It was, from the very beginning, a ghost. Visible and hunting every barefooted step forwards. Every footfall.]
You're in no danger of that. [Astarion pens for the same reason that No had been the leading line in Leto's own response, well ahead of everything else. Old fears never die, after all. They only shrink back and recede, packing themselves into unlit corners for about as long as it takes to be forgotten for a time, hibernating throughout every glancing mention. But when their name is called— well— the image of something feeble and thoroughly conquered proves itself nothing but a joke in the end.]
I risked my neck freeing a pack of them once. Slaves from your world. Guiding them away from an occupied city in Orlais, taken over by Tevinter. When the dust settled, I was their sole contact. They looked to me to be the one to draw them to more work or
I don't know. Another master, maybe? They had nothing. No one. It gnawed at me.
I wanted justice.
When morning came and the dust settled, I contacted one of Riftwatch's agents in the Free Marches, and washed my hands of the whole thing. [If he turns his own thoughts briefly to Shirallas, or the idea of closeness and consequence therein defined, he writes nothing of it.]
I've grown softer than I was. I tempt myself from time to time with thoughts of heroism for coin, or for the sport of following in your stride because I love the creature that you are, no matter how absurd those principles might seem to me in those seconds when I coil from the light.
But rest assured, my darling, I am selfish.
I will never care so much about the world to destroy everything in its name.
no subject
It was, from the very beginning, a ghost. Visible and hunting every barefooted step forwards. Every footfall.]
You're in no danger of that. [Astarion pens for the same reason that No had been the leading line in Leto's own response, well ahead of everything else. Old fears never die, after all. They only shrink back and recede, packing themselves into unlit corners for about as long as it takes to be forgotten for a time, hibernating throughout every glancing mention. But when their name is called— well— the image of something feeble and thoroughly conquered proves itself nothing but a joke in the end.]
I risked my neck freeing a pack of them once. Slaves from your world. Guiding them away from an occupied city in Orlais, taken over by Tevinter. When the dust settled, I was their sole contact. They looked to me to be the one to draw them to more work or
I don't know. Another master, maybe? They had nothing. No one. It gnawed at me.
I wanted justice.
When morning came and the dust settled, I contacted one of Riftwatch's agents in the Free Marches, and washed my hands of the whole thing. [If he turns his own thoughts briefly to Shirallas, or the idea of closeness and consequence therein defined, he writes nothing of it.]
I've grown softer than I was. I tempt myself from time to time with thoughts of heroism for coin, or for the sport of following in your stride because I love the creature that you are, no matter how absurd those principles might seem to me in those seconds when I coil from the light.
But rest assured, my darling, I am selfish.
I will never care so much about the world to destroy everything in its name.
Just yours.