Mental Link;

[miscreant]

DEVOUR beg for mercy and i will deny you	ASSIMILATE the scourge will wash over this world
LEAD we do what the living cannot	WANDER your kind has no place in this realm

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[miscreant]

[Seviilia's mental presence is chilly, but her attention is pulled without much trouble. She still smells of Lavellan's blood and the barithan, but she appears far more at peace than anyone else in the Nest.

A rare state indeed. But, for all Lakshmi struggled with reconciling her's and other's existence, she rather respects the young queen, and so her request is given the time its owed.]

( My presence is rarely a comfort, your highness. But my eye is upon her. )

[shri]

( Good - )

[ A pause, flickering on - at least someone is, someone does. Of the unsurety sitting ember burning on her tongue. Is it really a boon for someone with Seviilia's ability to be watching over Asuka?

In the end, none of it mattered, not right now. It matters what Asuka needs. ]

(If you need me for any matter, call for me. I will come as swiftly as I am able. )

[miscreant]

( Your concern is noted. )

[All the grief over Lavellan has set her teeth on edge. Grief is an emotion she doesn't know how to process, and thus it converts to cold annoyance in waves. Seviilia takes a moment to turn her mind's eye to Lakshmi.]

( Do they enlist children where you are from? )

[It was not uncommon on Azeroth, but so many people here seemed to balk at the idea.]

[shri]

[ There she sits, between the old world and the new. A girl that was given a bow and arrow at the age of 7 because that was what her family had done for the last generations, and by that same measure, married off at 13, and she cannot see it as good or bad. Not in the way Kaji had rejected it and said it wasn't common. Or Shiro's curled away response. That was what a girl did, and by token, that was when a boy began to take is position in father's work.

But she cannot always say that is right, just because it was what she had known. She had seen the starving and hungry of Whitechapel, the way the machines of the Empire threw its children out, maimed before they had even finished growing. ]

( Yes.)

[miscreant]

( Good. )

[Then her concern was coming from a place of practicality instead of sentimentality. At least, that was what Seviilia believed. Whatever Asuka wanted from her, she was likely unable to provide. But that did not mean she couldn't be useful in other ways.

A mentor. Not a mother.]

[shri]

( It perhaps is not always right, but it is very much done.

Granted, I suspect that makes us in the minority of those I have met here. )

[ She knows so often, she is out of place and out of time. The things she says, the way she acts, the expectations she has of herself and those around her - and to it she looks in perhaps the wrong place for some understanding over that. Kaji had done his best, but Kaji was not a creature of her kind of war. ]

[miscreant]

( Surely you know as well as I that it is not a matter of right and wrong, but necessity. )

[There is the sense of a great beast turning its weight as Seviilia’s attention shifts more readily to Lakshmi. She had learned by now that no other worlds were quite like Azeroth. Earth seemed to be a favorite of the Nest, albeit different versions of it.]

( We are born into the war. Shaped by it. How could a child be expected to survive if they don’t do their part in defending what is their’s? )

[But then, she had no memory of being a child. She could distantly remember the concept, but without the memories to provide context, it was like trying to hold onto water with her bear hands.]

( Those who refuse to undersrand do so because they have not seen the alternative. )

[shri]

( They have not. Nor do they know that cruelty that asks a mother to sacrifice her child and knowing it is necessity. )

[ The bitterness of ruling sits on her tongue. Ugly and full of it's private heartbreak that could never be shared beyond private walls at what the choices she has made truly meant. ]

( I suspect there is a difference to training and participating of course. I would want anyone to have time to learn, first. What good is anyone they don't know the weapon in their hands. )

[miscreant]

( The passion of a malitia can be just as deadly as a trained army. Any weapon is better than surrender. )

[From her point of view, anyway. Maybe that was too much information.]

( Asuka will learn. She already has the foundation. )

[shri]

( I lost too many battles to believe that is always true anymore. )

[ Even so, ]

( She will, but she needs the time to adjust. She has some monstrous notion that to be grown as a person is not to grieve at all. That denial of the self some how makes you stronger. )

[ Her disgust for that, is evident. ]

[miscreant]

( Have you considered that she simply wishes to express her grief differently? )

[Seviilia herself was not a particularly emotional creature, and barely understood anything more complex than fury and raw vengeance. Everything she ever felt boiled down to those emotions, and pleasure.

She does not find Asuka to be all that different.]

[shri]

[ She could explain, really she could - but that would taste of dishonesty. Instead, she cracks open not to a girl fighting - but instead to a girl, clutching desperately. Sobbing weakling into her chest. The viseral feeling of it, the sniffling noises, the crack in her voice. ( That too perhaps, Lakshmi's own, how her heart bleeds over something so similar, a child clutching to a mother's arms and how she in turn, removes it from herself completely. )

Only little kids cry! I'm not a little kid! the wet visceral feeling of her clothes being soaked through, the shake all the way through her. People will think I am weak. ]

( Consider? Yes. Believe? No. Someone has led her to think this about herself. Someone taught her this. They ought to be the ones weeping for lying to one so young to such a life. )

[miscreant]

[Almost immediately, Seviilia turns cold to the imagry, hardens herself the way a soldier often does — bled free of all emotion and reaction she might have. Dutifully seperating the action of comfort that Lakshmi provides. She hates it, there is no holding back her opinion of the entire encounter; an understanding that this was the natural state of the living, to feel a wealth of emotions and consider it healthy.

To Seviilia, it is poison, and coaxes dark shadows from the recesses of a decayed mind.]

( I see. )

[She doesn’t understand, but she sees. She could distinctly remember the tears that came from other knights when memories were returned to them, how it carved horrible burns into their faces. A gruesome reminder that life was for the living.]

( If she was raised to believe such things, I do not suppose it can be helped now. )

[She certainly couldnt teach her.]

[shri]

(No - )

[ It's sudden, sharp, barked in a barely kept form out from her mind and her lungs. A hurt, perhaps, deep enough to turn to an anger. Love, after all, was no more or less a bladed edge when used the right way. ]

( It can always be helped. To accept that on behalf of others is the truest cowardice I know. )

[ Accept and hold, dig her heels in against the pike to brace for impact - never, never, never. Hitched and high and gripping the reigns by teeth she will never, never, accept that. ]

[miscreant]

[This is the worst. She regrets opening her mouth — her mind. Both were becoming increasingly difficult to keep silent.]

( Enough. You kick and flail over such small things. )

[This is not a big deal, and even with Lakshmi hammering at her to try and force understanding, it just isn’t there. Not to mention the fact that Asuka would not give in so easily to new ideas. She did not need to know the girl’s heart to understand that much.]

( As I said. I will mind her. )

[shri]

[ It's all ugly snarling, in the end, fire against ice, the mythological differences. Easy to breathe that heat into her mind and words and mouth. ]

( I will return with dinner for her - tell me if there is anything else she requires. )