A soft and distant smile breaks across Erin's face. "Arthur's an Ogre. You may recall me mentioning them before. He can grow a mighty skin of stone that can stop blades in their tracks and turn aside bullets; I saw him in battle with one of the gods of nightmare, the very day he gave me my choice, and his protection gave even her pause. But before he became a thing of violence and might, he was an engineer; he designed bridges and pipes, built vast systems whose purpose was solely to help real people live their lives in comfort - to bring them water, to connect their communities, to light their homes or keep the stink of factories away from their beautiful neighborhoods. Arthur's a very thoughtful man, whose idea of being a mighty and just king was not simply to defend the innocent, but to leave behind a system that might ease the life of his subjects and all kings to follow, to create the machinery of governance which might bend his home towards compassion even without his hand to operate it."
"You say you could learn from him, but you just told me the same thing he said, when I spat his mercy in his face in my grief and demanded to know why I wasn't dead. You don't give yourself enough credit, Dimitri."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-11-22 06:18 pm (UTC)"You say you could learn from him, but you just told me the same thing he said, when I spat his mercy in his face in my grief and demanded to know why I wasn't dead. You don't give yourself enough credit, Dimitri."