Kinda having thoughts about Meritorious and Valkyrie right now, especially alt Meritorious. They're an interesting duo to me and nobody ever really talks about them.
From Meritorious's perspective, you meet a teenage girl in prison. She recognizes you, clearly sees you as a leader. She escapes, she comes back, there's a bit of back and forth for a while. And then she stops, and eventually you're free. One day she comes back, but you only hear about it from her groupmates; a shifty, untrustworthy bunch. She's on your side, yes. But she's unstable and far too powerful for someone as young as she is. She's good, at least you think, but she's hotheaded and likely to ruin everything if left unchecked. You understand that she is, in a way, still that scared girl you met in a dungeon, but she's become so much more and, once the threat is gone, must be removed from your people's presence as swiftly and politely as possible. And then she leaves, and you don't ever see her again. A bit like the Skulduggery you knew, perhaps. You never do learn what happened to him.
And also looking at it from Valkyrie's perspective is super interesting. Just think about it. The first time you meet Meritorious, you're a little, untrained, twelve-year-old who doesn't know the ways of this world. He's a god to you. A benevolent one, but one who clearly doesn't want you to be there. And he dies before he can ever really mean anything to you. People talk about him, talk about how good a leader he was, but you never really got to know him. It's a loss you quickly learn to accept, as the world moves on and you have to keep up.
And then you're taken to another dimension. Thrown in a dungeon. And he's there. And even though he's no longer a leader, he's lost the war, he's been down here for years and might be crazy, you still default to calling him the Grand Mage. He is still a god to you, perhaps even more so now that all you've ever really known him by are the idealized memories of other people. You escape when he tells you to, and you can only hope he one day escapes too.
And one day you're back. You're older, stronger. The world has been cruel to you but you remain unbreakable despite it all. And he's there, but you don't really get to meet him. But you hear about it. You hear that he's finally free. You fight this war on the same side, against hordes of draugr and a man locked up in his own city. You are the one who separates the dimensions. You are the one who ensures that the people over there and the people over here will not see each other again.
They knew each other and respected each other. But they also viewed the other with a wariness; an interaction gone wrong could lead to hostility. I do hope we get to see them again in the future and see if Meritorious has had any success wrangling the people of Dimension X.
