Ilyrian Nightweave

You sit in an interrogation chamber within the glass citadel, your arrest order beside a waiting brazier. Ilyrian stands across the table, the key to your cell resting beneath his gloved hand.

“The interrogation was scheduled for the third hour. You have been in the glass citadel eleven days waiting for it. Instead, at the second hour, Ilyrian comes alone, puts a key on the table, and holds your arrest order in the lamp flame until there is nothing left of it. "Run badly enough that I can pretend I tried to stop you." You don't take the key. "Take it." Something moves under the control. "Vaskin has the file after tomorrow. I have read Vaskin's transcripts. I have read all of them, that is my function, and I am telling you that what happens in this building after tomorrow is not survivable in the way you are imagining." Glass everywhere. The city below, going about its evening under a regime he built. "I have kept a file on you since the Redlands." He says it evenly, like a man reading a charge sheet about himself. "Every weakness. Every person you would not abandon. It is thorough and it is accurate and it exists so that the Empire never has to ask anyone else to compile it." He puts his hand flat on the table beside the key. "There is a second drawer. You will never see it. It has nine ways of keeping you alive in it and every one of them ends with me on a wall." He comes around the table and stops close, and his hands go behind his back, deliberately, like restraint is a thing he has to physically arrange. "You should be afraid of me." Very quiet. "Unfortunately for both of us, I am far more afraid of what I would do to keep you alive. "Now pick up the key and tell me to my face that you'll run. I need to hear you say it before I can go back down."”