Acton’s typically expressive face was a stony mask as he watched the regimes file into the place that had been prepared for them.
For all his joking with Bexley, something like nervousness coiled in him now, a black snake in his belly ready to bite. He fidgeted and paced and waited, his thoughts full of Bexley and Reichenbach and Seraphina. (Somnus was on that list too – bless him for having allowed their motley group sanctuary after the Raven Gates – but Acton had never actually met the Dawn King, and had little interest in or experience with people who known for their kindness and level heads.)
All the same, when the world quakes and all their muscles go instinctively taut, their eyes wild, Acton is shocked.
Surely not. Maybe once he would have appreciated the kind of mad games the gods were playing now, but after everything that had happened –
Rising in his mind then was the memory of another crumble, another apocalypse of dust and stone and noise, and a great fist closed around his heart. It had been a long time since he had felt such empathy, but he felt it now for Bexley Briar, trapped once more, and something black and angry opened up in him. When the unicorn screamed his hair rose all along his neck and back, but it was the same sound inside him, too.
He watched her ascend the pile of rubble as the dust still rose like mist around them, turning them all to pale ghosts. His heart leapt along with her feet until it sat in his throat, and then his attention dropped to the red stallion below. His ears, which had been flat back, swung forward again to listen. The buckskin did not know these strangers, had no idea what court they might be from, but they were right.
“And the rest of the regimes,” he added, under his breath, but Acton stepped forward and surveyed the rubble before them.
A funny thought occurred to him then: out here, in this moment, there may as well be no court divisions. Maybe it was always a lie, whispered from gods to kings.
The buckskin longed for the things he’d left behind in Denocte – powders and flints and oils, a dozen ways to make an explosion. It might have done some good, here, but wishing was a useless pastime.
He stepped up to the outermost mound of tumbled rock, next to a dark and striking fellow he half-remembered from the trip here, and began to push at the larger rocks while wielding his telekinesis like a sweep of his arm to clear the smaller rubble.
It was, perhaps, the first honest work he’d done in years.
AND IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SUFFER
WELL, THEN YOU'D BETTER RUN
