TALES FROM FAREWENDEN: THIS ONE CONVERSATION IS BASICALLY THE WHOLE POINT OF THE ENTIRE BOOK
“Oh, you’re a bad person, are you? And you just resign yourself to it, of course. You’re a bad person, and you’re too lazy to try to be anything else. Coward.”
Brom spat the word at him with a greater amount of visceral, withering scorn than he’d ever managed to drum up over the course of his whole life before that point, but Warrock, having been the target of many dozens of lifetimes’ worth of scorn for most of his years, remained wholly unimpressed.
“And what d’you think you are?” he sneered, his voice heavy with disdain. “A good person? Or are you one of those soppy teat-suckers who thinks everyone is naturally good inside? That is what you think, isn’t it? Everyone is good at heart, and bad people are just good people who need help. You and those stuffy Knights, too. You ridiculous child,” he growled. “The world isn’t like your flowery bedtime stories. You need to grow up.”
The words stung every bit as much as they were no doubt supposed to, Warrock knowing full well by then how often Brom worried about being too soft and inexperienced, too sheltered in his upbringing to be out in the world as he was, and Brom bristled and scowled at him for the all too transparent attempt to cut him down.
“You don’t get it, do you,” he hissed, fully at the end of his tether. “Good isn’t something that you are, it’s something that you do, that you have to choose! And you have to keep choosing to do it! It never becomes something that you can just… just be and forget about! It’s work! You have to work at it!”
“So what,” scoffed Warrock, almost laughing. “There are no good or bad people? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I know you think you’ve caught me out, saying that,” Brom replied, tersely. “But you’ve fairly well hit the nail on the head. There are no good or bad people. Just people who choose to do good or bad things. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah. That’s all.”
Folding his arms across his thick, broad chest as he leaned back in his seat, Warrock cocked his head quizzically at the young man across the fire from him, his grizzled face twisting this way and that while he mulled the idea over. Eventually, after some long moments of thought, he fixed Brom with a stare.
“... What’s the point in trying, then?” he asked, finally. “If you’re never gonna be a good person, no matter what you do?”
“Well,” said Brom, “It’s not about you, is it.”
“Is it not?”
Brom shook his head.
“No, of course not. You don’t do good things because you expect anything. You do good just because it needs doing, not because you’re trying to… I don’t know, win a prize that you can wave around at people afterwards. It’s not about you.”
“So you don’t wanna be a good person, then?”
“I want to be a person who does good things.”
“Is that not the same thing?”
“No.”
A lengthy silence followed, broken only by the gentle crackling of the campfire and the distant calls of nighttime birds, searching for each other under a vast, starlit sky. Such an enormous, open expanse, stretching out over the whole world, further than the eye can see, Brom thought. And yet, still a trifling thing compared to the gulf of difference between himself and the ruthless, hard-nosed Warrock.
“That’s a surprise to me,” Warrock remarked, after another pause for thought. “That someone like you wouldn’t wanna be a good person.”
“Oh, come on,” quipped Brom, with the barest hint of a grin. “Have you ever met someone who thinks themselves a ‘good person’? They’re the most annoying people in the world!”
At that, Warrock really did laugh.
“T’Maug’s leaky left tit,” he chuckled. “They really are, aren’t they.”
“And the worst thing about them,” said Brom, “Is that they’ll do awful things, and they’ll go, ‘Oh, but I’m a good person, so obviously this awful thing I’ve just done is good, actually, because I did it on account of my good morals and how good I am!’”
“Oh, it does get tiresome, doesn’t it. See me,” said Warrock, thumbing his chest, “I can be honest about it, at least, when I do awful things. I know that I’m, ahem, that I’m choosing to do bad things, as you’d say.”
“Yeah,” sighed Brom, frowning. “They’re cowards for not wanting to think too hard about what they’re doing or why and for never getting to grips with how selfish they really are. You’re a coward for completely different reasons.”
