Barovia V #1 Some Bridge Along That River

I never knew what to expect when travelling with Him. There were days He was quiet and focused, when nothing in the world could pull His attention from the road ahead. Other days it was as though He could not sit still in His own skin, chasing one thought after another as if they fell out of His head faster than He could follow them. The day He bowed his head to an undead king, and very nearly did not rise again, belonged to the former kind of day. He had been silent since dawn, turning something over behind His eyes, and I remember thinking that silence was the surest sign He had already made up His mind about something I would not like. The feigned confusion only guaranteed it for me.

The undead paladins stood there in armour gone the colour of old rivers. They did not look up as we entered, and did not look up as He knelt among them, and did not look up even as their king rose from his throne to pronounce, in a voice like a door closing, that the traveller had been summoned to answer for the living. That his death would be a mercy compared to what living men would one day do to the world in his name. 

I still cannot decide whether He walked into that castle believing they would hear Him, or whether some deeper part of Him already knew they would not, and went anyway. He was like that, in those early days. Hope was not a conclusion He arrived at after weighing the evidence, it was the ground He stood on before the weighing had even begun. It served Him well more often than it should have. It nearly did not, that day.

I will not pretend I understood that I was witnessing anything but a man's foolishness catching up to him at last. It was only afterward, long afterward, after so much else had happened, after His name had outgrown Him and outgrown me, that I came to think He had walked in there already knowing what it would cost, and had judged the cost worth paying.

- Excerpt from In the Shadows of Lightbringer

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