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It had all gone so well until the dragons came. They had filled the sky, roaring their defiance and glittering in jeweled colors, and her followers had lost what little remained of them and turned from their tasks, no longer interested in anything but their own immediate needs. She had hidden deep within the caves and corridors of her Elderling keep, huddled small, because she had seen what happened to those who failed, and she had failed, failed, and she couldn't understand why. She had had every game piece where she wanted it, and could not fathom how the sky could be full of dragons when she was supposed to have the final living one here encased in the ice with her.
And so she made herself small and hid among the ghosts and waited. The Elderlings lived, loved and laughed around her, and she waited. They played games around her, and danced around her, and worshiped their dragons around her, and still she waited. She watched long dead lovers vow undying love, watched children hurry to reach an adulthood that had long since ended, and she talked to them, reached out to touch them, and hated them when they passed through her, talked over her, when their memories faded just when she wanted to drown into them. She understood now why dragons and Elderlings could not be suffered to return. All that life and love and color and glitter they hoarded, all for themselves, and not a drop of it for her, alone and waiting to be punished for doing what she had been told to do.
Alone and waiting.
Alone and waiting.
Waiting.
It dawned on her, finally, that no punishment had come, no word at all from Clerres, and if none had come in all the eternities she had hid among the ghosts, then none would come.
And so she knew she was still favored, still special, still the White Prophet of her time, and that she still had work to do. Still had a dragon to slay and false prophet to defeat.
The dragons had been stone. She killed the man who first told her, because he had seen her astonishment and outrage and joy. This was why she still lived; this was why she had not been punished. Beloved’s dragons had been as false as he was, a conjurer’s trick that she could repeat – the revelation made everything fall into place, the strange passages in the scrolls she had purchased from the Six Duchies prince, the odd, lifelike statues she had seen the Elderlings create, the sensation of something stirring in the black stone when she fed the souls of her prisoners and troops to it.
She had work to do, and now she knew she had never failed at all, knew that it had all been Beloved's usual trickery. She was still favored, still special, still better than him, still more loved than him.
Her catalyst had thought himself free to do as he pleased in her absence, had gathered his remaining men and named himself their leader and her a witch and a bad omen. He roared for days after she had him chained to his chair in her throne room, roared and then wept and finally laughed like a madman. She turned her face from him and watched the Elderlings dance across the room, drunk on exotic beverages and love and life and everything she yearned to possess but couldn’t, and resented them for having everything she didn't, and Kebal for being so much less than she had been promised.
Slowly, slowly, her work lurched and skidded along. Messengers sailed between the mainland and Aslevjal, stirring factions to move against the throne; one of them would shake the pretender from whichever tree he was hiding in. Her forces were swelling with new additions, her dungeons with their soulless relatives, her stone dragon with their souls. The work around the dragon within the ice progressed slowly but surely. The little narcheska she had prepared was offered to yet another Six Duchies prince on a silver platter. And all of a sudden her game was won, both the false prophet and his catalyst delivered to her hands, her quest one breath from completion, her victory absolute.
She felt hollow.
There was no escaping it. Even in the darkest hours of the night before her final victory, alone and walking among the ghosts that had been her only companions for years, she felt it: the connection between prophet and catalyst, humming in the air in a constant current, crackling like lightning. It raised the hair on her arms, sent a thrill of deepest, purest envy and hate and longing down her spine.
She passed through the Elderlings sharing her space but not her time, long used to them now. A curiously colored cat ran through her legs, followed first by a squealing child, and then by the child's father, their laughter echoing around her eerily. An intricate melody played on seapipes, powered by lungs long since stilled, buffeted her like the summer breeze had forever ago, when she had been a girl in Clerres. A young woman's call demanded her attention; she was holding a basket of flowers unlike any she had ever seen, flowers that seemed made of crystal and precious gems but alive, flowers that were not for her at all but the group of giggling girls that passed through her to admire them just when she had moved to inspect them more closely. A bitterness welled within her as she stopped and watched the woman pin a blue flower on a girl's lavender hair, her friends exclaiming in delight, and it threatened to choke her when the lavender-haired girl rushed up the corridor to intercept her lover. He brushed back her hair, admiring the flower and the girl it adorned, and she gave him a secret sort of smile and pulled him aside, into an alley that had long since ceased to exist. His eyes twinkled golden at her.
Ilistore stood staring at the collapsed wall that she had almost walked into, trying to follow the young couple, and thought of the little golden serpent bleeding in her room. Why had this girl been so treasured? Why was he? Why did Beloved get a catalyst that would slay a dragon for him, that would reach out and snatch the stars from the night sky for him, when she only got one that had to be chained to stay by her side? How could anyone love Beloved and not her? She was special, she was favored. She was important, she was strong, she had lived in exile, with only ghosts for her company, for two decades, and she deserved all that love, all that devotion. She had made sacrifices, and the little snake just slithered about, all charm and innocence, wormed his way into the hearts of kings and queens and coiled around them, whispering venom in their ears.
Why did he have what should have been hers? Why was he sheltered by kings and rewarded by Elderlings and loved by catalysts? Why was she alone, always alone and waiting?
She breathed it in, the air heavy with their love and despair, bleeding out of them, reaching for one another even while both were unconscious. The bond was almost visible, almost tangible, like her Elderlings. And like her Elderlings, like everything they had possessed, it should be hers, she decided abruptly. It was not enough to complete her mission and vanquish the false prophet, not when he had so brazenly stolen all that had been meant for her. She would take it all back from him, and hear him admit his guilt before she let him die.
Hear him admit that she was favored, that she was special. That it was it was she who was beloved.