WESSEX
Well, that is a surprise, and Wessex doesn’t bother to hide it. “Damn, okay,” she says with another chuckle. “I’m forty-three now, but I’ll always look thirty-eight. That’s… older than most for my people. Conditions were hard here for a long time, and a lot of us didn’t make it to old-old age.” Shrugging the shitty memories off, she lets the offer to stop calling her young one die - she wasn’t really offended, anyway, just curious. And they’re off to the races again, so she tries to hold as many questions in her head as possible before finally letting the last ones go. “Ah, right. Okay. So she doesn’t really steal you from your world. From what I understand, she makes… a copy of sorts. You’re still you, in every way, and if there’s a version of you still alive in your world, that version remains. So you aren’t really leaving anyone behind. I think she initially pulled people here because she knew that the natives - we call ourselves Naturals - didn’t have the will to break out of our prison by ourselves.”
She gestures in the direction of the Grounds border. “Once, we had a force field around this area. It’s big, sure, but it was still a prison and it trapped everything inside. Weather… people, animals, plants. Eventually it started to kill us, and we lost a lot of people just trying over and over again to get out. People who have to struggle to eke out an existence don’t have a lot of energy left over to fight monsters or gain power. But these new people… they did.”
And here’s where she didn’t quite follow Darkeye’s statements, venturing slowly, “But no one is stealing anyone’s land. Caido is massive. Torchline, Halo, and Stormbreak all have cities. The Greatwood is inhabited too. King’s End would be a beautiful place to live. There’s plenty to go around.” As for hating the Voice, well, she knows of a few who had been here and experienced the Blight and the Mathair incident. She shrugs again. “I hate the Old Gods and their heralds for imprisoning us here. I hate them for actively killing my family and encouraging others to do the same. The Voice just wants to live and let live. Existing isn’t a reason for war, let alone the genocide of an entire race of people.”
But you’d never get an Old God to concede that fact. And there’s a steel flash in her ice-blue eyes, something harder than Darkeye has seen over the past conversation. “I’ll kill in defense. Or to get the advantage. But if they don’t fuck with me or the Ascended - then no, I’ll do my best not to harm them.”
No, I’ll be the stone
I’ll be the hunter, a tower that casts the shade
I lie awake and watch it all
I’ll be the hunter, a tower that casts the shade
I lie awake and watch it all
