Still in hell with the cold open beat with Thjazi versus Azune's private leveling up moment.
Thjazi Fang, years ago, talking to Thimble. He mentions a twenty-year-old hanged with the cadre of Falconer vets, saying he was too young, he couldn't possibly be a soldier of that war.
Azune was twelve years old when Thjazi brought him into the Torn Banner. We got to see Azune, a mere fifteen years, nearly dying in a battlefield. When Azune and Thjazi first met, Thjazi asked him, "Soldier, how old are you?" Azune didn't tell him an age. Did he ever tell him? Or was that where the curiosity ended once Thjazi had him fed and ready to work?
In the present, Azune holds an intervention with himself. One that lays bare all the crises of identity, the faults in his idol and how so much of his raising was simply sculpting Azune into the most useful possible thing to Thjazi’s cause, how that same epiphany of his robbed selfhood doubles back into an acceptance of the need to alter himself, to become different people to those who need specific characters to interact with to get things done. How in the midst of this he cracks open a new power that allows him to shapeshift as needed. His first truly intentional shift is into a hypothetical version of himself as he might have been, were he really Thjazi Fang’s son. It’s how he crawls into bed.
If the campaign's present is the year 71, then in the flashback's year of 63, Azune would be nineteen years old going on twenty.
Somewhere in the city, as Thjazi watches a young man hang with the Falconers he actually recognizes, there is another young man tirelessly at work. Diligently honing himself, preparing to graft on the costume of a new identity to better accommodate Thjazi Fang and a sea of others. A boy completing the metamorphosis that began at the age of twelve, transforming from a person to a prop. A weapon. A tool. This for the man who, we can now safely assume, presented himself as a father figure the same way he presented a hundred other faces to hundreds of other people to gain the best results for the cause. Azune Nayar, a soldier at twelve. Never given to Halandil Fang’s care until he was at least sixteen years old. Why waste another able willing body for the war?
Azune’s greatest mantra is to remember. His greatest fear to be forgotten. All his power and purpose beyond the factor of his usefulness to others is memory. Even in that private flash of recognition for the unhealthy angle of his relationship with Thjazi Fang, he covets and coddles the memory of that man. He understands why he was how he was, why he did what he did. And he must emulate some of that himself now, if more cleverly, less callously. His sole fantasy worn on his face: I wish I’d really been your son.
(The way Hal and his kids were really your family in a way I never was or would be. They weren’t expendable. They were precious, and so kept out of the loop. Away from danger. Unlike others. I know what I am. What I’ve always been and always will be. And it isn’t one of them. But it’s nice to pretend.)
A boy who is a man who is neither is sanding off whatever might be left of a future he might have wanted for himself, shelling himself in the character of the dutiful Arcane Marshal. A thing shaped like a person, there to serve the cause of a man who is not his father.
A short walk from the gallows, Thjazi shakes his head and gnaws his kebab.
“You see that young kid on the end? I mean, he couldn’t have fought in the Falconer’s Rebellion. He looked like he was twenty.”
How little did Thjazi remember about Azune Nayar beyond what that boy could do for him? How small a corner of Thjazi’s mind did he ever occupy in life? How much would his eyes have watered if the escape plan had worked and he’d heard days later that Lt. Nayar was hanged in his place?
How long after that would it be before he shook his head and picked up a snack on the street as consolation?
