>>6088848Riberia shares his hallowed eagerness. She finally finishes crossing over the hall, crouching on one knee. The Blessed Blind, biting his old lips, leans forward as she sets the cameo onto the open palm of his hand.
“At last— at last…” he coughs, his fingers brushing over the surface of the small pendant, taking in the details of Saint Bragia’s beautiful and stern face as she looks ahead, holding the wrong weapon in her hand. A rounded spiked mace instead of her axe. His lips curl into an ecstatic grin, gently setting the cameo on the black floor between him and the questing Knight, the ivory’s reflection stark on the polished stone.
“There are no more of these in the whole world,” he adds. “Three hundred and seventy four years under the Sun we have looked for them. No more. No more they will stain the memory of Saint Bragia the mourned.”
“No more,” Riberia agrees, her breath catching in her throat.
“No more—” the Blessed Blind reaches inside his robe and pulls out a large heavy sphere of blindglass. Relic to relic, the sheer depths of inscrutable darkness of the sphere against the simple white profile of ivory. Bone reflected and warped over polished Kiengiri marvel. The hand of the Blessed Blind stands in waiting over the circlet, his breath poised as if in uncertainty.
The last time one of these would ever stain the world with its presence. The final word on the string of lies.
“No more!”
With a mighty swing of his thin arms, the old man bashes the cameo with the sphere, ringing a high toll of glass against stone. The cameo bursts into a small cloud of crushed powder and fragments, a white star of exploded dust. And yet he smashes the sphere again and again, Riberia feels each toll echo through her bones. Each of them is a confirmation her long years — decades — of questing and toiling were not in vain.
“No more,” she echoes the Blessed Blind’s voice, until at last he pulls the sphere back. The floor before him covered in bone powder which the wind is already scattering, and he gives it a mighty help with a swing of his robes. Soon, not even the memory of the cameo dirts the palace of Ansàrra.
[cont.]
