Malakar's viewpoint.
In the days following my punishment, confined to quarters within my master's grey realm under considerably closer supervision than I had experienced in decades, I found myself turning over memories I had not permitted myself to examine closely in a very long time — memories of who, and what, I had been before three centuries of service reshaped me into the Grey Sovereign's faithful instrument.
I had been human, once. That much I had never forgotten, though the specific details of that mortal life had grown increasingly distant and fragmentary across three hundred years of service in a realm where time moved strangely and memory itself seemed to erode beneath the weight of my binding's constant presence.
I remembered a village, smaller even than Valoria, nestled somewhere in a kingdom that had likely long since crumbled into whatever successor states now occupied this continent. I remembered a family — a wife, I thought, though her face had blurred beyond recognition, and children whose number I could no longer confidently recall. I remembered, with considerably more clarity than I wished I still possessed, the night the Grey Sovereign's forces first came to that village, in the earliest days of his exile, seeking mortal servants desperate or foolish enough to bind themselves to a fallen god's service in exchange for power sufficient to survive whatever chaos his banishment had unleashed across that region.
I remembered volunteering. Not out of ambition, not out of any grand desire for power, but out of the desperate, practical calculation of a man watching his family starve through a famine that the Grey Sovereign's own arrival, and the chaos surrounding it, had directly caused. I remembered believing, with the naive certainty of someone who had never before encountered a being of genuine cosmic power, that his cause — vague, unexplained, framed only in terms of a great injustice done to him by beings who considered themselves beyond mortal judgment — sounded considerably more righteous than the alternative of watching everyone I loved slowly die of hunger.
I did not remember, with any clarity, what happened to that family after I accepted the binding. I suspected, turning the fragmentary memory over with a dread I had spent three centuries avoiding, that I did not remember because some aspect of the binding itself had deliberately, mercifully, or perhaps simply efficiently, erased whatever had happened to spare me the burden of that specific grief while I served.
It was a horrifying realization, arriving considerably too late to change anything about the three centuries that had followed. I had traded my humanity, my family, and quite possibly my own capacity for genuine memory, for a cause I had believed righteous and now recognized, with painful clarity, as something my master himself no longer seemed entirely certain justified the suffering it continued to demand of everyone caught beneath it.
I thought of Lukas Gigonos's offer — if there's ever a way to break that binding, I want you to know I'd help you — and felt something I had not permitted myself to feel in longer than I could accurately measure: genuine, fragile hope.
I did not know if such a thing was truly possible. Three centuries of the Grey Sovereign's careful, methodical binding had never once shown any sign of weakness or vulnerability, even during the worst of his own exile's early chaos. But I found myself, alone in my confined quarters, turning the possibility over with a desperate, careful hope I had not allowed myself since the night I first bound myself to his service, believing, with all the naive certainty of a starving father, that I was choosing the righteous path.
Perhaps, I thought, this time, if any part of that hope proved justified, I might actually be right.