There’s something in the air tonight. Maybe just the usual endgame jitters you still can’t shake, despite this being the tenth time you have been called to deliver justice upon whichever cause SHE feels deserves your ire this go around. Maybe it’s the knowledge that after all is said and done this could very well be the last time you ever see HER on this earth, and you can’t quite decide if this prospect delights or terrifies you.
But when you’ve lived this precious narrative nine, soon to be ten times over, you learn a thing or two about pacing. And this, this quiet? This moment where time stands still and the stars hold their breath as if to give you the chance to back out, to reconsider-
This is the AUTOSAVE at the peak of that hallowed and helical tower that begs the wise to return to their lives in the world below lest they face the dragon and die anonymous, or worse, prevail and be known as HERO forevermore.
You think you knew a HERO once. Your cousin beat the dragon, or so you like to believe. If he lost, well, he’d have just started at the beginning again. And Maker, you used to wait there every day.
oooooooof, YIKES, that’s all the time you have. You have a strict policy of limiting the daily tragic monologue to a 230 word count ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM. Can’t be getting too worked up about the ephemeral beauty of the bilunar reflection captured in the pool of your own tears, that somehow also represents how true peace is impossible and justice is unattainable by nature! Your universe quite literally abides by the genre of DARK FANTASY, and you don’t think KIRKWALL, let alone YOUR HEART could take it if you jumped on that bandwagon with anything resembling zeal. Or introspection. Or zealous introspection.
See, the only nice thing about your particular brand of TRPG, which is to say, Tactical Role-Playing Game or, if you prefer, Tolkien Rip-off’s Pathetic Gambit, is that where many DEVELOPERS chose to delineate the AVATAR’S (that’s you!!!) actions into those corresponding to some kind of moral binary, as the protagonist of 2011’s MOST MALIGNED SEQUELCULTEST CLASSIC, DRAGON AGE 2, you were always at liberty to take a third option: