All for ears like yours...

[Rance]

Your name is Alligail...

It is.

Are you frightened?

I am.

... don't be. Be strong.

I .. don't know what strong is.

Then your friend Hafwyn, by my blade and your carelessness, will die. And my songbird -- your Reverie -- she will rot in a cell. She will be bones. She will be roach-scoured gray-flesh when you find her, a feast for maggots, beaten by guards who believe her responsible for the coming invasion ... and I--

--Stop it..! Stop it..--

--And I? I, child, like the black king that I am, shall laugh...

For days, she had been wrapped in the darkness of this chamber, ensconced by loneliness, derelict to thought, and he had been there -- Him, this black king, this speaker in her mind. How he had found her she could never begin to fathom, and perhaps she was gullible, but his words reeked of danger. He said that Hafwyn was his, bound and mangled in chains, reliant upon these lies she would weave -- lies that He had told her to say -- to breathe another day. And Reverie, she was alone, locked elsewhere where Alligail could not be a shoulder for tears, or a reason for a smile. Waiting. For days, curled and whimpering beneath the shadows of a moth-eaten bunk, hiding away from the sting of the blazing sun, she feared.

They knocked upon her door. They brought her plates of food. They swept away untouched plates hours later. This was routine -- they had given her a bed, they had given her a shelter, but they had taken her sister, and he -- He -- had taken her friend.

She did not know that his name was Audmathus.

I know the secret that your sister bears. I know it because I stole it from your mind while you slept.

For Reverie, she would lie. For Hafwyn, she would lie.

She told you why she's here. I know you like stories. Make one for her, Alligail. You would not let her die. You would protect this baby in her belly. You would not let them think her ... a traitor. I will give you the names, and you will weave a story, or the blood will be yours to bear. I know how much you love blood...

Alligail Gloria Johnford Rin`arie needed no black specter in her mind to make her whisper these lies. She had already spoken them. The night of their arrest, while the air was warm with coming storms, while the hills rolled with the distant heralds of thunder, she had raised her chin and had promised to tell them all they needed to know. Reverie's secret was hers, festering and foul and frightful, but to protect this delicate creature that she had come to know and love and cherish -- that she could not blame for so morbid a task -- she would be loyal in only the ways that children could be. She would be the fantastical hero in the stories she loved; she would be the maiden donned in armor to fight alongside countrymen, where her voice was her blade and her hair a banner; she would be Reverie's savior, and Hafwyn's savior -- or so she hoped -- and if they showed her the gallows for the treachery she spoke ...

She would show a smile that sisters share.

Helstone visited her that night. He brought her honey-cakes. She, in turn, with her stomach sick and her pride shattered, gave him lies. Given to her conscience, names recited from a stolen census and implanted in her mind by black hands, she spoke names she knew and names she did not. For Reverie, for Hafwyn, Alligail Gloria Johnford Rin`arie told Coriolanus Helstone despicable lies.

Myrken Wood's time is short. It is a blemish upon the continent. Other lands feel threatened. People must die.

On the outskirts of its borders, men sharpen swords. Humans prepare for war. Everyone will die.

"Why have you come?" Helstone had asked. "Who sent you?"

She told him. She told him of a man named Coran D'zir, whose brutal powers were meant to assassinate political leaders. Alligail told him of the workers in the Rememdium Edificium, of a woman named Razqia and one named Janessa, of the boys Bryce and Braddock Larose, who perpetuated the spread of the Bloody Flux through their foul medications, attempting to weaken Myrkentown citizens with poultices of prosperity.

She told him of the soldier named Bishop, of the woman named Cinnamon, who strode through the halls of Brotherhood barracks with the intent to exploit and corrupt military functions in preparation for the coming invasion.

She spoke too, of General Kerrak, a plant within the council whose iron-fisted rule could, in itself, bring the common folk to their knees, who would verily slaughter her for breaking this ruse and spilling plans to too-late save a land whose people she, as people should, had come to love.

She told him, too, of her own hatreds -- and there was brilliance in the girl's unintentional cruelty, for there were names that the black king had not told her to share. There were names that she hated, and she twisted them into the weaves of these lies with the efficiency of a spine-aimed arrow. She told Helstone of Magdelaena Valteri, mistress of leeches, and of Lokelei the demon, vicious and foul.

In finality, she told him of the Duke Burel, whose kind smile had often shone across the lands of Myrken in its darker times. She told him of the Duke Burel, who provided aid to this pathetic little hamlet called Myrken. She told him of Duke Burel, who hid his intentions behind proud politics, who knighted claw-handed boys and showed his care for a downtrodden peoples in times of the past.

She told him of Duke Burel, the silent murderer, the man who would lie to expand the influence of his land, the man whose soldiers sharpened their weapons while he, their leader, filled Myrken with the most secret of traitors, because what is a Duke without their land, and what purpose is land if it is not fertilized by blood?

"Why have you come?" She remembered Helstone asking. "Who sent you?"

Thessilane. Alligail Gloria Johnford Rin`arie told him about Thessilane.

I love you, Reverie -- I just want to save you and Hafwyn ... I just want to make sure you're safe...

In the tower of the Brotherhood barracks, a cathedral window draped in the thickness of a woolen blanket, rolling the honey-cakes that Helstone had brought her within her hands, a traitor named Alligail Gloria Johnford quietly cried. Let them think her a traitor to a land -- she did not care. She would not be a traitor to her sister.

What your lord wants you to do, Reverie, does not make you who you are.

In silence, long after Helstone had left, she showed the tears that only sisters know how to cry.

I have found a family, Reverie. So have you. So have you!