would go all night. Sun Day lasted until the next dawn. The parties of those to be Freed would begin at full dark. He was sitting in a little chapel in the fortress. He had a few minutes, supposedly to pray.
There was a time when he had used it to pray. No more. If Orholam was real, he was busy, he was asleep, he didn’t care, he was taking a shit. Time was different to Orholam, they said. That would explain why he’d been doing it for Gavin’s entire life.
Gavin’s chest felt tight. He was having trouble breathing. The chapel seemed too small, too dark. He was sweating, cold, clammy sweat. He closed his eyes.
Get some balls, Gavin. You can do this. You’ve done it before. This is for them.
It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
It’s better than the alternative. Breathe. This isn’t for you. You want to go out there and tell those drafters waiting for you that their entire lives are a fraud? That their service is a waste? That Orholam doesn’t see their sacrifice? That what they’ve done, what they’ve given, doesn’t matter? Everyone dies, Gavin, don’t rob it of meaning for these people. Don’t make them see themselves as worthless. Their sacrifice as empty. All life as meaningless.
It was the same debate he had with himself every year. He’d even brought a bucket with him into the chapel, along with extra incense. He threw up, some years.
There was a knock at the door of the chapel.
“Lord Prism, it’s time.”
Kip wasn’t blindfolded the next night. Instead, they gave him darkened glasses, bound them around the back of his head, pulling them tight against his eyes, and ripped the sleeves off his shirt. It would be hard to draft, and anyone around him would have ample warning.
“Apparently there’s something they want us to see,” Karris said as the guards, Mirrormen and drafters, hustled them out of the wagon they’d been sharing.
They were brought to a security perimeter out away from the tents. It was oddly separate from the rest of the camp, given far too much room. The perimeter itself was simply a rope strung between posts pounded quickly into the ground, but it was huge—and no one from the camp even came close to violating the circle. Inside, looking tiny compared to the size of the circle, was a crowd gathered before a platform. The sun had fully set, but it wasn’t yet dark.
“They don’t want to be overheard,” Karris said. “Tells you how crazy they are. They’re going to rally the troops with some idiocy any norm would mock outright.”
Norm? Oh, a person who couldn’t draft. Wait, that meant…
As they were walked closer, Kip saw that his inference was correct: every single person here was a drafter. There had to be eight hundred or a thousand drafters here!
“Orholam,” Karris breathed. “There must be five hundred drafters here.”
So I can’t count, so what?
But even Kip’s bravado melted away as they got closer. His and Karris’s tenders pushed them into the crowd, and the first person they pushed out of the way stared at them with wild green eyes. His halos were cracked, snakes of green wriggling through the whites of his eyes.
Kip felt like he was passing through a menagerie. It seemed almost everyone light-skinned enough for it to show had skin stained by luxin. Green, blue, red, yellow, orange, even purple. When he looked into the superviolet, the superviolet drafters stood out like beacons. They’d worked designs into their cloaks, their armor, even their skin—all invisible to anyone but other superviolets. Adjusting his eyes, Kip saw that the sub-reds had done the same, etching dragons, phoenixes, whorls, and flames onto their clothes. Blues wore spikes curling like rams’ horns, or knife edges along their forearms. They passed an orange. The man looked normal except he’d slicked back his hair with orange luxin as if it were hair oil, and the whites of his eyes were solid orange, leaving no differentiation from white to iris, only the tiny black dots of his pupils marring that perfect color. A green clad only in leaves hissed at them; then she laughed. A menagerie indeed, except Kip was in the cage with the animals.
They were brought all the way to the front. The crowd was arrayed in front of a stone rising out of the ground, its surfaces worn smooth by wind and rain, but tall enough to be a platform. As Kip and Karris arrived, a man climbed up