WESSEX
Isn’t that the point, then? If their voices haven’t mattered before, they will now. This is their lives, not just Wessex’s. She has enough confidence that no matter what happens, she will find a way to make things work for herself, even if she has to go into hiding for a couple of years. She can see Deimos’s disdain for her as he no longer chooses to hide it and privately wonders if he could have done any better, finds it unlikely that the man would have said what Delah wanted to hear - whatever that was - or immediately stepped down to leave the Grounds leaderless and a part of the population disenfranchised. The Fae would never have let them open a portal there, not when it meant needing to kill the spirit inside. Delah’s proposition, her convenient lack of an answer (in the way the Fae are so good at avoiding lies) was utter bullshit. It wasn’t so much that there’d been another way, it was that the Mathair shouldn’t have been the first one they opened. If only they’d taken an Ascended down into the Spire. If only, if only, if only…
Matching Deimos’s cross-armed stance, she meets his narrowed gaze. “Portal options. I want to give everyone the chance to choose where to live, what to do with their life. If I can give them an open portal and they still want me to step down - then fine. I’ve done my part. If I can’t, and they want to go through the Greatwood, that’s fine too.”
She’d made the hard decisions she said she would - and in the end, freedom for her people won out over the Fae’s lives. Revolutions are never as clean cut or as simple as we hope they’ll be.
No, I’ll be the stone
I’ll be the hunter, a tower that casts the shade
I lie awake and watch it all
I’ll be the hunter, a tower that casts the shade
I lie awake and watch it all
