( it is striking, for a moment, that— perhaps someone who had been closer to herian would feel differently. they had known each other well enough, had enjoyed an amiable professional relationship. herian had been comfortable enough to lean on her counsel, and she had been willing to offer it, albeit not without her own purpose.

yet: to speak with herian as she is now is less different than that had been than she might have expected. the difference must be stark, within, yet from the outside... well, an argument against the way she had once attempted to smother her own feelings beneath a framework of rules that should have protected her from them.

it is not a new idea to her. the betrayal of coming to understand that the rules were not real, and that she was never safe. )

Honour offered you rules for the world, ( she says, ) and assured you that to follow them would protect you from that. A worse betrayal, then, and a worse shame that they did not, and could not; I imagine it must have been difficult not to see the flaw in yourself, and not in the tenets that you wished to uphold.

( she hasn't forgotten, for instance, herian's early loyalist leanings. or how difficult she knows it can be to lose those. )

Absolutes can only fail us, the way that a spirit cannot hold its shape when confronted with the complexities of our living. What you punished yourself for was your wholeness. A spirit can never err, in this way, and so it can never learn. It cannot bend, so it breaks. I don't believe that you share that quality.