#evenrest

@evenrest !!

               @evenrest ; drinking in the grove was fab.

                    There is a variety of torture to discuss here.                                                  ————————————     The most obvious choice would be torture used as a weapon, a means to get to an end. There’s no doubt that Keenmourn here dips his hands into foul work — he has never proclaimed himself ever clean — and the result of such is to deal with those who threaten his work and his success directly. This is never the initial route chosen, not unless the offense is supreme. His own view on it is a necessary tool, with no question that it’s foul and horrid, but when the results outweigh his own muddy morality on that note the option to take is obvious.      Perhaps in earlier years he had done the work himself — and oh that would have been messy and poor work indeed. His strengths aren’t in torture, for his own understanding of it involves knives and time, and the outcome rarely proved to be all that fruitful. His means of dealing with it now is to delegate to those with special skills honed in the art, where he needn’t plow his way through it so unprofessionally. This doesn’t absolve him of the blame, though, for it’s still his decision that brings it about.      As penitence for such, the Head does what he can to be present in those moments. While he can make the decision to proceed with interrogations, it doesn’t mean it does not upset him still.                                                  ————————————                    — but let us touch on a nicer topic, as to what the word means personally to him outside of that prior scope.     To him, it is to be so near to something without fully controlling it. Be it a goal, an object, even a person. True torture is to allow Braern near the thing, close enough to slide his hands over it, to palm the source of his fixed attention enough that he could feel something near to satisfaction before denying him that end. It is not truly his, and his to claim, until he’s able to sink his teeth into it, and anything up until that point is a tease to draw out his attention and tension longer.     It’s not the dangling of bait that is torturous, but the false hope of attaining such. To taste what is close enough without him being able to mark it as his own. There is no grander frustration or annoyance.     Still, given that, Braern works remarkably well under this sort of torture, to some level he even enjoys it. A streak of self-masochism buries itself there, where that taut coil of resentment burns within his chest in a manner he rather likes in small doses. It links itself to a deeper understanding that he enjoys a challenge, and not when one gives up too easily.

          The gods do not sit idle with their hands empty, and if Braern is to mold himself into such an image, then he will not either. He has no luxury of endless time unraveling as a spool at his fingertips —— his thread is taut, wound through obligations and responsibilities. What is left is a mantle woven by his own accord, the yoke on his shoulders by his own design, and Braern does not look upon that with any regret. When it comes to business he is at fault for how the tides ebb and flow, his own personal livelihood so intermingled with it that there is no way to easily untangle the knot unless it is severed. Structure brings him peace, it gives him focus, and it puts to rest whatever plaguing worries lap at the shores of his mind.