“You could help us.” Alana forced herself to meet the woman’s grey eyes. “You could teach people how to defend themselves from the Proclaimers. You could stop the witch burnings. People are so scared. We can’t tell stories or ask questions. We can’t whisper to each other or wear our hair in braids. Sometimes, I don’t even feel like we can breathe. But you know so much more than everyone else. Who knows? Maybe you could even—"

“NO!” Alana winced from the power in the word, from the sudden spark of green in the woman’s usual grey eyes, from the force of the wall crumbling even before the woman’s dark fist rammed into it. “No! I have fought my wars. I have looked and pulled and stretched and done everything I could to fix it all and look what happened. They burnt my friends, destroyed everything we worked for. They erased our names from the histories, blamed us for every ounce of work they had to later endure in the name of progress. We all fought until our hands and minds bled, until our hearts could hold no more sorrow and our throats could no longer utter a battlecry and for what? For freedom? Freedom led to economic collapse, to fanatics with torches. Barely a century has passed and the libraries have become temples and the Faoii are just ashes. Everything we did. Everything we were. It’s all gone.” For the briefest of moments tears welled in her eyes and washed away the color, but she blinked them back almost immediately. The grey orbs stilled. “I have fought my war. I am done. Fight your own if you want to, but be prepared for the consequences you can’t yet see.”

Alana sat in silence for a moment, looking at her hands. After a long time she gulped her fear back down, and dragged her eyes back up to meet the woman’s.

“You’re her, aren’t you? The Betrayer.” The grey eyes seemed to look right through her with a dispassionate gaze.

“Some have called me that.”

“What about before? What did they call you then?”

The eyes refocused for a moment, and the faintest hint of green recolored the irises.

“Kai. They used to call me Kai.”