Chapter 561: The Will To Fight
"You did help more people," Ashlynn said as the vision of Milo standing before him faded away and the two were left alone in the desolate village. "If you keep going, if you don’t give up when Old Nan dies, then maybe you’ll see how much more you did. After all, things might be a bit worse here, but they’re much, much better in the other villages," she pointed out.
"But I still failed," Ollie said, shaking his head as he knelt in the dust. "I still failed my people."
"That happens sometimes," Ashlynn pointed out gently. "We do our best, we do everything we know how to do, and it still isn’t enough. We make mistakes, we jump to conclusions... we fight battles we shouldn’t have, and people die because of it," she said, speaking from painful experience as she placed a gentle hand on his shoulders.
"It’s okay to fail," Ashlynn said. "But now that you’ve tried helping the other villages and you’ve learned how hard it is to work on a bigger scale, to help even more people, are you content with what you’ve achieved? Is this a result you can accept?"
"No," Ollie said, shaking his head and blinking away the moisture that clouded his vision. Why was it that no matter how parched he was, no matter how chapped his lips or dry his throat became, his body always held enough moisture for tears? He’d sooner be done with them and save the water for more useful things.
"No, I can’t accept this," he said. "If you were standing here instead of me, the real you, then you’d have thought of dozens of things I haven’t thought of yet. You wouldn’t accept this defeat, I know you wouldn’t," he insisted. "So I need to try again. How many times can I try again?"
"You can try as often as you want," Ashlynn said. "But if you persist too long, your body will fail you, and the cypress seed within your chest will consume you. Sooner or later, you must accept that you have done your best and move on from what you have achieved with it. Already, you’re suffering from repeating this trial just three times. Are you sure that you’re up to a fourth?"
"I’m not giving up," Ollie said, pushing himself up from the dirt and standing firmly in front of the vision of Ashlynn. The sun overhead pounded down on them, and he briefly wondered if the heat had baked his brains to mush to be this stubborn,n but he refused to accept that this was the best he could do. "Let me try again."
"And what will you do differently if you try again?" Ashlynn asked. "How will this attempt be different than the last?"
"Help isn’t coming for any of the villages," Ollie said. "And nothing seems to be stopping the Inquisition from punishing innocent people with their ’second sun.’ So, if I can’t save the villagers by outlasting the Inquisition, the only thing I can do is take the fight to the Inquisition and purge the sun from the night sky."
"Does that mean you no longer wish to face this trial as a witch?" Ashlynn asked, summoning a familiar-looking suit of armor in the dark midnight blue and black of the Vale of Mists. "Do you want to prove that you can beat this trial as a knight?"