light of heart and stupid of countenance

It also means wearing things they might not approve of. Using accommodations that they might not think you need. Not falling for their guilt trips. Eating when you’re hungry, not when it suits them and their idea of your weight or health. Making your own friends instead of seeking the stamp of approval from them.

Of course, some parents are stricter than others, and some use abuse to keep you from expressing yourself. But do what you can, even if it seems small.

Otherwise, when your parents are no longer in the picture, you’ll try to find it somewhere else to get validation. A strict boss, an abusive partner, a selfish friend.

I think it'd be really funny if Eric was actually a younger brother. So, like, maybe he's a duke, actually, but he still gets the title of Prince. Travels the sea a lot, unlike a more landlocked heir. Hanging out at this summer seaside palace while the rest of the family is elsewhere for some reason.

10. In a gaudy temple. The fee was exorbitant for something most acolytes can do, but time was of the essence. The higher quality oil they anoint your face and shoulders with smells nice and the sun shines through a stained glass window that has your favorite color.

9. An inn where you've been sweating into the sheets of a rented bed for a few days. The revelry downstairs makes it difficult to hear what the old woman that freed you told your friends. But they look relieved to have you back and you're relieved to be back.

8. Out in a field, where the wild grasses still benefit from the blood that spilled there a lifetime ago. A spirit that looks like you, in a uniform you never wore, grasps your shoulders. You're told to hold tight as the spirit goes to find aid. They never return. You never tell what happened once the others notice your return.

7. Stuck in the middle of a crowd awaiting an execution. The conflict you felt about the punishment disappeared when the blade met the wood beneath. Around you, others blink and shake their heads as if just awaking, feeling the same release as you.

6. On a slab in a morgue. Your returned breath caused the mortuary assistant to drop her tools. The resulting clatter woke you up. She screamed, you fought to remove the sheet covering your face, and the mortician laughed at the both of you when they made it down the steps.

6. In the space that was once your childhood bedroom. It's not a room anymore, the walls fell away to nature or some other force. The metal skeleton of a bedframe gives a support structure to vining plants that drape around a stone carving of a rabbit. You forget what exactly you placed in front of the carving as you try to find your way back to the road.

5. On the field of combat, sounds of pain, exertion, and metal impacting leather and wood finally breaking through the ringing that's been drowning you for ages. The person you were preparing to swing your weapon at has an open hand extended to you. You take it and help them up.

4. At midnight, sitting in the dust of a rural crossroads intersection. Next to you sits an older man in a wrinkled suit. He glances over at you and smiles, like you're a pleasant surprise. With a chuckle, he claps your shoulder and uses it to push himself up to his feet. By the time you think to ask any questions, he's long gone.

3. In the arms of a stranger on a busy festival dance floor. You return to yourself for the first time you can recall as someone whose name you don't remember teaches you the steps to a dance you'll never forget. Music and laughter and spices and frying batter. The person that stumbles home in your shoes later that night is someone you've never been yet.

2. In the early hours before dawn, sitting in front of a headstone. It's not yours but it could have been. The person who rests under it still owes you money. You are finally realizing that you no longer feel like you would give up the rest of your possessions to bring them back. You can feel them laughing at you for taking so long to get to this point. You didn't bring flowers, but the small pile of plucked grass blades you made while talking to the headstone counts in the only way that matters.

It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.

No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---

Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.

The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?

No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.

Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.