give me reasons we should be complete

[Tarian]

Tarian thinks he has never been gentle.

Even as a youth, he had been born with a crown precariously weighted on his brow and a sense of duty that weighted his steps. When most foals his age had been playing and romping, Tarian had been shadowing his grandfather or his father or his uncle. He learned the patrol routes of Paraiso instead of chasing the wind like his twin and plethora of cousins; he learned to recite the names of his long-dead ancestors like prayers instead of trying to learn the names of pretty girls like Liam had.

(If there had ever been anything gentle about Tarian, it had bled out of him alongside his slain parents.)

His blue eyes trace over the ravines and canyons of Pangea. They study the red walls that loom around them and rise to the mountains of Hyaline that stand guard in the distance. They had no legends? No fables? It was an odd thought to the silver stallion, grandson of an acclaimed storyteller and a Guardian. Maybe the Pangeans took all the free space afforded them - the places where myths and stories might have laid the bedrocks for something else - and filled them with whatever they pleased.

That it was just as @[yadigar] said.
There is only us and our will to survive.

The gray pegasus settles his pale wings again, feeling a phantom wind stirring his feathers. These ideals are oddly freeing to a man who has always shackled himself with responsibility. An ear flicks toward the dragon stallion as he speaks; this is the answer to the question that Tarian had asked. These are the things he wanted to know. He had hoped to learn something that he could take back to Loess, something he might share with Lady Oceane to help the South.

"Ah," Tarian says, not wanting to undertstand. Not wanting to, but he does. He thinks of Isakov and how he had almost ripped out the throat of the boy for borrowing the shape of star. Of how he looked within Tarian and ripped from him the shimmer of someone that he still clung tightly to. "So it takes the blood of another to make you feel alive?" The older stallion asks.

He doesn't crave blood or carnage. He doesn't even enjoy killing (though his trade sometimes requires it). But he can recognize, and acknowledge, that there is a thrill in the godlike power of claiming a life. The gray stallion has gotten a high from it; he has looked down on his enemies as the life left their eyes and felt the proud (frantic) beating of his heart as it proclaimed him victor, conqueror, warmonger, alive.

That, in the black moments after, reminded him: he was Tarian who should have been King, who should have been the Shield, who should have been-

And now is Tarian the Captive.

Snorting, he asks: "And if I could take that from you, what then? Do you think you could come to care for the taste of something else?"