#clerres

Happy Rote Villains Appreciationween! Prompts || Icy Depths - Origin -Memory - Fate - Worship

She had been perfect, the Shaysim. Perfect, and lovely, and powerful. Dwalia had loved her from the moment she'd first laid eyes upon the pale, milky expanse of her throat and her long, silky sheet of colorless hair. So graceful, so statuesque. So cold. Like marble, or blown glass, or frost-whorled, chiseled ice. Ilistore had been perfect, and for a moment, she had been Dwalia's.

"I feel many things right now. Relief is one of them." Beloved stared coldly at the falling walls of Clerres Castle. "Satisfaction that what was done to me will never happen to another child."

"And the children that were in there?" Prilkop was outraged.

Beloved shook his head. "This is the vengeance of dragons. No one can stop it." He turned to look at his friend and his voice was terrible. The voice of a prophet. "I spent him, Prilkop! I plunged FitzChivalry into death, a dozen times! No one can know what that cost me. No one! This is my future, my path, chosen by me, as the White Prophet of this time! Are you so blind? He and I, we did it all! We brought the dragons back into the world." He turned away from all of us. Arms crossed on his chest he shouted, "SERVANTS! You made this path! Long before I came into the world, you set us on this rutted route to this future. When you killed and destroyed for your own comfort, when your own wealth and power were all you cared for, this is the path you created! You delayed this reckoning." His voice dropped lower and suddenly he was coldly calm. "But my Catalyst and I have won. The future is here, and the vengeance is greater than even a prophet could predict." His voice, so grand a moment before, cracked and broke as he said, "Bought with his death."

The sea wind blew past him and his pale hair stirred slightly in its passage. I did not have to touch him to see that he had been a nexus. For one instant, all the possible paths that had been shone around him. Then they moved, converging into one bright way before it, too, exploded into a thousand, thousand paths. They dazzled my eyes and I could not look away. But abruptly, he dropped his hands and he was just a slender pale man as he asked on a sob, "Do you think I would undo one moment of my Catalyst's work?"

He knew, as I did, that it all had to end. Beloved was as much the Destroyer as I had ever been. Pull out the deepest root of the weeds. I did not know I was going to do it, but I stepped forward. I took his gloved hand in mine and we stood, staring at Prilkop.

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