[private] i've always had too much pride

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

What have they put in this boy’s head?
What darkness have they polluted his bloodstream with?

Mazikeen had said it herself. She wanted to be powerful. Have they led his nephew to believe that power was the most important thing?

He has never cared for it, never lusted after it, never thought to petition the Mountain for it, never thought to ask his own father. 

He shakes his head, a stilted kind of smile tying up one corner of his mouth while the boy speaks. No, he will not make the long trip to the Mountain, will not ask for the weakness to be purged from his system. He is a thing crafted from ice, made for a singular purpose, and he will warn them when Death comes for them. As if there is any way of really stopping it.

“I am not suited for power,” he tells the boy, “I don’t think it’s all that suited for me, either.” 

There is no self-pity in it. It is a plain truth. 

He does not know how to undo the things done to his nephew. He does not know how to draw him out of the dark and into the light. His stomach clenches with the thought that he is too late, though he had not known that he was needed at all. Not until now. Not until the damage was already done.

“There is strength in knowing that you’re outmatched, too, I think,” he says, one corner of his mouth still tied up in a kind of sad smile. “In accepting that there are some things that simply cannot be changed.”

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@bolder