She returns to Kir Kanara, a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. Her body is tired and battered. Her armor dented, bloody. And her eyes—her eyes are cold. She is alone.
It’s been years since she last was here. Years since she rode down from the gates at the head of a battalion of Greystone Knights with orders to find the princeling and put an end to his rebellion with as much violence as was necessary.
How she wishes they hadn’t succeeded.
She returns to Kir Kanara, a weight of years and death on her shoulders, flanked by the ghosts of a hundred dead companions and all the innocents they couldn’t save. Perhaps if she had listened, perhaps if the princeling had thought his words could reach her… but perhaps can’t bring a single soul back from the world hereafter, and it can’t unmake the destruction that has reduced all this once beautiful land to ash and rubble.
She can’t remember when it happened, when the last bit of hope that remained to her finally withered and died. She wishes she did. Hope is too precious a thing to lose with so little fanfare. But lost it is, and it’s left nothing in its wake but this angry, broken woman who realized too late how many lies she had been told.
There is no one left for her to save. No one in need of her protection. She’d looked. For months she’d looked, only to find them too late or not at all. She’s not looking anymore. An expression, complicated with rage and grief, cuts across her face; if it’s innocents she wanted she would not find them here. Not in Kir Kanara.
But she is too late once again, even for her other, bloodier purpose. She doesn’t know what she expected. The whole land is ruined, why should the seat of trouble be any different? It’s justice, of a sort. It should be cathartic to know that those who damned them all brought hellfire down on their own heads as well. Yet all she feels is wicked, rotting disappointment that she wasn’t the one to mete it out.
She returns to Kir Kanara, a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. But there is no one left for her to fight and nothing left for her to burn, and all that drives her vanishes like so much smoke.
She wanders, aimless. Her feet take her through the fallen castle, so long destroyed that weeds grow over its burned out corpse. She thinks of lying down, of letting her story end where it began. It would be easy. It would be, perhaps, what she deserved for believing all the lies, for trusting that this place, this once-beautiful place was all that it said it was, that it held all the ideals it said it did.
That it wasn’t just a wretched facade.
The thought comes to her quiet, so subtle she hardly realizes. Her ideals have not changed. They are bruised, wounded like she is. But they are there, a foundation. And little more than a foundation remains of Kir Kanara.
There are so many reasons it shouldn’t work. If anyone else has survived the destruction, Kir Kanara would be the last place they should trust. If the castle is a symbol, wisdom might argue that it was so corrupt it could not, should not be salvaged. If all was lost then maybe she should just leave, too, and find a way to nurse her wounded ideals back to life.
But she cannot shake the thought.
It takes time for her to realize what it is. Hope. Hope for redemption. For herself. For Kir Kanara. Hope that there’s a way to make the castle what it should have always been. A refuge. A haven.
So she stays at Kir Kanara, a hammer in one hand and hope in the other.
F.A. Hakimian 