Instead, he had this: the stench of bonfires, that ashy smear of cleared land, everything raw and torn and nothing in its proper place. High branches stacked in chaotic heaps, moss knotted on every twig. Roots dripping in inverted postures. Enormous boles lying flat and stripped down, great swaths of bark prised loose. Red-stained wood and black gritty rocks pulled from the flecked soil.

The earth could heave and make such a mess, but it had not. It had but trembled, and not from any deep stirring or restlessness, but from the toppling of trees, the bellowing of oxen straining at stumps, the footfalls of mindful men.

Shatter all you see. It’s what makes you feel. Feel . . . anything.

He remembered his hands deep in the rich warm earth. He remembered closing his eyes—for just a moment—and feeling that pulse of life, of promise and purpose. They would plant crops, nurture a bounty for their future lives. This was just. This was righteous. The hand that shapes is the hand that reaps. This, he told himself, was pure. Sighing, a sure smile curving his lips, he opened his eyes once more. Smoke, mists here and there amidst the ruination. Still smiling, he then withdrew his hands from the warm earth.

To find them covered in blood.

He never counted himself a clever man. He knew enough to know that and not much else. But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme—in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.

He stared down at his hands and knew it for a memory not his own. It was, in fact, an invention, the blunt, almost clumsy imposition of something profound. Devoid of subtlety and deliberately so, which then made it more complicated than it at first seemed.

Even these thoughts were alien. Last was not a thoughtful man.

The heart knows need, and the mind finds reason to justify. It says: destruction leads to creation, so the world has shown us. But the world shows us more than that. Sometimes, destruction leads to oblivion. Extinction. But then, what’s so bad about that? If stupidity does not deserve extinction, what does? The mind is never so clever as to deceive anyone and anything but itself and its own kind.

Last decided that he was not afraid of justice, and so he stood unmoving, unflinching, as the slayer appeared at the far end of the corridor. Asane’s shrieks had run down to silence. He knew she was dead. All her fears come home at last, and in oblivion there was, for her, relief. Peace.

Murder could wear such pleasant masks.

The slayer met his eyes and at that final moment they shared their understanding. The necessity of things. And Last fell to the sword without a sound.

There had been blood on his hands. Reason enough. Justice delivered.