Arthur.

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"You say I could start a new life," I murmured, the sadness in my voice impossible to hide now. "But what binds you to this one?" @nevergilded

… Why keep walking a road that wounds you and the one you loved most?" This was perhaps the most I have ever talked back to anyone. I had learned to be obedient and not to question fate, and I felt pieces of myself scattered even more, fleeing away from my grasps.

My eyes met his again, my hands clenched tightly in desperation for an answer. "But if that is true... then why must you remain here? If this path only brings you sorrow—if it forces you to become the monster the world insists you are, then why not step away from it too? …

"You speak of escape as though it were possible," I continued, I wasn't sure if what I seek is justification or understanding. "As if a man could step away from everything that shaped him and begin again somewhere beyond the reach of the past."

… two souls who had followed their written roles to their inevitable ends. I lowered my gaze for a moment, the night air was cold against the tears I had not fully managed to stop. "If you believe I could leave all of this behind," I asked of him, "then why can't you?'

… been free to choose the lives we now carried. We had simply followed the roads laid before us until they became prisons. We had both become instruments of forces larger than ourselves—love, faith, power, survival. And now we stood here beneath the same dark sky, …

To be called traitor by the one you cherished and loved most. To be named monster by those who never understood your reasons. To walk a path that history would condemn even if your heart had chosen it out of love. In that moment, I understood that neither of us had truly …

… seemed less like pride and more like resignation, as if he had long ago accepted that the world would remember him only through the worst interpretations of his actions. He looked tired. And I wondered what it must have been like to step in his place.

… chosen suffering knowingly and continued to carry it long after the world misunderstood his reasons. There was mercy in his expression where I had been told to expect monstrosity. There was restraint where I had been warned of devastation. Even the bitterness in his smile …

… as if the weight of what he had become pressed down upon him more heavily than any crown. I had expected arrogance from a God of War, some cruel satisfaction in the path he had carved through betrayal and blood. Instead I saw only weariness, the grief of someone who had …

… at him, who had once been my comrade and now cursed by an entire world. Strangely, everything about him right now shared little resemblance to the calamity the sermon whispered about. The red head standing here looked almost gentle, burdened rather than triumphant, …

… weight of my own blood-soaked devotion, heard something else within his proposal—even though I did not believe a life beyond this was something I deserved. As I stood before him, the sorrow that pressed against my chest was not solely for myself. It deepened as I looked …

… understanding that I belonged to God before I belonged to myself. To step away from that—to abandon the honor I had sworn to hold until death—felt less like freedom and more like treason against heaven. And yet part of me, the part that had begun to tremble beneath the …