"Oh. No, no, you do not get to pretend I do not know you." She smiles, sharp teeth against a slow expression of something far harder underneath. "I know you even better than the knights you have spent centuries besides."
There she leans in, slow, measured, just as even. "It is not a beast I fear. I have learned to put them down." Pretend all you want. Pretend in your daylight hours that you were doing it for some idea of good. That you sent those soldiers and you did not know what they would do because you were not there. Poor, poor Lucan. Knight of the Order. So much power. So many people trusting your word." There is such mockery in her words. She understands, what pain it must be to lie to those around you like that. To hear them hate the very thing that you are, day in, day out.
And maybe as a young woman? It might have been different and was that not the irony. They all made their choices. "But they did it and you sent them. For six days, my city burned, and I know your calculation for what it is. That was formation, battle, direction. Do you know? I did not even know what a Lycan was. Until the bodies started to climb upon themselves. Then the children clung to my skirts as they told me of things with teeth the size of their arms. They begged me to save them. I remember. I will always remember. I do not hate you for being a terrifying creature, clawed and fanged, for surely the Goddess Kali is as fearsome. I know to never trust you, as one who had the strength to send a foreign nation to die because you thought we were little more than food for your kind. When we had done nothing but be subjects of the Empire whether we liked it or not."
no subject
There she leans in, slow, measured, just as even. "It is not a beast I fear. I have learned to put them down." Pretend all you want. Pretend in your daylight hours that you were doing it for some idea of good. That you sent those soldiers and you did not know what they would do because you were not there. Poor, poor Lucan. Knight of the Order. So much power. So many people trusting your word." There is such mockery in her words. She understands, what pain it must be to lie to those around you like that. To hear them hate the very thing that you are, day in, day out.
And maybe as a young woman? It might have been different and was that not the irony. They all made their choices. "But they did it and you sent them. For six days, my city burned, and I know your calculation for what it is. That was formation, battle, direction. Do you know? I did not even know what a Lycan was. Until the bodies started to climb upon themselves. Then the children clung to my skirts as they told me of things with teeth the size of their arms. They begged me to save them. I remember. I will always remember. I do not hate you for being a terrifying creature, clawed and fanged, for surely the Goddess Kali is as fearsome. I know to never trust you, as one who had the strength to send a foreign nation to die because you thought we were little more than food for your kind. When we had done nothing but be subjects of the Empire whether we liked it or not."