#but i feel like while andrei puts on formal airs with most people and talks in a somewhat affected grammar as a result

[ulircursed]

for forever

Patrol your companions’ quarters [Max 4 muses per thread] - Restore 1HP to houses per post - Can now talk to Mairenn during this task

     Even looking still as death, Edain’s hands are still warm when he grasps them.

     That unchanging fact keeps Andrei’s anxiety at bay as the weeks bleed into one another without a single sign that their allies are close to waking up, while the outside world around them is met with one trouble after another. At the very least, inexplicable injuries notwithstanding, all of their allies are still breathing, though that is small comfort given the circumstances. Despite making a conscious effort to spread his patrolling among the four houses in somewhat equal measure, he cannot help but return to this house, this room, more often than any other.

     (He’d promised to try and keep her safe.)

     And it is here that he stands again, after yet another night of exhausting battle, after the chief had seen them making their usual patrols to check on their companions (they weren’t wounded by outside forces last time; what could they possibly do against a power beyond their reach?) and made a cryptic offer, one that loops endlessly in his mind, even now.

     Be with them forever, peacefully and happily, in a world free of pain...

     ...Why wouldn’t he want that? A world without all this pain and bloodshed. A world with Lady Sister, and Father and Edain, and whomever else each of them would choose to complete their family, without a single one lost. A world where conspiracy and the greed for power never touched any part of Grannvale.

     A world where he’d never had the choice to tear his family apart.

     “You’d want it too, wouldn’t you, Sister?” Andrei asks the sleeping figure before him, doing nothing to hide his desperate, anguished expression in a room without waking, judging eyes. His hand trembles in hers. “Even if it’s only a dream... If it’s one where nothing had gone wrong... Wouldn’t we all be happier for it?”

     He isn’t sure how long he stands there in silence, as though awaiting, begging for an answer, before he startles at the sound of the door behind him being pushed open. Hastily withdrawing his hand, Andrei turns, blinking at the familiar face that appears through the entrance.

     “Ah... Lady Caeda,” he greets, not quite meeting her gaze, for fear his thoughts might be laid entirely bare to anyone who sees him, “You— you are here on patrol as well, I take it?”

@arcaeda