@goldencups
Continued from here
It was funny how a simple drop of words could make you feel.
Just a few sentences could throw someone into joy, despair, ecstasy… A small arrangement of syllables could change someone’s day, or sometimes, their entire life. There was so much power in words.
An arrangement of six little words provoked rage in a particular prince.
He should learn to lie better? Asriel Fl͎͔͐o̵̝ͮẉ́᷃e̹̾͘ỳ͈̖̆́᷁̇ Dreemurr was a bad liar? His fists clenched, he felt magic balling up in his fists. He felt the need to call vines out of the earth, rippling to the surface and squeezing the life from his victims, one HP at a time.
Adults, adults, why were they so stupid? He could destroy everyone, everything, and he’d kept that secret hidden with an expertise perfected over centuries. Even in coming to the City, swearing he planned on being a ‘better person’, he had to hide what he had done. Asriel was deceitful every single day of his existence; and this pathetic human had the nerve to tell himhe needed to learn to lie better? He could kill everyone they loved and he would still play his little act.
*(He felt so empty. Nothing but the anger persisted. The need to SURVIVE. The need to ACT.
Asriel tied his fists behind his back and aimed his gaze at the ground. It was almost laughable. They really were an IDIOT. When he looked up, his lip was curled in a short apology. An act that anyone would fall for, and they had. They’d fallen for it for lifetimes.
“O-Oh, Golly… I’m sorry! I’m not used to lying! Guess I’m not very good at it, huh?”
The half-elf noticed.
He’d spent decades dealing with the anger of humans. Decades at the whims of their emotions. Decades handling liars, thieves, backstabbers, and the nuances between them.
He’d learned what to watch for, the tells that betrayed a person’s thoughts, and he’d learned that it wasn’t just humans that expressed them.
On top of that, he had committed to perfecting his own deceit--a necessary tool to trick humans into believing he was innocent and subservient, even when his rage boiled.
So when he watched the other’s reaction to his words, the clenched fist and the slightest of twitches, he could tell right away what they truly thought.
He’d made them really angry, as if he’d insulted a skill they’d perfected all of their life. It told him a lot about the kind of person he’d run into. Even more deductions came from the second immediate reaction. They contained their anger quickly, and within a moment it was replaced by what Mithos assumed was a facade; bashful, shy, apologetic. The half-elf scratched his head at the irony.
“Eheh...” it was a nervous sounding laugh, “N-no, I should be the one apologizing... You actually lie a lot, don’t you? I didn’t mean to offend...”
It was the truth, his intention had never been to offend anyone, just offer advice after witnessing what he now realized was an intentionally bad lie--maybe calling out their lie wasn’t the best way to apologize for calling them a bad liar, though...