Three yards from what remained of the door, they slowed; there was too much rubble. She thought she could see what looked like a melted Wevaran limb, half-covered by debris; she could certainly see blood.

The sharp intake of breath prompted Terrano to say, “Teela’s, minor wound. Not poisoned.”

She stepped with more care; the last thing she needed was to trip over stone and wood before she had reached her destination. But the destination loomed; from the hall she could see Azoria’s back. Were it not for the extra limbs and the eyes that rose from the crown of her skull, Kaylin might have mistaken Azoria for a Barrani. But the limbs and the eyes were present, and two of them swiveled toward the late arrivals. Kaylin wouldn’t have been surprised to see a mouth sprout from Azoria’s back.

But she had the attention she wanted now.

“Hope?”

Her familiar squawked. Quietly.

She lifted the hand in which she’d carried what remained of Azoria’s name—a word she had no hope of controlling because she would never be able to speak it. Not even the Ancient could. It was a word that had, over time, been eroded; all of the bright promise of its meaning forever lost.

Accepting your limitations might be bad, but accepting yourself, accepting your essential nature, was necessary. Kaylin now understood how easy it was to mistake one for the other.

“Azoria!” she said, raising her volume without shouting.

Azoria pivoted toward Kaylin then, all of the eyes on their flailing stalks almost lidless, they were so wide.

“You! What have you done?” Her voice was a shriek of sound that resonated in the hall—literally. It was like an earthquake made verbal. Kaylin, braced, retained her footing, her knees bent and moving. Had Azoria chosen to collapse the floor, she would have fallen.

“You didn’t want the life you were given,” Kaylin said. “You destroyed it with your own hands. But you destroyed many other people to do it.” She focused on the new word she’d cupped in her palm as Azoria leaped from the room toward her.

Kaylin!

Azoria bounced off the barrier Hope erected. Hope squawked up a storm; his verbalization sounded scathing, even if she couldn’t understand a word of it. Azoria didn’t have that problem.

Get Mrs. Erickson in line of sight of the...door. Tell her: she can command the dead.

Severn didn’t argue; he understood what Kaylin intended. Azoria, once Barrani, was impotent for the moment, and the moment was all Kaylin needed. The marks of the Chosen hadn’t settled back into their home on her skin. She reached for their power, as she had in the outlands, and it came at her call.