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The Exalt's brother goes down like a felled deer, never even seeing the bolt that hit him.
With a flicker of annoyance, Robin registers, as she sprints past the body, that she hit his lung rather than his heart. Never mind that. Someone will be along to finish him off.
Ylisse's palace is guarded by peacekeepers and bandit-fighters; they have no way to deal with warriors forged by civil war. Her loyalists send arrows towards the sound of flapping wings and are rewarded by the scream of a Pegasus; they cut the legs out from under horsemen; they hammer knights until blood leaks out from between the chinks in the armor, and the knights move no more. Some survive -- she catches a glimpse, in the half-lit halls, of the defenders' healers bolting away on horseback, and tells her men not to pursue. If they wish to cripple their own defense, so be it. Others surrender -- they understand Ylisse falls tonight, whether or not it will take weeks for it to know it has died, and choose to live rather than to die foolishly. So be it -- the ranks of her followers have often swelled from former enemies. They did not take Plegia by failing to seize opportunities --
And now she stands before Emmeryn's chamber. The madwoman -- for she knows all that occurred in the previous war and somehow still clings to hope in human goodness, she must be mad -- is not defenseless; her bolts and fireballs have already cut down several would-be assassins by the time Robin herself arrives. The commander spares a moment of respect for each of her fallen men before she enters the fray against Ylisse's Exalt herself, her hand glowing purple with magic as she incants spells of which this pious woman knows nothing.
"This is bloodthirsty madness!" Emmeryn cries, reasonable to the last. Robin rolls her eyes. She knows bloodthirsty madness. She was all but born from it. "I wish peace between our countries, not--"
Madness isn't a battle to the death between adults. It's cities burning in the name of a holy war, civilians being butchered like pigs by paragons of virtue, and screaming children being dragged to the stake by Naga's priests.
Whatever happens now -- whatever she's become -- doesn't matter. Because she will always be that terrified child, her mother dead at the hands of the righteous and her next, being gripped by a blood-spattered, barely-adolescent thief, one of his hands clamped over her mouth and the other clutching the dagger he used to kill the priest as he hisses at her in a voice he can't quite keep from shaking, telling her to be quiet, be quiet, they have to keep the Ylisseans from hearing them --
For that, she will serve Gangrel forever. No matter what he does or what bloody path he treads, she will always remember the night on which that priest declared she was the child they sought, pressing an accusing, bony finger into the birthmark on her right hand, and told his pious thugs that she had to be killed to keep her from being used as -- a vessel? An avatar? She never understood what they meant, and still does not. She only understood that a street rat, one of the many war orphans out for no one but himself, did something infinitely reckless and selfless that night, and for all that he did that night and every night after to keep her alive, her life is his. It always has been.
She will drag this woman's bloody corpse to her king's door, and with the end of the line of the Exalt -- this woman soon to be dead, her brother dying, and the other one rumored to not even have the Mark -- they will have peace.