#and also book him an urgent appointment with a ye olde fantasy world therapist yanno

[furysreign]

🖊 + zak 🥺❤️

ahhh my poor bab! zak is honestly one of my fave characters to write and plan for because his personality fluctuates so massively based on where he is mentally and who he’s surrounding himself with. book one zak wants to die, but he wants to die in a way that he perceives as meaningful. he has this incredibly flawed logic, born of both trauma and guilt, that has told him that the only way he can ever earn forgiveness for being the only survivor of his home’s destruction (through hiding and his own belief of ‘cowardice’) is to die at the same hands of the one that caused it, meaning kiran vonoris (or so he thinks). essentially, zak knows that his fool’s quest of revenge is a fruitless cause. he’s one relatively sheltered young man with no combat training crossing two continents to try and kill a king, knowing full well that the king in question is a military general with an army and a guard at his disposal. it’s not the act of killing that spurs him on, it’s the dying in the attempt of it. a sacrifice like that, he believes, would be enough to atone for his sins and he’d be able to find peace. this mindset leads zak astray for a while, to where he actively shuns any opportunity for growth and recovery and actually makes some pretty bad choices that result in people getting hurt or worse, but at his heart he remains a very insecure, afraid, and lost boy, and it takes a while for him to become confident in who he is as a person and to find his true role in the story 🥺 (and let’s be honest there’s only more suffering from there)