"Times have changed," one of the shayasyas remarked; his clothes bore the patterns of the Rubythroat clan. "In Bizanth, no one would allow a woman rule alone. I’m surprised they let her rule at all. She probably has as many enemies as supporters, and her voice likely carries no more weight than any other member of their Council."  

"However much the Empress’s voice may count, it seems their Council has collectively leaned toward peace," Sasan of the Golden Eagle clan reminded him.   

At least he was for negotiations... But it was precisely in contrast to Sasan’s words and quiet, gentle thoughts that Narseh realized: the majority of those present were against it; their mainyu shimmered with every shade of anger, and the very notion of negotiation only provoked them further.

"Let her send a new agreement and relinquish the Scorched Lands!" someone else exclaimed passionately.  

"She will not give them up," Ardashir said. "Her position is already precarious. People will consider this a weakness."  

Anahita stared at Ardashir with a challenge: 

"And if you cede the lands to her, it will be you who will be considered weak."  

Anahita was always direct, like the flight of an arrow, as sharp as a knife thrust, and so was her mainyu. She rarely bothered with words, considering them unnecessary formalities or clever evasions.  

The Prince’s thoughts were equally wide open now, each one laid bare for all to see. If anyone accused him of hiding his intentions, he wouldn’t have been chosen as the prince of the united clans of Arya.  

And in his thoughts, Narseh saw mostly exhaustion.

“I see that few here agree with me,” Ardashir said, “but I am prepared to negotiate with the Empress’s envoys. I have already signed the peace agreement she proposed." 

The assembly hall erupted in fury.  

“What kind of peace could this possibly be?!”  

"After the Red Emperor's death, Bizanth is weakened! It's time to gather our strength and strike!"   

"Let's take back what is rightfully ours!"  

"Wait! Prince Ardashir's plans may lie beyond our understanding," said a shayasya with the patterns of the Raven clan. "There were times in the past when we couldn’t grasp his strategy, but we still trusted him, and it bore fruit..." 

“This isn’t about military strategy,” countered the shayasya of Rubythroats. “Which is a shame!”  

"Do we even need a High Prince if there's no more war?" This mocking thought came from Vardan of the Falcon Clan. He did not voice it — it would have been an act of shocking insolence — but his mainyu made the sentiment unmistakably clear, and Vardan made no effort to hide it. 

"Then vote and release me from this burden," Ardashir said dryly.  

The man of the Raven Clan replied to Vardan: 

"Does anyone truly believe the war is over? Bizanth just needs a reprieve. Now they are weakened, but later, when they’ve gathered their strength, they’ll strike, disregarding any oaths of peace. Of course we still need Prince Ardashir. Tell us, Prince, do you have a plan to ensure that Arya regain what is owed to us?”

A certain image appeared in Prince Ardashir's mainyu, something like a winding, fragmented, dimly lit path through a stormy, dark sea. It wasn’t meant to be shared; it simply surfaced unbidden, hazy and unclear, and Narce couldn’t decipher it.

"I can only hope for fate," the Prince said aloud. "If some situation turns out to be in our favor, I will be glad. But for now, I propose we accept what we have. Peace, even under the worst conditions, is better than unending war."  

"Peace?! You believe in peace with those who’ve spent twenty years killing our sisters and brothers?" Anahita jumped up from her seat and walked quickly to the Prince in the center of the hall, straight and tense as a bowstring drawn. Ardashir stood up as well. She continued:

"The chief of the Raven Clan said it right: they just need a reprieve to build up their strength. But no - you are deaf to any arguments of reason... Negotiating with Bizanth...! It even sounds absurd. What can we talk about with those who just want to destroy Arya as a species...?"  

Anahita's mainyu, as if cast from steel, was hammered into the minds of those around her with heavy blows, and Narseh could no longer tell where her thoughts were and where his own. She was right, right about everything.  

"...The war took my father first, then my sister..... This agreement is humiliating! Do you want us to add shame to our grief?" Anahita's mental speech resounded, and hatred flared up in Narseh like embers.   

Like the flames raging around the houses in Juniper Land, the town that no longer existed, its people gone. Where once stood golden wooden houses and apple orchards, there was now only sparse, patchy grass; cold mist filled the valley, shrouding the charred remnants of buildings. Only pale silhouettes of chimneys jutted from the ground like fingers. Chimneys burned the slowest of all… 

"Fine," Ardashir said mildy. "Let us refuse the empress. Let us keep fighting. Our children, too, will know nothing but endless war. Then their children will fight as well…" 

"No! The war will not last forever. We will win. You've already done what no one has ever done before — united the clans. We are constantly honing our skills and learning new things. They, on the other hand, can only throw waves of soldiers at us, like fodder. They are already exhausted..."    

“Let’s say we win. What then?” Ardashir asked. “What will you do then, Anahita?”

The simplicity and bitterness of the question doused the fire raging inside Narseh.

Just like that day, when the flames consumed everything — inside and out — and Narseh had asked himself the very same question: “What then?” And he had no answer.

The memory tasted of ash and damp earth.

He thought this was what set Ardashir apart from the leaders who came before him: not just his curiosity for the new, not just his ability to turn change to his advantage, but his understanding that beyond the question “What then?” lies nothing. Absolutely nothing, not even the desire to remain on This Side — only blackness.

Perhaps Ardashir, too, had once asked himself that question. Narseh didn’t know.

“What then?”

“Yes, what then? Imagine this: you kill everyone who fights against us… What comes next?”

“The priests of their One God. Their entire faith is built on hatred toward us.”

“And then?”

“I’ll kill everyone unwilling to follow our ways.” but at those words, the resolve in Anahita's mainyu shook a little. “Every adult and every child. They teach all of them that people like us are evil, a scourge that must be wiped from the face of the Earth.”

Ardashir stepped closer to her. They were of similar height, both considered small by Arya standards, their frames delicate. He gently, almost tenderly, touched her shoulder. Narseh was struck by the sheer helplessness revealed in that gesture.

Once, before Ardashir became the High Prince of all Arya, he and Anahita had ruled the Owl Clan together. The union of a clan’s leaders didn’t necessarily imply anything more, but Narseh had heard rumors that for a time they shared not only leadership but also a bed — or perhaps even the grotto. War shayasya and peace shayasya. Now, it seemed, their roles had reversed…

“I know the terms of this treaty are unjust, Anahita. Don’t speak to me of the evil wrought by the Bizantines — I know. They are monsters, even to one another. But if this war continues, we will become monsters ourselves. That’s all you’ll achieve. Perhaps one day, someone will have the resolve to wipe out every person in the world who has rejected the Other Side. Perhaps such a world will even be better than the one we have now... But I don’t want it to be done by your hands — or by the hands of those I care for. I won’t let you become monsters. Not while I’m alive.”

The power and obvious honesty of these words stunned Narseh, as they did everyone else. He didn’t need to glance around the hall to know that all present were subdued, shamed. The sensation of scales falling from their eyes spread through their mainyu like a gentle, cleansing light.
But Anahita was unmoved.

"Then I will take your life."   

And she attacked him.

The air in the hall quivered, and the fine hairs on Narseh's neck stood on end at the inaudible crackle of fabric tearing between This Side and the Other. As Anahita leapt, her hands transformed into clawed talons, and Narseh braced himself to witness a horrific black tangle of two fravashis rolling across the floor...

But before shifting his shape, the Prince managed to throw the both of them through the Other Side, carrying the fight far from the meeting hall — perhaps to avoid injuring others, or perhaps to keep anyone from witnessing the duel…

What remained in the hall was only silence, a hollow absence where they had stood. All eyes fixed on that empty space, as seconds dragged by like the slow flow of water through an hourglass.

Then, Ardashir reappeared in the center of the grotto, alone, his hands stained with blood, his eyes empty. His white garments were splattered as well.

"Her body lies by the bend of Bear Creek," he said without expression. "Let her be buried on a tower of silence as befits her."

Anahita had attacked Ardashir without honor, offering no formal challenge, but if the Prince had deemed her worthy of a proper burial for her past service, no one would dare contest it. Her body, now severed from its fravashi, would be prepared over three days in the customary manner and laid atop the tower for the birds to consume.

After a pause, Ardashir added: 

"If anyone else disagrees with my decision, speak now."  

No one did.

The prince’s voice was heavy as he declared:

"Then every clan is required to send at least one authorized representative for the negotiations. The meeting is over."

And he disappeared again.     

*** 

After the assembly, Narseh made his way toward his home. Perhaps there were those in the infirmary who needed his help, but as always, when overwhelmed by strong and conflicting emotions, he wanted to be alone.

But someone caught up to him, and to his surprise, it was one of those from the assembly — the leader of the Rubythroat clan.   

"I've heard something about you," said the Rubythroat, falling into step beside him. "You weren't always a healer."  

"That was a long time ago."   

Narseh had been gifted with a rare and precious healing farn, and healers were always in demand in the clan. But warriors were needed even more, so anyone who had a strong enough black twin was trained to fight. That had been a lifetime ago, though — almost another existence entirely. And even then, his time as a warrior had been brief. Not long after he underwent his coming-of-age trials, the valley of the Kestrel Clan had fallen to invaders…

The stranger spoke in a sly, coaxing tone: 

"You know, we’re kin, you and I. My name is Khosrow. My father's father was a Kestrel before my grandmother took him as a grotto companion and brought him to her clan."   

Paternal kinship was not considered particularly significant in most clans, but Narseh replied politely: 

"Then greetings, kinsman."  

"They say that in the valley once called Juniper Land, there is only dead silence now, and no bird or beast dares to enter…" 

“That’s just a story,” Narseh said, forcing his lips into a smile. “If nature were so attuned to the atrocities of Bizanth, the storms would have drowned their Great City long ago.”

"And yet you have your reasons for not agreeing with the Prince," the Rubythroat said.

Narseh realized now that beneath the vivid, almost cloying images in Khosrow’s mainyu — the burnt houses, the slaughtered Arya, the desolate valley in a frozen fog, all bordered by the black edge of shared sorrow —there were other thoughts. These, however, were veiled by some kind of curtain. Khosrow was skilled in mental speech. Narseh, by contrast, must not have had his emotions fully in check during the assembly, and the stranger had sensed his disagreement…

Narseh stopped walking and looked into Khosrow's face. The Rubythroats chief's gaze was as impenetrable as his thoughts.   

"I have my reasons for being loyal to the Prince," Narseh said at last.  

“Well,” the Rubythroat replied, his tone light as he gave a faint smile. “Anyone would be lucky to have such loyalty.”

With a nod, he melted into the shadows of the evening.

Narseh wondered whether he should report the conversation to Ardashir. But that lingering sense of hurt and doubt from the previous day resurfaced. The Prince was hiding something from him, avoiding him… Narseh wasn’t sure how to act around him now, and after what had happened at the assembly, Ardashir likely wanted to see no one...

And what would he even say? Nothing explicit was offered, and Narseh had no desire to accuse an innocent man.