rereading aurora and I noticed something horrible in 1.21.5
VD says that he "knew [Erin's] SELFISHNESS" would serve him well. regarding Erin's willingness to die.
Erin has an ego, but he's not self-aggrandizing -- like almost everyone else in this group, he's got plenty of self-destruction to go around as long as it's to protect the people he cares about. When he first got possessed, if he had died in the Caves nobody would have known what happened to him. Everyone he cared about was far far away, where they would be safe and he could just disappear without consequences to save them all.
Now, though, he has a team. If he died here, not only his new friends but his SISTER would find him. In fact, he wouldn't even be able to try without Tess catching on and stopping him from whatever he tried to do.
And that is selfish, to him. We don't know exactly what happened, but he feels responsible for "forcing" Tess to stay when he was a child. He thinks he's at fault for most things, in fact, because he thinks that having power means that he should be able to keep everyone completely safe, even when that's not actually possible or they themselves are refusing to stay protected. This guy has so much pain and I want to wring it out of him like a towel
waaaaaa there's so many layers I love it
