( 🐐 ) : what has your muse achieved just to prove they could? / ( 🐻 ) : what pushes your muse from gentleness into something dangerous?
( 🐐 ) what has your muse achieved just to prove they could ?
she’s never done anything grand. nothing that moves armies or shifts the fate of a house. but she did decide, once, that she would be the best at the high harp in all of gulltown, not because anyone expected it of her, only because her aunt laughed and said it was too difficult to be played properly. so she practiced. every afternoon. until her fingers ached and the notes carried clean and certain through the room. she approaches other things the same way. finishing the embroidering of her silks even when there is no urgency. committing maps and courtly lineages to memory so she will never falter at table. learning precisely how long to hold a smiled. painting a watercolor landscape simply to see if she can capture the light as it truly is. these are not victories. they do not alter anything beyond her immediate world. but to her, they matter. they are proof that she is capable. that if she turns herself toward something gentle and beautiful, she master it.
( 🐻 ) what pushes your muse from gentleness into something dangerous ?
she is gentle by instinct. she has always preferred to believe that sharpness is accidental, that most unkindness is merely clumsy phrasing. a patronizing tone, a careless remark — she will grant it more grace than it perhaps deserves. but undeniable, deliberate unkindness is different. cruelty toward someone who cannot answer: a woman being dismissed as though she were unimportant. a child corrected too sharply for something small. a lord speaking of the smallfolk as if they were pawns on a board, and not people placed under his protection. it unsettles her in a way that lingers. it feels wrong. as though someone has stepped outside the part they were meant to play. that is when she grows quiet. once she decides someone is not what they ought to be, she stops treating them as though they are. permanently. her warmth recedes. her courtesy remains but it becomes precise. measured. deliberate.