Scorching desert breezes dry Acacea's tears as soon as they start down her cheeks, never allowing them to fall. The unicorn in her hands gives her loving support, but can do nothing to ease the pain of tangled paths and lost faith. She rests her forehead on her knees, thoroughly miserable about the road that brought her alone to shifting sands.
Maybe I should have shouted, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY HAVE DONE? Maybe yelled at them a list of all of the epic things we have accomplished. Maybe then they would not spit in the faces of all of those people and achievements by thinking that a sect of the Mad God had the only answers.
She lifts her head and angrily casts some sand into the winds, for once bitter and discouraged by something already past. Then she slumps down a bit, falling back into the dune and leaning her head back to look at the distant ruins.
I said it all to the wrong people...
She rolls over, frustrated that somehow for just a moment - long enough to lose a battle that stung worse than the swords she'd been bitten by in the past - that decisions are made with the mob mentality. Not just brokenhearted that a group of Dragoncalled had chosen the easy alliance with evil rather than finding their own solution, but disappointed by the thought that had she only raised her voice a little more, they might have held the majority for longer than the few moments it had taken to shift flimsy supporters.
Acacea presses a dry cheek to grains of sand and tries not to think about what she could have said, what she should have done.
"Please come with me, you need not accept anything, just come...Accept your friendship for me and be there with me and that's all... you can think I'm totally loony... just be with a loony. You remember what we always talk about, my worries, what I go on about..."
Acacea pulled her hood down in the rain to look up at Plen, standing outside of the north wall of Hlint. Her eyes drifted back down to the grass, pained by what felt like a complete loss of a friend.
"I know. I'm sorry..."
"Okay."
He turned and started away, and Acacea started rambling a bit, not wanting to feel like she was just abandoning someone. "I already said that you are probably not loony...and that when it is over and the story is going around, that it will have been some heroic thing. And the wisdom of taking lesser of evils will be praised and all that..."
She just kept talking over his "That was not why I made the choice I did," rain making her curled hair even more frazzled than usual.
"-and everyone will have been "proud" to have gone with you. I just..." She rubbed the back of her neck unhappily, then looked up as Brisbane approached and asked Plenarius for a word when he had a moment.
Once the druid had walked away again, she continued with, "I am sure I will be in this story with others as one of the people who put the world in danger. But I don't know. Maybe somebody will remember that I would have no dealings with someone capable of restoring a bloodpool. And lusting after the power that it gives, for their own ends. And who thought, there are always better options, from ourselves, than handing it over. The others, they were mostly for it, for awhile - then against, then for - they don't know. They will go wherever the strings pull."
She stopped with a shrug and looked up to the Bird Lord who had stood silently listening. "I am sorry, Plenarius... I do not want to be a hero, this time...not like that."
Was I right, Diamond? she wonders, to what feels like her only friend.
Do they care? I think that is why I did not yell at them... I was afraid... not 'cause I thought they'd make fun of me, or that some Black Wizard would come with some rod of doomedy doom for me or somethin'... I am just afraid that no one would care about the things they have done. Kobal announced at Moraken's, in the middle of a HUGE mob of people, that there was a Black Wizard in the room...name and all... Basically pointed and said "Rufus Coldfinger is a Black Wizard!"
Not a single person so much as flinched. I am not sure I could stand to see any of them again if they just shrugged off anything I could tell them...worse, the loudest of them already knew. How can I do anything about that, Beloved? It will never happen, not when all the world is just like them. Some beacon...
She sits with only glass for company in the harsh climate, unable to help feeling betrayed by everyone walking on two legs.
They can be led with rings through their noses for all that I care, but I will not be afraid again.