Table for Three

Ashe remember why you started.    Ashe didn’t look away from Jigano this time, canine brows drawn together as she listened. This wasn’t the first time she had heard similar things: that she could pave a new path, that she didn’t have to be the monster she was shaped into. And she had tried. And she had failed, and failed, and failed again. How many lives had been lost with her ineptitude?    But… but.    How many had she saved, simply because she tried?    The wolf huffed and gave a nod---freedom was terrifying, to be certain. She had been healing, or trying to, this last year. After I toppled my Guild, she started, unsure of why she would share it with him. Did he care? No, likely not. But there was a certain comfort in telling someone who did not have the bias view her family did that brought a new reality to it all. I was hunted, for years. I was never free, my Master shadowed my every move, murdered my friends, stalked me, deceived me… but I was trying. To defeat him, to protect… everyone.    And she had fought and bled and wept for that stupid settlement. I found him. Killed him perhaps only weeks before we ended up in Caido. I didn’t… I had never planned for a life after that. I never thought I’d even live to see nineteen, let alone twenty. But after embracing Mort... things are different. The world became… different. She shifted her paws and wrapped her tail around, thinking of it. So much pain, pain so immense her mind couldn’t grasp it. But the love. If she had been in her human form, her eyes would have been filling. I was a messenger in Northaven. I was good at it. Maybe I’ll start there.