Fri Jun 14, 2024 2:03 pm
- Link
"Dragons choose... mostly fine even without a Touching," Esther said, though she remembered one Hatching where there hadn't been one, and the outcome had been poor. She couldn't even remember why she had attended; to punish herself for her failure, she supposed. To force herself to watch other people being happy with what she had lost. Still, even then most of the dragons had chosen without a great deal of trouble. It was just how bad the dragons that didn't had been that was the problem.
Esther shook her head. "I don't get to take credit for that. Krugith does. She saw... what I could be, not what I was. I was... barely functional, after... everything. I forgot to eat, I barely slept most nights. I got it in my head that I was... dirty, somehow. That I contaminated everything I touched. I'd scrub the floor of my room, over and over, trying to make it clean again, and... No. I wasn't strong."
She was fairly certain Relli wouldn't be sitting here talking to her if she'd known her back then. She hadn't managed to maintain friendships with anyone she'd known before Keramerth had died. Had, in a last act of either vengeful pettiness or a misguided sense of mercy for the first time ever, had left her for worse than dead. Not that she'd had many friends then in any case. And after... she hadn't had any. A meddling sister, but that was all.
"And I think part of me hated myself. Because once the initial shock wore off, I was almost... relieved he was gone. Even though I was just empty, barely even a person, I was relieved that I didn't have to worry what either of us would do. He was gone, and nothing I did mattered for anything or to anyone any more."
She rubbed the little brown's belly and he stretched out, cat-like, for more. "I'm just... glad you didn't know me back then. You wouldn't think I was very wonderful at all—and you're wrong about that anyway. But... I'm also... glad you're wrong about it, in a way. I think I'd prefer that you had a high opinion of me than... not. Even if you only think it because you didn't know me at my worst."