of it, what once was an incredible, unshakeable belief in his dream fractures further. When he thinks about Meg, Iaves, he feels himself start to fragment.
This is a new door of destiny Ben has arrived at, one he would have never seen before, but now, in the light, seems as if it has always been waiting for him to arrive at its step.
Gods help me, Ben thinks—a new thought, for he's never thought he needed any help from any god. Gods help all of us.
The wagon beneath him jostles over rough terrain. Outside, sitting in the moonlight, are men who think him to be close to a god, or at least some kind of prophetic messiah sent to deliver them into a new world. The Ben before might have even agreed with that last interpretation in the deepest parts of his heart.
But this Ben does not. That dream was a lie—a beautiful, deadly dream he could not wish into reality no matter how hard he tried.
And I tried hard. So hard.
Not all of Ben's faith is gone—the principles he founded all these dreams on, they still hold strong in his heart, but in the course of a few hours the makeshift future of razed, freed lands he built on them has tumbled and crashed. Or maybe those hours were really days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years. Maybe some of this was fashioning cracks in the dream before he could really see them.
But the men out there show that the dream does not only live in Ben's mind—it lives in theirs too, and all the others he pulled to his side.
It lives in Allayria's mind as a nightmare, a boogie man.
Ben has to break his dream. Or at least level it down to some good foundation for someone else to open the door to and build upon. But not him.
Ben has a new door to walk through.
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A/N: He's an asshole, but now he's a self-aware asshole. 🤷♀️
Chapter Notes: Balder tells Ben what his new world will be built on in Prodigal's "Clever Little Trinkets."
