Madi's lovely lovely face fills me with such deep fondness and despair. She's, what—like 22, 23 at most? Her family was enslaved by the Guthries—a situation she could only escape with her mother as a result of her island being subject to the brutality of Spanish pillaging. Confined to a "safe haven" and separated from her father most of her life, trained and educated to be a competent leader to her people since childhood, people who weathered unbearable suffering that she may not have experienced firsthand, but is familiar with and at the danger of being exposed to at any given moment. She has been raised, justifiably, to limit hope and exercise extreme caution, but she can't quite abandon her wish for something better—the prospect of liberation in great masses, of the kind of freedom that is incontrovertible and stark in the eyes of all who are subjugated and all the bystanders and oppressors alike. Of real security, not a shadow of it. Everything and everyone around her has taught her to think it unattainable, but she knows. Intellectually, she knows it can be achieved. And her blood is warm enough and young enough to not let her forget. Then entirely by chance, and all in a blur, she loses her father and with him goes the true understanding she had only just begun to receive, as well as their hard-won veil of security, and she finds herself at the helm of a revolution that could shake the foundations of civilisation itself. She believes in it. She'd give up her life for it and she would not ever consider it too great a sacrifice. She has ventured into this endeavour with a man she grows to love, and it's the first time she has ever loved someone like this, and this man has given her little reason to think that his investment in this revolution is of a different nature than hers. She doesn't know that it will matter. At a point, she even finds her strongest and most audacious partner in somebody she'd had good cause to be wary of. She's aligned with him and they give each other hope. She isn't deluded about any aspect of what the future might bring. She knows failure lurks at every corner, she knows what they are trying to do is damn near impossible, and she knows there will be loss to endure. All of it, including her own life and her love's, is secondary to the possibility of freedom. There are voices she must answer to. She'll burn for them and there's not a soul who doesn't realise it. Especially not the man she loves and chooses to trust and doesn't suspect is a selfish coward who sneaks around like a thief in the night and kills the fire she set, all in the name of protecting her in a way she knows to be meaningless
