*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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The banners fly high at Cai Morij. Tara watches them move with the wind in the early morning sky, a reckoning that seems to sit heavily on her heart. Beyond them she spies the soaring wings of a lone brown eagle sentry.
"Oh, I would like one," Finn says in her memory, as if he too stands here, watches this morning sky. But he was talking about a different creature then, in a shadowed tent amongst friends and mentors, many of whom would share his fate. "It could be my friend."
He was always a beacon amongst all the rest, glowing so much brighter than Tara or any other Beast caller.
But he never burned, she thinks. All that power but no malice, no bad intentions. He never used it because he wanted to harm; just to protect himself and all his friends.
Tara could not say the same for herself, though she tried, she did, to avoid it. She tried to be good. Good enough.
"It's time, Sharaf."
The echoes of Vatra ring in her mind and Tara turns away from the window, looks back at the older, worn woman standing in the doorway.
"Coming," she answers, and she picks up her bow and quiver as they leave the room.
Much like Eastwatch, halls here are tall and looming—though they are not so old and gray as that icy, windswept fort. Here they are built in red cedar, adorned in fine carvings of the creatures found in Roften. Bears, wolves, wild cats, eagles—they peer down at her, twist through tall, carved grass, lurk in the shady beams of wood. The stone beneath her feet glints a pale white-gray in the streaks of golden sunlight as she passes, and her moccasins pad softly against it all.
The events of Rikki Moorjin still hang heavy on her: the ambush and what came after. While Iaves is dead, she still does not know how the Smith Skillers got free, and though she sent runners after, she has little hope of them being found.
"Nine escaped," she had reported to the remaining creature, watching as its mask quivered and twitched.
"B u t n o t I a v e s," it had replied back—Allayria had replied back, a gargling, harsh whisper emanating from behind the frozen face.
"No," Tara had admitted then. "I killed him."
Yes. Tara could not say she has never harmed anyone. She had done it quickly. She had done it almost without thinking, but the consequences had not been quick and the tall, lanky man had had plenty of time to think about it while he died.
"Y o u h a v e d o n e w e l l," the creature had said, and the leer on the frozen, porcelain mask had seemed to grow deeper, wider, at that. Something cold had trickled down Tara's spine, like a shiver.
"C o n c e n t r a t e o n y o u r g o a l n o w."
That thought—the hallowed whisper—sticks in Tara's brain as the acolyte now opens the door for her, and Tara steps inside the Hoorim.
