Nearing the climax here and the world will never be the same.
Chapter 21
Ikrivain enters the ritual chamber and the guards watching are zoned out. some are dead and others are roaming aimlessly. They lock in on him and attack. He fights back and overwhelms them. Then he goes to the brother and tells him he’s free and he can stop the ritual. The brother refuses to disengage. This confuses him and there is a brief fraught dialogue where he and the brother go back and forth about why the ritual is being cast and now it is clearly about revenge. He pleads with the brother to stop and to let him bring him back to his sister and now he discovers that this is not at all what the brother wants and never what the brother wanted. He has what he wants and he means to kill everything here and control the keep. He means to have power.
This is the moment of choice. Ikrivain has to decide to either leave the ritual to be or to stop this man. he decides to leave the ritual to be, refusing to have the moment where he confesses to killing her brother. He leaves and meets his friends who have waited downstairs for him with horses ready.
The group flees from the area riding on until night.
Note: This has become the birth of the lich king story in many ways. ikrivain’s failure to kill the brother when he had a chance will reverberate in the world for centuries.