Cricket Creek Bog A liar and a cheat, but I could be so much worse

You too? she asked, and this... this was not an answer he had expected, and he looked at her, ever thoughtful, and with the warming thread of empathy threatening to steal through his cautionary watch. He considered that she might be tricking him into a place of commonality, for such a connection often comforted, often pulled down the guards so carefully constructed in the name of self-protection. These things, they made smart wolves stupid. And stupidity was a thing Glaedwine could not afford to be.

But he wondered, too, if prejudice was simply an attribute spread across the minds of the sentient: to reject anything objectively different and uphold those arbitrary things that somehow made some more worthy, more loved, more desirable, than those who had been born a little less favourable than the mass.

These thoughts he kept however; he turned, rather, to the other most peculiar twist in this rather peculiar conversation they shared.

"I can imagine," he mused, paused, "You know, I've met a witch before." If one could truly call her that. @Whitney had been the furthest cry from anything like the devils the Fableists wove into their great and terrible tapestries of song, and he was wont to believe that this girl was no different than her. Powerless, but making truth of the ruse, perhaps to terrify, perhaps to charm, perhaps to exert some false control over a power that would never be hers. "What, pray you, will this blessing do? And who is so worthy to receive it?"