#sorry for the asterisk btw i’m just not trying to show up in the search. mutuals only post if they care to read it

[scionshtola]

enw/6.0 spoilers below the cut

i’m trying to get back into the island fic frame of mind which necessitates thinking about z*nos bc half the things cori is struggling with post enw are related to him. they can’t cast bc of his whole body switcheroo, and when they try to cast it takes them back to that day, trapped in another’s body, desperately dragging themself across the snow to save their friends. and his death weighs on them too, not bc they feel guilty but bc after everything he did to them—hurting shtola back in sb, stalking them throughout enw, projecting onto them and failing to see them as their own person or anything more than a mirror (literally not their own person but a reflection of him), the body swapping!—they only feel relief that he’s dead.

cori is generally a kind and empathetic person and i do a lot of hand waving wrt the amount of killing the wol does—first bc i do think the game is a bit unserious about it frequently except when it suddenly decides to be and secondly bc it just fits her character. she is “the shot that never misses but never kills.” she is not baha blasting two nameless cult members in rak’tika, etc. so any time she does really kill is i think a big deal for her.

but with his death…they have just been so tired and terrified and not wanting anything to do with him but to be left alone. they didn’t want his help at all with endsinger but didn’t feel in a position to turn him down. they didn’t want to fight him in the end but again didn’t feel in a position to reject him—what would he really do if they said no? what would he do to them or to their friends or to anyone else if they let him go? especially if they stayed behind and were not there to stop him.

maybe he’s changed and just wanted to help but they don’t believe that. they don’t trust him, and why would they? but there’s a part of them, later, that wonders if that should matter. if it should matter whether or not his intentions were just or pure or true when he did the right thing anyway. and they wonder what it says about them that they were so quick to disregard that and to feel such relief—almost happiness—at his death.

there’s a quote from the second book in the masquerade series that i think about a lot when i’m thinking about this situation cori is in.

Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth? Maybe the Oriati thought so. Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power.

ultimately i think cori comes to the same conclusion as the last sentence—it does matter why he did it. now they just have to figure out how to live with the judgment they made, and a decision they made when they thought they were going to die.