@icespirt do you think that's a good idea? / mamoru!
Mamoru stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the weight of generations pressing against the quiet pulse of the Crystal Palace. Even here — in the stillness of peace they’d worked lifetimes to earn — the air tonight carried something else. Not fear. Not yet. But something watching.
When Elsa’s voice broke through the silence — low, uncertain, edged with a chill that had nothing to do with winter — he turned. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Her words hung there, crystallizing in the air like a spell undone. He studied her carefully, not as a sovereign from another time or a sorceress of snow — but as someone who knew. Power restrained. Power feared. Power that could turn from gift to curse in an instant.
“…I don’t know,” he answered, finally. His voice was softer than usual — less the resolute tone of a king, and more the whisper of a father, a guardian, a man still haunted by the weight of ‘what if.’
“But I know what happens when we let fear make our choices for us.” He moved toward the balcony, letting the moonlight catch in his violet eyes, now shadowed.
“And I know the silence in the north has lasted too long. If something’s stirring out there—” he paused, “—we can’t ignore it.” Mamoru turned back to Elsa, and for a moment, the mask of Endymion slipped — revealing the man who had stood through apocalypse and rebirth, who had held the broken pieces of a future and helped forge them into a kingdom.
“You’ve felt it too, haven’t you? The change in the wind. The echoes in the ice.” He stepped closer. “So no… I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But I think it’s the only one we have.”
