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RE: [The Garden] Praeceptor of the Reliquiae - Helena - 10-20-2025
“You may not,” she said. Her eyes didn’t blink. She found the posturing irritating and wasteful. Helena was not offended or made angry by the amused twist given her name but she would not forget it either. It had been a formal and factual statement and not a means to sway by her title, but clearly it had not been received well. Something she made note of.
Not being permitted to enter was an obstacle. She disliked when a path could not be straight and simple, especially when she understood the benefits, but bureaucracy was rarely logical that way. Allowing Eliot to proceed without her was an option of course. Her pride was not the problem. It was her own refusal to let this thread of fate be unshaped by her own hands.
The Atharim would be reformed whether or not the Ascendancy chose to support or acknowledge it, though the journey would be smoother with legitimacy. Clearly he was intrigued, or perhaps fearful. This meeting had been arranged too swiftly to speak otherwise. Di Inferi knew how to work within the world’s margins, however, for the shadows were their specialty. The network Eliot had begun to create would grow; men and women hunted by their former brothers, unswayed by the amnesty offered by the Custody because it solved precisely nothing. Children still died. And the actual monsters in the dark could no more be allowed to thrive than the injustice of the Atharim’s rule continue. The change was coming; she could feel it in some way she could not explain. This was not about permission but transparency.
Nox Durante intervened a moment before she had been about to turn her head and ask him to be useful. She wasn't unaware that he bristled, but she trusted that he believed in this cause before his own inconvenience.
As it was, it seemed the woman only barred with her words, and if she claimed to have no sway over the Ascendancy, she did have it over the armed men at her side. A pointless pause.
“No one will die today,” she said in response to Nox's rather morbid assistance. The words she spoke had a strangely poignant depth, like the truth was indisputable. It wasn't confidence on Helena’s part, just one of the things she knew sometimes. “And if there will be flaying he will at least wait until after he has heard what we must say.”
Her tone was flat. It might have been a joke. Though Helena was not known for them.