Perhaps when she was a younger girl, his words may have shattered her.
Maybe she would have dissolved before him, meek and battered and guilty. She would have accepted all of the blame, would have self-detonated with it, would have been unable to hold his gaze or stopped the tendrils of fear that raced through her stomach. But she is not a younger girl now. She is not even who she was. So she doesn’t shatter or bend or even crumple before him; she just stays quiet, thoughtful.
“I just told you about all of my mistakes. Do you feel better for having yelled them back at me?” She angles her lovely head, her calm eyes studying him. She doesn’t feel the need to defend herself further; to explain how the magic nearly broke her mind in half when it flooded through her. How it had not been her arrogance that had driven her mistakes but her naivety, her inability to harness the breadth of her gift.
But such things don’t make it to her lips.
Instead she just watches as he rages at her, curious at the way Loess seems content to waiver between chaos-loving warmongers and victims of a war they helped ignite. “I am well aware that such a life was lost when the child followed you to Tephra, and I mourn that child as much as I mourned my own.” She had tried to find ways to revive bodies from the magma, but just as she had not been able to recreate Vulgaris from the ashes, she could not remake the boy she had never met. “But I did not deliver the killing blow. I did not take his eyesight or force him into the middle of the war. No Tephran did.”
She knows the series of events that led to the boy’s death.
She knows how he had been flying, how his own relative had tried to end the war but caused his death.
But Leliana, for as complicated as her relationship is with Heartfire, has no desire to cast blame.
Still, if Loess seeks to blame her and her kingdom for his death, she would bear it. When he finally, conclusively, denies her offer of peace, she merely rolls a shoulder. “I am not surprised.” She takes a step back, hesitating for just a moment before finding his draconic eyes again. “But do not mistake my intentions to try and negotiate peace as weakness, Castile. I have no intentions of letting you harm my home again.” There is the barest flutter of a smile at the edges of her gentle lips.
“I am not afraid of dragons. Not anymore.”
And then with a smile, she blinks herself out of existence and returns home.
it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes
@[Castile]