A M A L I A
"What about the demon?" Once, she believed the spire monster was there to keep them from freeing the Old Gods- but now the girl's perspective is warped, and Amalia is left with more questions than she could have foreseen. If the Old Gods made the spire to keep the New Ones in, did they too create the beast that guards it, responsible as it is for so very many deaths? This thought chills her, and though she does not believe it, cannot believe it, a part of her gnaws with hungry doubt. Onyx eyes search Safrin's inscrutable face, looking for some sign, some answer, that her Gods are not responsible. That even in their absence, they love the ones they have doomed.
Safrin makes no promises of the outside world, and Amalia grows concerned, her foolishness at asking such a thing at once apparent. "I'm sorry," she murmurs, head bowed. "I was wrong to ask, I just..." want it, her heart sings, but her lips fall still. It is selfish to want, cruel to ask, now that she understands why the cage was built - it is a prison, not for them, but for the beasts they made. To demand that prison be felled so she might taste a world she does not even know... it is selfish, arrogant, and against the will of her Gods.
And yet...
As the Goddess speaks of Vi the baker softens slightly, her affection for the absent god filling and warming the quiet girl. That Safrin is his, a vassal of him... it brings fluttering delight to Amalia's thread, a yearning sense of kinship with this trapped deity, this beautiful being to whom she will never be equal, but perhaps in time may aspire to serve. "Thank you," she whispers from behind a bowed head, her cheeks coloring in the Goddess' grace, "But they are not absent, not to me. They are with me in the world they created for us, in the stories my grandmother would tell me, in the life we live every day... and in you." Looking up at Safrin the girl smiles, radiant and hopeful, happy and at peace. "Thank you for answering my prayer, Your Radiance. It is good to know we are not alone in this world, even if the Old Ones cannot be here."
