At least once a fucking week I think about a line from the Misraaks lore entry in the Dreaming City lore book. These two opening paragraphs are great in their entirety but there's one line that always gets stuck in my head.
"She will twist and tear his arms from his body like she is shucking a fine, fat crab for dinner, and he will be glad of the slow, sick cracks and crunches of his bones."
There's such a sick sort of poetry to the line to me. The alliteration and sibilance, the perfectly placed commas, the honest brutality of the actions described. It makes me wonder when exactly his capture takes place in regards to the third and fourth entries from Above All Else, where Misraaks joins his mother's crew officially.
"I did not give her the satisfaction of hearing me scream." At the start of this entry he was thinking on all the ways he knew she loved him.
Even knowing all that he thinks she would have been satisfied to hear him scream. But I think it's fairly clear based on her reaction to his abandoning Rakis and Siviks on an asteroid in the fourth entry that she never wanted to have to teach him the worlds brutality, even after having no choice but to take it up herself.
She was still alive when he was captured by Sjur during the Reef Wars as a vandal. (Did she never get to see her son fully grown??) I feel like he must never have seen his mother again after that point, at least as far as I can tell. Destinypedia seems to imply that he took over as Captain of her crew after her death (on Inaaks' page) but they don't cite what lore that comes from and that seems like it would be odd to me?
Allying himself with the Awoken almost certainly seems like something she would have opposed at that point. It seems most likely to me that he left her crew then, and sometime after that is when he found Eido and took her in. I don't think the crew he had later on Titan was his mother's old crew since they were all House Dusk at the point afaik. He wasn't around when she was killed and didn't know for a long time so I think that all but confirms he didn't take over her crew.
I wonder if she knew he joined the Awoken, or if she thought he'd died in whatever battle he went missing in. But I don't think that if he returned she would have taken pleasure in shucking him like a fine, fat crab for dinner at all. But she would have done it.
I choose to think she'd have been proud of him for breaking the cycle if she knew where he'd end up: Kell of a house where eliksni have a chance to have gentle hands again. That he hadn't been ruined by the lessons in brutality that she was shamefully forced to give him so that he could survive. I find Inaaks to be such an interesting character. I wish we got to know a little more about her. I wish Above All Else was a longer lore book, because what we got from it was so damn good. If only it had more than four entries. But I'm biased... These parallel lines from Inaaks and Misraaks get me thinking every time I read it:
Fluency is straightforward, honest. But eloquence implies a greater understanding of the language learned. He became better at violence than her, and she was ashamed to have taught him so well. But in the end he managed to build a new future for the eliksni and that just really ties it all together for me. Without that history of violence to back his decision to not be violent (against the mind-open eliksni; against humanity), he wouldn't have been respected enough for it to stick, I think. At least among the eliksni. Something about wise men fearing the wrath of a gentle man. I dunno where that quote comes from but it fits Misraaks to me. He certainly wasn't always gentle, but he ended up choosing to be.
And it still cracks me up though that Misraaks calls House Judgment flesh-lovers in his mind when he first meets Sjur, considering he's arguably the biggest flesh-lover out of the eliksni we know in the lore after everything that happens. In a purely diplomatic sense, of course.
