I think about Pyrrha Dve and I want to scream a little. Imagine, being eaten by your best friend and then living in the back of his mind and in his body for thousands of years, during which you meet a beautiful woman hellbent on your destruction and let yourself fall in love, in fact you're ready to raise her daughter if she'd ask you to, but you and your best friend have to kill her. You spend 19 years thinking you killed your own child along with the love of your life, 19 years of guilt and grief. Your love comes back to you, you find out the child was never even yours and your love dies again. So does your best friend, and now you're stuck in his body without him. Then fast forward to Nona the ninth, you finally get the domestic bliss you've been waiting for in the form of Nona (a different person in the body that you spent a year watching your best friend try to kill) and Camilla (another one of devotion's casualties) and Palamedes (inhabiting the body of his best friend, just like you did for so many long years). And you make breakfast for them, and you do Nona's hair before she goes to school and you give her tons of adorable nicknames and you walk to work with Camilla and look for radio stations with music on them because Nona likes them. You bicker with the Warden over what food to buy, you roll your eyes with affection when they try and get you to stop smoking cigarettes. Sometimes, you talk to Warden and Camilla about moving to a half flipped moon, together with Nona, and living off the land; teaching them to farm, teaching them to wait. You're so close to the life you've wanted for so long. But slowly you can see Camilla, a woman you don't quite love but could see yourself loving in the future, get more and more lost in Palamedes, losing herself to her necromancer. And you see them both fall victim to that total loss of self and codependancy that you saw so many of your old comrades fall too, and you lose them both. Its completely done, and it's not something that can be undone, and you know they're never coming back. Now they're a stranger in a body you recognise, in a body you almost built a life with. And then there's Gideon, the child of the woman you loved, the child you might’ve raised in another universe, being the saddest girl in the world and a reanimated corpse, a puppet for the empire that killed her (and yeah, you guessed it! She died for her necromancer too). And then, just when you think it can't get any worse, there goes Nona. Nona, who loved being alive and loved to love things just for the sake of loving things, who just wanted a birthday with 10 dogs and her friends from school, literally dies in your arms. She falls apart while you hold her and is now in the unrecognisable body of someone who is the pinnacle of cavaliers being mistreated. They're all gone, but Pyrrha is still there, right where they left her. She remembers everything, she remembers that she was happy, if only for 6 months.
