Silver Moraine chase

he listened, as he always did, weighing her words with the careful precision of a man who had spent his life carrying the burdens of legacy and expectation.
tartok.
the way she spoke of it was reverent—more than a name, more than a claim. a force, a way of being, something that demanded absolute devotion. it was not unlike what he had built here, in the frost and ice of darukaal. his wolves, too, had become something greater than themselves, forged in the crucible of hardship.
he exhaled, gaze drifting across the valley, the land that had come to define him as much as he had shaped it.
i wish i thought like you, he admitted, though his voice was not regretful. it was simply the truth. there was something freeing in the way she spoke, the way she carried herself untethered by the past. as if she had cut herself loose from all that came before, unburdened by anything but the future she willed into being.
faust, for all his strength, could not do the same.
but i hold much from the past.
his name, the weight of it—one he had spent years trying to outrun, to erase, only to realize that no matter how far he went, it clung to him like a second skin. his father had tainted it, had shaped it into something that dripped with cruelty and tyranny, but it had been faust who reforged it. his wolves did not fear it. they followed it.
some things, you cannot give up, he said, finally. his name was his own now, no longer his father’s. no longer a curse.
he glanced at her then, searching, wondering if she could understand. if tartok could be what she said it was, and still allow for something like him—something old and bloodstained and unwilling to let go.