how do you view aglaya and katerina saburova as characters? some things about their way of thinking, some headcannons, their psyche, etc etc
they're like babygirls to meeee ok let's go
at their cores i think they're scared. i think most characters of this game are scared, but these two are special in their own ways.
aglaya is scared of divergences of the established order; as someone who is face to face with g/God, with the Order and Law, and as someone whose role is to keep the balance without a tilt of the scales, she fears the people and the things who are not on the scales, but rather next to them, above, below; those who observe her put heart and blade on these scales; those who laugh softly at seeing her do so — and there are a lot of those in Town-On-Gorkhon. she is used to having Something hover over her head, but she's used to knowing what it is: the Powers That Be, the Tower (or what she thinks she knows of the Tower)... she is not used to things being Expandable and Everchanging — or rather she is used to being able to control that Expansion and that Everchange. and she is currently fighting, with the rest of 'em, something that refuses to bend to her vision, to everyone's vision. she is used to molding people into the chess pieces she needs, and she never expected the chess pieces of this particular board to grow legs and start running amock. she never expected the knights to rear up and gallop away... and she finds herself grasping at everything she can to either restore order, or throw herself out of it completely as to not be crushed when the scales, without her to put weight on them, topple over and break — hence why she begs artemy to run away with her. she is most scared of space.
katerina, too, is scared; but she is more scared of herself, of what she is, and of what she isn't. (everything is about the fear of the self, except when it isn't, in which case it is about the fear of what the self is not, and cannot be.) she copes, very poorly, with this what-she-is-what-she-isn't with morphine, and that doesn't help (addiction muddies even more the shapes of what-you-are-what-you-are-not). she speaks in tongues, often, that scares her. She wants to throw herself into being a vessel, an electrical conductor almost: she cannot be for a child, so she desperately try to be for prophecies, for words of the Earth; hence why the Rat Prophet so easily slips between her fractures. she's a very extreme person, where aglaya is an extremely measured person (so measured that the smallest of earthquakes sends her tumbling down). katerina lives with a big, big hollow where should fit what the town has considered her "duty", which is a Mistress heir, and instead all sorts of things come in its place. anotha one of my personal hcs is that she does value the Herb Brides a lot, first because she believes her visions come from the earth so she's like... communicating with their mom, basically, but also because a good part of the Kin rites is very into the Mother thing... with mother earth/boddho/humanized earth/not to psychoanalyze this game but the abattoir is very Womb-like (all caves are frankly!) (and artemy's voyage in it is him literally Going To Meet Mom/Where He Is From For Real)/the common <O> brand/sigil with meanings of birth-motherhood-cycle-earth, + my personal hcs that many of the brides are midwives [they canonically are but I'm Pushing It Some More For Fun]. so I think she gravitates towards the brides because she thinks that maybe she could get their blessings and maybe by some miracles eventually have a Mistress Heir... and technically it works a lil since Clara her adoptive daughter crawled out of the earth so <3 just keep going ladies she is most scared of time.