The Weight of Legacy

Veit didn’t deign to show up for the rest of the month. That was just fine with her, Malwine reasoned. With as high as tensions had been, if they didn’t take a break from each other, either might have said or done something they’d actually regret.

Not that all that rationalizing of it helped with her anger. She hadn’t had the time to parse the details, then, and she certainly didn’t have the full picture still, but by now, Malwine had a general idea of just what had set Veit off.

She’d known he was widowed, and while she hadn’t really cared to consider the implications of that, him having a mortal wife made sense. A mortal wife who was apparently part troll.

Malwine had little to no interest in unpacking that at the moment. For now, the knowledge that this woman—‘Pola’—had been part troll was enough for her to connect the remaining dots. She’d been mortal, and Forgers would not help extend her life, because she wasn’t entirely human.

Even in another world you really can’t avoid that interspecies discrimination… Granted, the widow’s Earth had nothing other than humans, but they’d excelled at fighting among themselves just as fiercely. Discrimination against non-humans had been limited to fiction and to court cases about button-pressing dogs who demanded better rights, but the concept was close enough.

Veit hated Forgers for a reason. Malwine wouldn’t forget his reactions anytime soon… but she understood. Somewhere within, in the part of her that had been the widow—a far more spiteful person than she believed the forester to be—she understood.

It’d simply take a whole lot more than understanding for her to forgive him in full.

Another topic she’d benefited from alone time with was the whole… well. The thing with the god. Malwine found she was a little bit worried about how little she cared. Between the normalization of Devils and the widow’s predispositions, the knowledge that she’d spoken to—yelled at!—a deity was little more than a footnote she could see herself bragging about down the line. Much further down the line.

Maybe it was her own history with the fell—or more accurately, her history of being impacted by her ancestors’ history with the fell—but Malwine would have been far more concerned had she learned she’d communicated with some trickster fey or the like.

If anyone had to worry about the deity, it was Anselm.

I wonder if Veit will actually investigate that. The lines between his actual duties and the things he did because he felt like it were clearly blurry, and she feared he might renege on that promise if it wasn’t truly something required of him, now.

She’d at least take the forester at his word on the suggestion that she steer clear of the deity, though. Avoiding the trial should have been all that took, but Malwine knew herself well enough to know she’d probably do something stupid if given the chance to.

The locket and his sudden desire to have it back. His hidden Status Effects. That refusal to have whatever ailed him checked out, which honestly went past any impressions of him wanting to keep his privacy, and sailed right into suspicious territory.

If she wanted excuses to question her uncle, Malwine had those aplenty.

But for now, that advice that she should be careful actually held her back.

For now.

Speaking of things Veit had told her not to do… Malwine had to admit the technique was quite effective.

Him expressing how he expected her to just ignore him and do something stupid with [Earthless Glory] was actually making her avoid playing around with it—she wasn’t about to prove him right, even if she had found the warnings reasonable enough as it was.

While he’d kept things relatively vague, the process he described—that of outright splitting his consciousness—sounded terrifying. Could it be powerful? Probably.

But just as the widow had been, she was reckless. Not brave. Malwine would take no risks with something she doubted she could bullshit her way out of—a perfectly justified stance.

Or so she told herself.

Unfortunately for her, the matter of [Earthless Glory] and the mechanics it may or may not have been tied to had become the pink elephant in the room. Intentionally training that Skill without thinking about how she would evolve it—but not right now!—was a Sisyphean task, and it didn’t help that it was leveling up at a snail’s pace.

Just like [The Way of the Clave].

The matter of imbalanced categories had been easier to ignore before she had Skills she could watch basically freezing before her eyes. [Shieldwork]’s relatively decent growth pace had lulled her into a false sense of security. Malwine had started to think any consequences from that would be mere inconveniences, not insurmountable obstacles, even after Veit had warned her.

Her <Soul> Class had a problem with it, and Malwine had had a suspect for a while now. [Enforced Longevity] would have been easy to blame, with everything her grandfather and young uncle had told her about imbalanced categories.