VEYL: First Campaign Thread

Harper hadn't moved through any of it. He'd kept writing about Mirana, every word spoken by her good friend. He held the drum soft under one hand and let the anger crack open around him without adding to it. Finished, he set the charcoal down and spoke once the others were done, not loudly, but in the way that made people stop and listen.

"She fed people for whatever they could spare. Lost money doing it but kept doing it anyway. She thought the little things fixed the world....Seeds...Roofs...Clean water." He looked up from the journal, his eyes moving from Rory's sword hand, over to Cork doing her best to stand tall, and over to Solya and her harp, but finally landing on Dorn. "She started every story with 'now, this may not be true, but.' She laughed at goats in strange places. She collected buttons because she thought they meant somebody passed through trying to hold themselves together." He let that sit......"I don't think a woman like that wants the last thing she hears to be us shouting over her."

He turned to Dorn, gentler now.

"It was your choice. It still is. Not Solya's, not the sword's. Yours. You knew her. You're the one who should decide how she goes. Whatever you choose, she won't be unmade. We have her now. All of her. She goes forward from here no matter what happens to the rest of tonight. "The choice is yours....let her linger until she's no longer Mirana, or grant her mercy while she still is."

He picked the drum back up, quiet, steady. A heartbeat under the argument. An invitation to bring it back down.