fic: Once Called a King
Apr. 1st, 2009 02:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bonnefoisTitle: Once Called a King
Series: FE10
Day/Theme: 4.14 | you were born to be betrayed
Character/Pairing: Pelleas, assorted hints of PelleasMicaiah And SotheMicaiah. Also various Almedha and Izuka.
Rating: no more than PG
Word Count: 3,001
A/N:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
20_wars claim which hasn’t been approved yet... eheh. I’ll crosspost it once it’s done. This follows the second playthrough path, and probably has spoilers. The references to the “tale of the past lands” is Arthurian in nature because Daein is filled with people of Arturian names. Seriously, Gawain, Pelleas – I even have a crack theory that the name Greil is actually a scrambled Japanese rendering of Grail. But seriously, digression, ‘that is another story’ etc.
Also, this is another apologyfic for being so mean to Pelleas in Oedipus Rex.
1. Pelleas was country born, deep in the southern regions closest to Begnion. It was a small, out of the way place that only knew crime from occasional cattle rustlers. His country heritage was quite obvious for several reasons: first, the inflection to the accent, almost Begnion in nature. (To his countrymen, he sounded not unlike a foreigner placed upon their throne from the hated decadent courts of Begnion.) Second, Pelleas knew nothing of crime. He had once slipped out during a late hour in a desperate need for companionship and a bit of cider and fried pastries – the kind he could never find in the castle for the dish was considered too ‘lowborn’ for a king. At his hometown one could walk the streets at twilight and never fear that a knife point would be pressed to one’s back. Pelleas had foolishly assumed that this would still apply in the capitol and greatest metropolis of the whole of Daein.
He was wrong. He escaped with his life merely because the thief in question didn’t feel write slitting the throat of a simpering boychild, and only stole his gold and left him with a few sizeable bruises and a black eye.
(When asked, Pelleas offered that he simply ‘fell down some stairs.’ It was entirely characteristic thus no one asked further.)
2. Pelleas used to dream of what a mother must be like and formed a dream surrogate from his own face and the idiosyncracies of other women. He thought that he must have inherited his soft curls and blunted edges from his mother, who would be a gentle woman by nature. His father was likely a distant scholarly type who he had inherited the skill with ledgers from. They would live in a small house in a place close enough to town for his father to walk to work, but far enough away to keep animals. His visions were entirely mundane; he had no delusions of grandeur.
When he met Almedha, those imaginings fell far short from the tall, elegant and cold woman before him. In his mind his mother had been a simple country woman, slender with curly hair and rough hands.
3. The first night in the Keep he hunted down a picture of the former king – his father – to look for himself in the brush strokes and mottled paint. The picture was of King Ashnard as a young general, he held up a huge sword with cruel spines and rested his hand upon a human skull. (Fake, and for effect, Pelleas hoped.) There was little of himself to be found in there either. The hair color was similar, yet it was straight and coarse, not the dandy curls that Pelleas had. He knew he had inherited no personal traits of his father either. His father had been a great general and tyrannical king. Pelleas certainly didn’t have that kind of strength. Slowly, the fireside daydream of the distant, yet kind scholar and the gentle washerwoman mother with the curls and the soft face fell to ashes like paper thrown to the burning coals.
4. Pelleas admired Izuka’s many talents and useful abilities for many reasons. Izuka had helped him get his bearings and always been around to steer him in the right directions. He looked over contracts and laws and explained them in more common terms so the documents were more than a blur of inky incomprehensible words. But mostly Pelleas tolerated Izuka’s strange ways for nostalgic reasons. Shortly before his thirteenth year Pelleas was apprenticed to a Sage and mad chemist. The sage was prone to muttering to himself and often screeched strange things. He hurled insults Pelleas’ way – too clumsy, useless boy, I wasted the money I put on you – but it was the first time Pelleas had ever felt a place somewhat like home.
Less than a year later Pelleas was sent back to the orphanage for tripping one too many times and breaking the precious glass beakers.
5. When the dying spirit offered him power beyond mention, Pelleas simply said But you’re all alone too, aren’t you?
6. After that, there was a mark left as a fingerprint where the spirit had touched his body. It resembled a branded mark just enough to increase the isolation until it really was simply him and the spirit. The spirit didn’t talk anymore, so Pelleas was left to his books and ledgers where there were no accusing words to be thrown his way. Books were kind to him, and Pelleas took to them life a second language. While children played outside, he tried not to think of hopes and dreams of being accepted and brought out to play stickball and chase. He was too clumsy, and the mark was now too often misinterpreted of the blood of a beast. So Pelleas was left to his books and in them he forgot the disgraces weighed upon him, true and otherwise. Within them he found other worlds.
7. When reading romantic tales Pelleas never had enough hubris to wish himself the hero. Heroes always had lives fraught with such danger and upheaval. Pelleas always appropriated the role of a scholar or theologian or humble librarian that led the brash hero either to victory or doom, whatever the gods willed it.
8. Pelleas had studied many a myth and lore in his days. In them the youthful hero always took the throne with a few minor ogre battles, dragon slayings and princess rescuings The scene faded to a perfect sunset as their king arrived. The hero never had to deal with manners he had never learned or a court that pretended to be for him but waited for every moment to stab them in the back. Heroes never worried about invasions from other nearby countries or imposing laws they had no idea of the effects of. In this way, life did not imitate art.
Then again, while it was the usual for the chosen maiden to accept her hero and rescuer wether dashing prince or clever farmboy, it wasn’t always. He’d once cringed through the past tales of a land before Daein. There had been a cruel maiden and the knight who loved her unconditionally. It attracted him for the knight shared his name. But Pelleas couldn’t appropriate any other aspects of the story. Ettarde was nothing like Micaiah. The myth was no foreboding of history to come. Still, his life resembled these tales more than the linear fairy stories of his youth.
Perhaps that was his problem. He was caught in a tragedy, not a fairy tale.
9. A teacher of his once said that Heroes are merely the product of a culture’s imagination. One country’s hero is another one’s villain
It set him thinking. Was he considered a villain in Crimea? Begnion? Or even one of those barbaric subhuman colonies? It unnerved him that anyone could consider himself an evil person simply by merit of birth and his lot as a countryman. He’d sought to be nothing but kind and even if he had slipped up at times, every leader was allowed some margin for error in the beginning, weren’t they?
At times Pelleas worried so much of how history would paint him that he forgot to remember the present. Today whittled away to nothing while he worried about tomorrow.
10. He did not love her at first glance, or second or third, but it had already begun to grow by then. It came up so sudden that he did not realize his affections at first. He felt foolish in retrospect for telling Sothe that he was merely jealous of Micaiah’s way with the people.
It wasn’t a lie, at first.
11. Even Pelleas couldn’t say if he loved Micaiah, the fortune teller or The Infallible Silver Lady. All of Daein had deified her and of them he was perhaps the worst. She had saved him and stayed with him through the worst. Love turns flesh into divine, and his was a particularly virulent case of blindness. He could not tell if he loved her or the fictions he had made of her. Whether myth or the true girl, without her, he would have crumbled into a muted nothing beneath the weight of the lying courtiers and subterfuge around him. And that in itself is enough to enshrine her in his heart for as long as it beat.
12. Pelleas was to his knowledge, an only child. Perhaps he had a brother or sister or even plural who had been separated when they were too young to realize, but Pelleas never felt that connection.
It was that mantra that he reiterated to himself at times when he saw her lean into Sothe and say I’m so tired and saw him touch her arm in a way that was protective and possessive all in one.
He didn’t understand the love of siblings. Obviously, any outsider would take it for something it was not. What they had was pure and true, and he would silence any suspicions about them. Even his own.
13. He had almost begun to get the hang of being a king before the mark came upon him. At first he thought it was a burn, a scar of some kind or even a message from the spirit. When Lekain came and informed him of the grave mistake he had made, Pelleas developed a painful stutter and his shuffling, tripping and trembling ways spread until he could barely hold a goblet at dinners without spilling the contents.
Pelleas forgot how to laugh then. Each day seemed to be a countdown to his – and everyone else’s demise. Before then he would’ve been remembered as the laughing boy king with his shining Silver Lady at his command.
Now he was simply known for his melancholia and impending failures.
14. Suicide was a coward’s way, but it was also the thing of honor. When it became clear that his life was the only price to be paid for his mistakes, Pelleas started the plans with almost a sense of relief. The constant guilt of a blade hanging over his neck could at last be finished.
A coward dies a thousand deaths, and Pelleas thought he had died nearly that amount already in his worryings – if not more.
It took Micaiah’s pleading – and body thrown in front of his to convince him to stop in his cowardice and keep living to face the consequences, whatever they may be. She had been so thin and frail, and the blood had spread over his skin like it had been made of snow. That silver hair had spread against him and he had touched it as he had so many times wanted to do – by accident, by subconscious, by concern – by daring.
Pelleas never forgot the price of a life, a price she had almost paid. He swore himself to be worthy that such a sacrifice had almost been made on his behalf.
15. Pelleas always considered himself a good son and strived to be as such, but as the suspicions of his own birth within himself grew, he couldn’t bear to be by Lady Almedha’s side. She clung to him like a creeping vine after his attempt to break the blood pact. The tighter her arms came about him, the more he felt simply a doll with the word son imprinted on it to soothe a madwoman.
16. It was almost comical that he would end up under Tibarn’s care. Even Tibarn himself was bemused by the situation. He tried to keep up and failed, for the wings were too wide and his shoulders so broad as if to lift up boulders and even the world itself. Tibarn patted him on the shoulder on the first time, and told him to catch his breath. Pelleas felt horribly inadequate in comparison to a King who could singlehandedly win over the countrymen and battle at the forefront without ever falling tired.
It wasn’t until Tibarn’s Heron companion took him aside and said “Everyone envies Tibarn, even himself” that Pelleas felt more relieved of the situation.
16. It took some getting used to return to civilian life. Here the fellow soldiers did not honor him as king, but merely as a reasonably talented sage – one who was given to bouts of awkwardness and occasional tripping, but none called him on his mistakes. When he came down for breakfast at the campfire at the middle of the circle of tents, there were no accusing faces demanding why he didn’t save his country. He was as any other soldier, and just as valuable as any other.
Tibarn’s group was surprisingly gentle to his ineptness. It was the first time since he met Micaiah that he felt accepted.
17. When he got the chance, Pelleas followed after the tactician of the Greil Mercenaries again. The tactician hadn’t given much of a satisfactory answer about the mark, and Pelleas had to know, what spirit lay within him? Was it a similar one? Would they talk to each other?
Perhaps the thing that interested Pelleas the most was how much the boy resembled Lady Almedha. The look was striking, from the same hair to the same blood ruby eyes. The shape was similar, of arched eyebrows but the frame far more delicate. It was more than that, for there was a harshness in his gaze that reminded him of that young portrait of the former king, of the man who was said to be his father yet that bared almost no resemblance to him.
Here was the face he should have had, the sum of two mad royalties. Here was the face he had been trying to find in Lady Almedha’s and the portraits of a deceased king. The pieces fit. Pelleas finally understood.
18. Pelleas always had a sense of innate honor and it was that sense that made him revoke his kingship and tell Almedha the truth. He could have lived a lie, but not happily, and not for long. The guilt would have brought some truth to his lips eventually, and he’d rather be remembered an honorable nothing than a lying fraud.
Still, a teensy part of him – one that he was ashamed of – was somewhat relieved. Almedha was not the soft mother of his imaginings. She was cold and rough, like lace rather than silk or soft linen. She clung to tightly and had hints of madness around her composed facade. She even carried the blood of a beast within her. The thought that those chants of schoolchild could’ve been true – that he could’ve been part beast from the vile copulation of man and animal sent a chill down his spine.
19. It was Micaiah and the Herons who made him reconsider the dogma that subhumans – Laguz were heartless beasts that would feast on the young of anyone who didn’t exterminate them first.The white winged glorious creatures didn’t resemble the things they said at all. Still, long held assumptions were hard to break. Every time he saw a subhuman he still cringed. He remembered the chants and insults hurled at him in his youth. Old wounds linger long, and scars do not heal so easily.
20..
Though he thought of going back to his homeland – twice in disgrace of being returned for being unsatisfactory goods, Micaiah asked him to stay. Asking in a tone like that was more of a command than a question, for before she even said it she must have known he would have no way of refusing her.
He told of his plans when he handed the ring over to her. A no name scholar in a no name village to fade to obscurity. That far off no one would call him on his mistakes and no one would make him remember the past. He could live in ignominy and anonymity. Pelleas was willing to take those steps for atonement.
But she gave him another option: forgiveness.
And he knelt before her and promised to serve her as long as he lived. He owed her his life tenfold and then some. Besides, it was not a harsh fate to be dealt. A life lived in the service of the beautiful woman one loves is not such a punishment, not near the things he deserved for damning an entire country. He kissed the ring that had once been so heavy on his fingers, and kept his still parted lips against her skin a fraction too long, so much so as to be shameless for a mere servant with no peerage to dare to.
He stuttered an apology but felt her fingers on his lips, silencing him. She gave him another option and he took it with pushed back thoughts of absolution and worthiness– It was only the one gift every human deserves, but not every one finds within a life span, the one thing he craved and searched for all his years–
Happiness. A home. A place to be.
He had once been called a king but now he was servant to a queen and he wouldn’t trade fates for all the wishes in the world. He wouldn’t trade it at all.
Series: FE10
Day/Theme: 4.14 | you were born to be betrayed
Character/Pairing: Pelleas, assorted hints of PelleasMicaiah And SotheMicaiah. Also various Almedha and Izuka.
Rating: no more than PG
Word Count: 3,001
A/N:
20_wars claim which hasn’t been approved yet... eheh. I’ll crosspost it once it’s done. This follows the second playthrough path, and probably has spoilers. The references to the “tale of the past lands” is Arthurian in nature because Daein is filled with people of Arturian names. Seriously, Gawain, Pelleas – I even have a crack theory that the name Greil is actually a scrambled Japanese rendering of Grail. But seriously, digression, ‘that is another story’ etc. Also, this is another apologyfic for being so mean to Pelleas in Oedipus Rex.
1. Pelleas was country born, deep in the southern regions closest to Begnion. It was a small, out of the way place that only knew crime from occasional cattle rustlers. His country heritage was quite obvious for several reasons: first, the inflection to the accent, almost Begnion in nature. (To his countrymen, he sounded not unlike a foreigner placed upon their throne from the hated decadent courts of Begnion.) Second, Pelleas knew nothing of crime. He had once slipped out during a late hour in a desperate need for companionship and a bit of cider and fried pastries – the kind he could never find in the castle for the dish was considered too ‘lowborn’ for a king. At his hometown one could walk the streets at twilight and never fear that a knife point would be pressed to one’s back. Pelleas had foolishly assumed that this would still apply in the capitol and greatest metropolis of the whole of Daein.
He was wrong. He escaped with his life merely because the thief in question didn’t feel write slitting the throat of a simpering boychild, and only stole his gold and left him with a few sizeable bruises and a black eye.
(When asked, Pelleas offered that he simply ‘fell down some stairs.’ It was entirely characteristic thus no one asked further.)
2. Pelleas used to dream of what a mother must be like and formed a dream surrogate from his own face and the idiosyncracies of other women. He thought that he must have inherited his soft curls and blunted edges from his mother, who would be a gentle woman by nature. His father was likely a distant scholarly type who he had inherited the skill with ledgers from. They would live in a small house in a place close enough to town for his father to walk to work, but far enough away to keep animals. His visions were entirely mundane; he had no delusions of grandeur.
When he met Almedha, those imaginings fell far short from the tall, elegant and cold woman before him. In his mind his mother had been a simple country woman, slender with curly hair and rough hands.
3. The first night in the Keep he hunted down a picture of the former king – his father – to look for himself in the brush strokes and mottled paint. The picture was of King Ashnard as a young general, he held up a huge sword with cruel spines and rested his hand upon a human skull. (Fake, and for effect, Pelleas hoped.) There was little of himself to be found in there either. The hair color was similar, yet it was straight and coarse, not the dandy curls that Pelleas had. He knew he had inherited no personal traits of his father either. His father had been a great general and tyrannical king. Pelleas certainly didn’t have that kind of strength. Slowly, the fireside daydream of the distant, yet kind scholar and the gentle washerwoman mother with the curls and the soft face fell to ashes like paper thrown to the burning coals.
4. Pelleas admired Izuka’s many talents and useful abilities for many reasons. Izuka had helped him get his bearings and always been around to steer him in the right directions. He looked over contracts and laws and explained them in more common terms so the documents were more than a blur of inky incomprehensible words. But mostly Pelleas tolerated Izuka’s strange ways for nostalgic reasons. Shortly before his thirteenth year Pelleas was apprenticed to a Sage and mad chemist. The sage was prone to muttering to himself and often screeched strange things. He hurled insults Pelleas’ way – too clumsy, useless boy, I wasted the money I put on you – but it was the first time Pelleas had ever felt a place somewhat like home.
Less than a year later Pelleas was sent back to the orphanage for tripping one too many times and breaking the precious glass beakers.
5. When the dying spirit offered him power beyond mention, Pelleas simply said But you’re all alone too, aren’t you?
6. After that, there was a mark left as a fingerprint where the spirit had touched his body. It resembled a branded mark just enough to increase the isolation until it really was simply him and the spirit. The spirit didn’t talk anymore, so Pelleas was left to his books and ledgers where there were no accusing words to be thrown his way. Books were kind to him, and Pelleas took to them life a second language. While children played outside, he tried not to think of hopes and dreams of being accepted and brought out to play stickball and chase. He was too clumsy, and the mark was now too often misinterpreted of the blood of a beast. So Pelleas was left to his books and in them he forgot the disgraces weighed upon him, true and otherwise. Within them he found other worlds.
7. When reading romantic tales Pelleas never had enough hubris to wish himself the hero. Heroes always had lives fraught with such danger and upheaval. Pelleas always appropriated the role of a scholar or theologian or humble librarian that led the brash hero either to victory or doom, whatever the gods willed it.
8. Pelleas had studied many a myth and lore in his days. In them the youthful hero always took the throne with a few minor ogre battles, dragon slayings and princess rescuings The scene faded to a perfect sunset as their king arrived. The hero never had to deal with manners he had never learned or a court that pretended to be for him but waited for every moment to stab them in the back. Heroes never worried about invasions from other nearby countries or imposing laws they had no idea of the effects of. In this way, life did not imitate art.
Then again, while it was the usual for the chosen maiden to accept her hero and rescuer wether dashing prince or clever farmboy, it wasn’t always. He’d once cringed through the past tales of a land before Daein. There had been a cruel maiden and the knight who loved her unconditionally. It attracted him for the knight shared his name. But Pelleas couldn’t appropriate any other aspects of the story. Ettarde was nothing like Micaiah. The myth was no foreboding of history to come. Still, his life resembled these tales more than the linear fairy stories of his youth.
Perhaps that was his problem. He was caught in a tragedy, not a fairy tale.
9. A teacher of his once said that Heroes are merely the product of a culture’s imagination. One country’s hero is another one’s villain
It set him thinking. Was he considered a villain in Crimea? Begnion? Or even one of those barbaric subhuman colonies? It unnerved him that anyone could consider himself an evil person simply by merit of birth and his lot as a countryman. He’d sought to be nothing but kind and even if he had slipped up at times, every leader was allowed some margin for error in the beginning, weren’t they?
At times Pelleas worried so much of how history would paint him that he forgot to remember the present. Today whittled away to nothing while he worried about tomorrow.
10. He did not love her at first glance, or second or third, but it had already begun to grow by then. It came up so sudden that he did not realize his affections at first. He felt foolish in retrospect for telling Sothe that he was merely jealous of Micaiah’s way with the people.
It wasn’t a lie, at first.
11. Even Pelleas couldn’t say if he loved Micaiah, the fortune teller or The Infallible Silver Lady. All of Daein had deified her and of them he was perhaps the worst. She had saved him and stayed with him through the worst. Love turns flesh into divine, and his was a particularly virulent case of blindness. He could not tell if he loved her or the fictions he had made of her. Whether myth or the true girl, without her, he would have crumbled into a muted nothing beneath the weight of the lying courtiers and subterfuge around him. And that in itself is enough to enshrine her in his heart for as long as it beat.
12. Pelleas was to his knowledge, an only child. Perhaps he had a brother or sister or even plural who had been separated when they were too young to realize, but Pelleas never felt that connection.
It was that mantra that he reiterated to himself at times when he saw her lean into Sothe and say I’m so tired and saw him touch her arm in a way that was protective and possessive all in one.
He didn’t understand the love of siblings. Obviously, any outsider would take it for something it was not. What they had was pure and true, and he would silence any suspicions about them. Even his own.
13. He had almost begun to get the hang of being a king before the mark came upon him. At first he thought it was a burn, a scar of some kind or even a message from the spirit. When Lekain came and informed him of the grave mistake he had made, Pelleas developed a painful stutter and his shuffling, tripping and trembling ways spread until he could barely hold a goblet at dinners without spilling the contents.
Pelleas forgot how to laugh then. Each day seemed to be a countdown to his – and everyone else’s demise. Before then he would’ve been remembered as the laughing boy king with his shining Silver Lady at his command.
Now he was simply known for his melancholia and impending failures.
14. Suicide was a coward’s way, but it was also the thing of honor. When it became clear that his life was the only price to be paid for his mistakes, Pelleas started the plans with almost a sense of relief. The constant guilt of a blade hanging over his neck could at last be finished.
A coward dies a thousand deaths, and Pelleas thought he had died nearly that amount already in his worryings – if not more.
It took Micaiah’s pleading – and body thrown in front of his to convince him to stop in his cowardice and keep living to face the consequences, whatever they may be. She had been so thin and frail, and the blood had spread over his skin like it had been made of snow. That silver hair had spread against him and he had touched it as he had so many times wanted to do – by accident, by subconscious, by concern – by daring.
Pelleas never forgot the price of a life, a price she had almost paid. He swore himself to be worthy that such a sacrifice had almost been made on his behalf.
15. Pelleas always considered himself a good son and strived to be as such, but as the suspicions of his own birth within himself grew, he couldn’t bear to be by Lady Almedha’s side. She clung to him like a creeping vine after his attempt to break the blood pact. The tighter her arms came about him, the more he felt simply a doll with the word son imprinted on it to soothe a madwoman.
16. It was almost comical that he would end up under Tibarn’s care. Even Tibarn himself was bemused by the situation. He tried to keep up and failed, for the wings were too wide and his shoulders so broad as if to lift up boulders and even the world itself. Tibarn patted him on the shoulder on the first time, and told him to catch his breath. Pelleas felt horribly inadequate in comparison to a King who could singlehandedly win over the countrymen and battle at the forefront without ever falling tired.
It wasn’t until Tibarn’s Heron companion took him aside and said “Everyone envies Tibarn, even himself” that Pelleas felt more relieved of the situation.
16. It took some getting used to return to civilian life. Here the fellow soldiers did not honor him as king, but merely as a reasonably talented sage – one who was given to bouts of awkwardness and occasional tripping, but none called him on his mistakes. When he came down for breakfast at the campfire at the middle of the circle of tents, there were no accusing faces demanding why he didn’t save his country. He was as any other soldier, and just as valuable as any other.
Tibarn’s group was surprisingly gentle to his ineptness. It was the first time since he met Micaiah that he felt accepted.
17. When he got the chance, Pelleas followed after the tactician of the Greil Mercenaries again. The tactician hadn’t given much of a satisfactory answer about the mark, and Pelleas had to know, what spirit lay within him? Was it a similar one? Would they talk to each other?
Perhaps the thing that interested Pelleas the most was how much the boy resembled Lady Almedha. The look was striking, from the same hair to the same blood ruby eyes. The shape was similar, of arched eyebrows but the frame far more delicate. It was more than that, for there was a harshness in his gaze that reminded him of that young portrait of the former king, of the man who was said to be his father yet that bared almost no resemblance to him.
Here was the face he should have had, the sum of two mad royalties. Here was the face he had been trying to find in Lady Almedha’s and the portraits of a deceased king. The pieces fit. Pelleas finally understood.
18. Pelleas always had a sense of innate honor and it was that sense that made him revoke his kingship and tell Almedha the truth. He could have lived a lie, but not happily, and not for long. The guilt would have brought some truth to his lips eventually, and he’d rather be remembered an honorable nothing than a lying fraud.
Still, a teensy part of him – one that he was ashamed of – was somewhat relieved. Almedha was not the soft mother of his imaginings. She was cold and rough, like lace rather than silk or soft linen. She clung to tightly and had hints of madness around her composed facade. She even carried the blood of a beast within her. The thought that those chants of schoolchild could’ve been true – that he could’ve been part beast from the vile copulation of man and animal sent a chill down his spine.
19. It was Micaiah and the Herons who made him reconsider the dogma that subhumans – Laguz were heartless beasts that would feast on the young of anyone who didn’t exterminate them first.The white winged glorious creatures didn’t resemble the things they said at all. Still, long held assumptions were hard to break. Every time he saw a subhuman he still cringed. He remembered the chants and insults hurled at him in his youth. Old wounds linger long, and scars do not heal so easily.
20..
Though he thought of going back to his homeland – twice in disgrace of being returned for being unsatisfactory goods, Micaiah asked him to stay. Asking in a tone like that was more of a command than a question, for before she even said it she must have known he would have no way of refusing her.
He told of his plans when he handed the ring over to her. A no name scholar in a no name village to fade to obscurity. That far off no one would call him on his mistakes and no one would make him remember the past. He could live in ignominy and anonymity. Pelleas was willing to take those steps for atonement.
But she gave him another option: forgiveness.
And he knelt before her and promised to serve her as long as he lived. He owed her his life tenfold and then some. Besides, it was not a harsh fate to be dealt. A life lived in the service of the beautiful woman one loves is not such a punishment, not near the things he deserved for damning an entire country. He kissed the ring that had once been so heavy on his fingers, and kept his still parted lips against her skin a fraction too long, so much so as to be shameless for a mere servant with no peerage to dare to.
He stuttered an apology but felt her fingers on his lips, silencing him. She gave him another option and he took it with pushed back thoughts of absolution and worthiness– It was only the one gift every human deserves, but not every one finds within a life span, the one thing he craved and searched for all his years–
Happiness. A home. A place to be.
He had once been called a king but now he was servant to a queen and he wouldn’t trade fates for all the wishes in the world. He wouldn’t trade it at all.
