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They take him to see where it happened.
The airship rattles and wheezes over the desert, oars churning through air reluctant to move, much less bear them aloft. Below, the desert roughens into the craggy mountains that choke the long, inhospitable land bridge to Ilsabard. The lowering sun throws half the mountain faces into shadow but lights the pass through them in a stark, austere glare. Every book that mentions the Ghimlyt Dark makes note of its perpetual gloom, but the aetheroclimate shifted, as everything had, in the Eighth Calamity.
In those long and terrible years after, when the shroud lifted and light finally reached the passage, it found only a ruin clotted with corpses: a piled wreckage of people and machines obscured, no longer by darkness, but by a slow-roiling poison. The first flowering of Black Rose, the haze that killed as it bloomed and allowed nothing more to grow in its wake. Biggs hasn't spoken since it came into view; G'raha hasn't either. The sight demands silence.
A demand only the airship is brave enough to defy, with its creaking planks and the tired rasp of the pipes threaded through the hull. A particularly loud cough from the engine breaks the spell, and Biggs clears his throat. "Cloud's been there for about two hundred years. Hasn't moved an ilm since the Empire deployed it. Misjudged the potency and closed off their own pass." Biggs tilts the ship in a widening gyre, and the deck leans dizzily down toward the swirling poison.
G'raha's fingers clench around the handrail. He may pretend the certain death below is why, if he likes. "And that's where…?" he asks, though he knows the answer, and he cannot pretend that it will change upon asking. History is not so easily mutable.
"Aye," Biggs affirms, large hands gentle on the wheel. "Memorials are all elsewhere, though. No ins and no outs from Ghimlyt, so everything's—everyone's—still there. Nothing in it rots, after all. They cannot be moved, either, as the area is a natural stagnation—"
"I wish to see them." G'raha speaks without thought. He only feels it and the words have been said already.
Biggs eyes him, one cheek hollowing as he bites it. "…are you sure?"
G'raha only nods and lifts a finger to mark a likely landing spot: a cliff overlooking the battlefield, far enough for safety and high enough to offer a suitable vantage point.
Biggs shrugs and brings the ship down. The clifftop is lifeless and brown, sparse clumps of dead grass clinging on only because the wind is too feeble to tear them away. He fishes in a compartment at the helm and pulls out a tarnished spyglass. He looks like he's about to say something as he hands it over, then lets out a breath and gestures up the cliff.
It's a short climb. The cliff arches away from the battlefield as if repulsed, and G'raha imagines what it would have looked like then. Dim, lit only by fires and scraping searchlights. A warren of twisted metal not yet run to rust, snarled pathways curling around piles of scrap and larger, broken hulks. Choked by smoke drifting from wrecked warmachina and ceruleum fumes from those still running. It is not a beautiful place to die. The spyglass clicks as he extends it between sweaty hands.
Are you sure?
The poison has fit itself over the landscape like settled silt, air convinced it is earth. Its bright swirls resemble clouds, but what little wind there is stops dead at its edges. For centuries the world tried to push the toxin along, and for centuries it refused. Slowly, the vapors part and close and open again. Enough poison to drown a legion, to choke a city, to bury a Warrior. The last scraps of a war not ended, a weapon outliving those who killed and died by it. Carrying on purposeless and deadly, alienated and absolute. A hungry ghost haunting the graveyard of the last Scions, the last heroes the world had before it ended. He has to see them.
Are you sure? Biggs' question rings in his mind. Did he truly wish to see?
"I must," he says, and brings the spyglass to his eye.
Darkness drops again over Ghimlyt, this time as the blindness outside lens's magnification sparing him the dismal panorama. Thin streaks of reflected light impair the view, and he turns slightly to put his back to the sun. Stone and metal and dead trees. Black Rose, still. Three dark figures.
G'raha steadies the eyeglass and twists the focus. The figures lie like a broken arrowhead, then swell in a ripple of glass. He's there, next to them in vision and in the nauseating nearness of something that dries his mouth. He's apart by half a malm of fatal air and two hundred years already gone.
Two smaller corpses flank the Warrior. Face down and angled toward each other, matching white hair identically askew in long braids. Lying supine between, the Warrior… Mitr'a's head is turned away. Those eyes that saw everything, violet and white contrasting—whether open or closed, they have been long dried out. Muscled flesh thinned to papered bones. Gloved hands, reaching, that handled so many poisons but could not combat this last. The reeling shadow of a desert bird the only movement, and silence, silence from a man not often moved to words.
But when he was, the songs…
G'raha's throat tightens over the ache of what should have been, but wasn't. What should be, but isn't. Poison fog drifts and covers Mitr'a like a curtain, the hero of a play cut short at the intermission.
That curtain could be drawn back again, the script amended and the story restored, completed. Roles unwritten and penned anew, martyr remade into hero—alive again, and with him, the star. This doomed world is stumbling on, the corner into which G'raha awoke dedicated to a dream that it might not be so. All that dream requires is him, if he allows it. If he plays the role of the gambler and the gamble, thrust from the shadows behind the stage and betting everything on everything.
Are you sure?
He must be.