Sasha (Natania) I

Sometimes it’s hard to care about a good world for myself, but it’s a lot easier to care for other people. I don’t have to be good to know I can’t raise a kid in a bad world, and I know that makes be better. It makes so much more sense when I’m starting from scratch. My baggage don’t matter, good or bad, because now I’ve got someone coming into this world at 0, and it’s now my first and most important job to try and keep it that way. Keep it safe. But it’s also so terrifying. I can’t throw myself into danger because I’m not gonna leave my kid without it’s dad, I’m not gonna leave Evangeline alone with a fucking baby, but I’m also not gonna let some bitch with morganti run around in a town where my kid is gonna be living soon. It’s kind of about the story stones. Someone, Chumkali I think, said in the inn something along the lines of “we need to do the story stones mission cause they’re precious, and if one is lost, it’s irreplaceable.” Life is irreplaceable too. Life is more irreplaceable. A stone is a story recorded, and a person would live a thousand more stories than are in a damn rock if they didn’t get snuffed out because they wandered into the wrong fucking tunnel at the wrong time. Yes it’s a distraction. It’s a fucking good one because we need it to end. I don’t frankly give a shit about telling stories if we’re doing that instead of stopping a fucking mass murderer. How many families are out there grieving right now? How many pairs of boots by the door that aren’t gonna get worn again? How many mugs left out on the counter cause they were gonna finish their tea when they got back? How many last words that no one knew were gonna be the last? How many more of these are there gonna be? How many more kids who said something pissy to their dad before work, and now have to sit with that being their last words forever? How many parents wondering what they could’ve done to see their kid one last time? How many unfinished books and uneaten dinners and unconfessed feelings and unmade beds and lonely dogs who don’t know why their owner isn’t here to pet them no more? What good is spreading fucking light when we’re letting this happen? Why do we even fucking adventure if it’s not to perserve the lives we can. I know what I’ve done. I know what I deserve. So I know how important it is to put lives and hearts first. And I know that by our inactions, well, it’s not our fault they’re dead in full, but it sure as fuck should weigh on our hearts. It should weigh on our consciousness, why didn’t we put these people first? Cause I’ll tell you one thing for fucking sure, they ain’t first if we try once, fail but suffer no real casualties, and decided it’s not worth trying again. We’re close. We’re so fucking close to winning. We can do it, I know we can, we have the skill, the knowledge, the means. But is it gonna have to be one of us to take this personal enough to finish it? One of our families who’s gonna be gutted forever? I know I give Eto a lot of shit, but you know what? I’m glad my wife walks around this city with a bodyguard, even if she does fight better than him. Because we haven’t done much at all to make it a safer, less evil place. And I couldn’t live with myself if she was the next one to go. I’m aching to know how it feels to know you did the right thing and won. I want us all to feel that. We can’t bring anyone back. We could’ve stopped that bitch, and we didn’t, twice. And we can’t bring back the people who died in the subsequent time. We can’t do anything to make all the hundreds of people who just lost someone ok. We can’t do one thing. We can’t scrape the spirit matter off a blade and send these people back through the reincarnation cycle- they’re gone. And if we had done better, maybe some of them wouldn’t be. It would be cowardly, it would be irresponsible, it would be fucking impossible to call ourselves “good” and “on the side of the court of light” if we didn’t try our absolute fucking hardest to stop this. Can’t plant flowers till you rip out the fucking weeds. Can’t seed save when there are no fucking seeds to save. Can’t raise a baby if I know this is what might happen to it. Next moon. We’ve gotta do better.