The Weight of Legacy

From the moment she’d opened her mouth, Malwine regretted having asked. She knew all too well that if she’d waited a moment longer, she’d have backed out once again—perhaps it would have been for the best if she had.

“Of all the things you’ve asked… That is a peculiar question,” Veit noted dryly. He seemed neither annoyed nor confused, features twisting with a level of blatant pensiveness that was very much unlike him. “That is not a category most would think about, in no small part given how it is absent from the Visible Status Effects panel when not in use.”

“Well, I—”

“Read about it?” the forester asked. His eyes were moving rapidly as his scowl deepened, gears clearly turning in his head.

All at once, Malwine felt very stupid. She’d glossed over the likelihood of him suspecting why she asked when she’d weighed the pros and cons of the choice. Once she’d gotten it into her head that she was wasting an opportunity by not consulting this with him, she’d been at war with herself. Trying to push forward before she talked herself out of it had taken precedence over everything else.

Refusing to meet his gaze, Malwine sighed.

“Is this about your mother?” Veit asked, eyeing her. She didn’t have to look up to get the impression that he was being a bit judgmental.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” she muttered, her exhaustion forgotten as she tried to think of an out, all while knowing there probably wasn’t one.

To her surprise, his next words weren’t just a demand that she explain. “Would it be harmful your mother, you, or your family if we were to discuss this?”

Bewildered, Malwine finally turned to him. Her immediate reaction would have been to say ‘no’, but should she? Any urge to lie would have been born of her desire to avoid the conversation, not out of any true justification. Being honest about it might be worth it, though she genuinely hadn’t expected him to react like this. He’d seen through her so quickly—goddammit, Veit, why can’t you be a bit slower on the uptake?—yet unlike when she’d accidentally outed herself as a Forger, he didn’t seem angry in the slightest.

If she hadn’t built this image in her head of him being this grumpy old man she could spend her time annoying, she would have believed he looked genuinely concerned for once. As if he were… Not someone she had a deal with, suddenly worried about whether it’d be fulfilled, but someone whose student said something that concerned them and they were trying to get to the bottom of it.

“No, not quite,” Malwine shook her head. “At least I don’t think so.”

“Is this about your mother, then?” Veit seemed to take her answer as permission to repeat his question. With a wave of his hand, glass manifested, shifting in a kaleidoscope of colors until a chair stood there, for him to sit on. He leaned forward, fingers intertwining as he clasped his hands.

Veit sat there. Waiting. During their first true argument, he hadn’t let her evade his questions in peace. The sight of him just waiting for her to say something was more jarring than any other reaction she could think of could have ever been.

Malwine scrambled to get her story straight—though thinking of it like that might have been inaccurate. For once, she technically didn’t have to lie about anything. Her connection to the widow, the matter of how some aspects of the system clearly still saw her as an otherworlder—none of that mattered. This all came from Beryl.

“It is,” she confirmed, glancing at the panel that was the source of all her problems ever. I’m not even exaggerating!, she insisted to herself.