A Moment of Conversation

Promises. Words that can either be as strong as iron, or flimsy as tissue paper. But for a son of the Storm Father, promises are a binding contract, so they are always to be made carefully. James sat in his room, looking at the paper rose sitting on his windowsill.
 
“Don’t break your promises she said. Everything is possible if you just take it.” He chuckled. “Only you could make someone on the verge of breaking stand up and bravely face the storm. Not because they must, but because they now want to. Lady, please make sure she never loses that gift, for the world would be much poorer without it.”
 
Looking out as the sunlight glimmers off the water of the port, James lets his mind wander, trying to find paths that might not yet exist. “I’m going to get hurt more, a lot more. They’re going to chip away pieces of me, make me bleed out a little bit here, a bit there. But I can’t let them do it to all of me. I won’t. They can have their pound of flesh, if it gets me closer to getting out, but they can’t have all of me. She has a part of me that they can’t take away.”
 
James smiled, a bit sadly at a memory, and a thought. “You’d only have been walking around for a little while, if you’d met me when I needed this advice the first time, but maybe someone like you could have been there. Maybe they could have helped me from walking the bloody path I did. But no one was there. No one to blame but yourself James. But also, you need to stop wasting time. Yes, you’re in a bad spot with bad people who are lending you to worse ones. And maybe you do deserve some of that. But even so, that’s only on you. You’re not helping right the wrongs you made. You’re not making things better. Listen, I know you’re scared. I know every time you go out there and see all those masks it bothers you. I know when you see ones that look so like the ones they were wearing, before becoming marked by blood, that you flinch. And I know your heart races and tells you to run when you see those masks on obvious nobles. But you’ve still got to get out there. You being alone, cutting yourself off, flinching every five seconds, that’s how they kill you, kill your soul. And you promised to two people now, that you’re not going to let that happen, right?”
 
“Right. I can’t let them win. I can’t break my promises.”
 
James picked up the paper rose and lightly kissed it, before putting it back on the sill. Last night was difficult, and things are only going to get harder. But as he remembered the feel of her lips on his, he knows that things will get easier and that it’s worth going on, no matter the pain.