Moonspear heavy as heartbreak

He listened as she told her tale, the details filling themselves in from the snippets that she had passed along to him here and there. A puff left him as she mentioned the cannibal, but that only ruffled him slightly—it was a wonder there weren't more wandering the countryside, left over from the famine that now seemed an eon behind them.

But the fighting, while it had not made sense to him before, suddenly did.

He understood the fear that she had, though he did not share the emotion.

"I can't say I wouldn't have intervened myself, had I been there." To an extent, he almost regretted not being there, but chances were it would not have ended as well as it had. Perhaps it was best that they were angry with her, good that they were still alive, but he felt a painful course of anger arise in him. Somewhere along the way, rationale had gone out of the window, and he could only point the blame towards their collective upbringing that still lingered. A callback to things better left in the past, things he had hoped would be. The very things he wanted to spare his children from and yet had not.

"But you did what you thought best at the time. Arcturus had the right to defend himself and his claim, but he should have known you would have backed him up. That both of us would have. Revui does not have the right to come in here and make claims as he did—this isn't your father's reign any more. It's ours," he explained pointedly. "I don't care that he comes and goes from here because it's his home and will always be, but that's all it is. We are more than just flashy sets of teeth and arrogance now."

He hadn't forgotten that pride went before a fall.