thought a little too hard about the venerate and now i'm going to explode and blow up and die i think
what if you were promised you could unshackle the chains of fate, that you could fix things, and that every terrible means you need to use for your ends would - eventually, once and for all, when it's done and over with - be erased, and the only thing that would be left would be the victory. that everything could be fixed in the end, no matter how badly you have to break it now. if you could come home, not just victor, but hero and savior and with every cruelty and sacrifice repaired so that no one knows you've even done them, because in this world you haven't
what if it was you and yours, together, people you've known for longer than anone else who understand and who want what you want - people who get it, when no one else can, after how long it's been and how much you've done and how much you've traded and sacrificed and become for the one goal, when no one else could possibly understand. And then one of your number lost their mind and gave up on the perfect shining goal, and in only a hundred years or so - the blink of an eye, to you, immortals, around for thousands of years at the minimum - kills several of your number before you finally band together and put an end to it. When before, you were somewhere between friends and family. When, in spite of everything, you still are.
and with roadblocks in the way and stresses and hardships for a thousand years, you work at it, you try to get the things moving again. it takes a thousand years. and at the very end you find out you've been betrayed from the inside again, that your most dedicated member has changed his mind, or lost it, or both. frankly, definitely both. tal does not have his fucking mind together, half the series he's amnesiac and the other half he's a zealot unwilling to even consider peace with the people who have known him longer than half these societies have existed.
And then one by one, within less than a decade, the rest of your number are dead, and so is he. When the only constant in your lives across the millenia has been that you cannot die. And the world will never be fixed, if it ever even could have been.
anyway i'm going to go cry for eight million hours now.