[quote=@Tatterdemalion][b]Adila I![/b]

“You [i]abandoned[/i] me! You betrayed me, locked me away, and you stopped caring about your [i]responsibility[/i] when I won your war! And all I wanted was... you said we were supposed to win the war... save Hyperborea... I believed in you, Addy...”

Her voice is thick and choked with tears. The Felorian hands her a hyacinth-patterned handkerchief and Euphie loudly blows her nose for an exceedingly long time. The Felorian pats Euphie on the back, making noises as if soothing a horse, and then looks at you with eyes like glittering stones.

“I think Eupheria’s owed your thoughts from the heart, ma’am,” the Felorian says, with the gentleness of earth trickling down onto your tomb. “Tell her what you should have told her back then.”[/quote]

Thoughts from the heart? Easy to do. Her being here, now, meant that every hard choice she'd made, every ruthless sacrifice, had been for nothing. She'd played dirty and still lost. Her life seemed so pathetic knowing that she hadn't even [i]succeeded[/i]. All her justifications had washed out of her along with her tears, and her voice is heavy with self-contempt.

"I don't love you, Eupheria. I don't love anyone - I don't even [i]understand[/i] it. I don't see what other people see in romance. I can't see beauty, kisses leave me cold, and it makes me feel like a monster trapped in a world that doesn't belong to me."

But the Felorian's eyes weren't looking for that. They maintained that same, steady, soul-searching gaze just as steadily and for the first time, fixed under that implacable gaze, Princess Adila finally understood why her successor treated her with such respect.

"But - I do [i]care[/i] for you. More than anything, in ways I don't understand. When you're happy you illuminate everything around you, you can take the light of the world and filter it through your heart and make everything seem beautiful in ways I never expected. When I was with you I could see a different kind of me, and for the first time I [i]felt[/i] something. I'd traveled through so many wars and dark hollows, I'd taken my people across the borders of possibility to search for a home, and every time I saw you that's where I felt I was. You know how I used to yawn all the time -" she realized even as she started that confession that it was so silly, mundane, minor it didn't fit at all but she couldn't stop the words as they awkwardly fell from her, more vulnerable than she'd ever been, "- it's because I'd never smiled before I met you, and it made my face hurt, so I kept yawning to stretch my mouth..."

"I was happy then, Eupheria. I dragged the war out because anything I changed might have risked that feeling. I deliberately dragged it out, building castles, talking about the long game, making it into a siege. I didn't know what the feeling was and I didn't know how to preserve it so I tried to freeze the moment in time. But then you went looking for a way to break the stalemate I'd so carefully crafted... and you did it. You became something terrifying, Euphie. You were going to rip my mask off and realize how hollow my heart was. You'd see all the lies for what they were. And since you were already cursing anyone who came between us, the thought of your wrath when you learned the truth terrified me. So I told myself that my feelings were a weakness. That this world wasn't any better than the others, that you were just a new and even more frightening kind of monster, and I needed to fight just like I'd fought everything else. Cruel and ruthless and treasonous. Not for you, any more, but for the world you cared for..."

"But it turned out that was a lie too. I've betrayed my strategy again. A plan hundreds of years in the making... thrown away because once again, I just don't want this moment to end."