#mutt's rambles

[muttb0yy]

I enjoy Varka being just some random guy who rose to the top through skill and a shit load of determination and resilience, but I also like the idea of him being the younger brother of Frederica.

Just imagine working incredibly hard, making your parents proud by being a proper, disciplined Gunnhildr heir, only for your scruffy lazy little sibling with a truancy problem to overtake you and to end up a higher rank than you. Frederica being livid, and so begin the endless squabbles!

Varka loves teasing her, and she'd smack him around the head in return, scolding him for making a mockery of their family and the lecturing him about the importance of legacy.

Exasperated by childish nicknames, having a go at him whenever he calls her Freddie in front of a squad of knights she's commanding. Still, even if she's sick of him and perhaps a teeeeny bit jealous, Frederica worries about him a lot. Always going out and doing reckless things --- Varka's going to get himself killed one of these days!

When the expedition was being planned, and Frederica was told exactly what her little brother was going to do, she was so anxious for his safety that she considered trapping him inside the basement of the Gunnhildr mansion and keeping him there for the rest of eternity.

Varka as an uncle? Bad influence. Stay away from Jean and Barbara; don't corrupt them with whatever you've got going on! Took them out often (read: snatched them from underneath their parent's noses) to explore Mondstadt's wilderness, which lead to both Freddie and Seamus losing hair from stress. The rest of it? Rapidly going grey.

[muttb0yy]

Guthred didn't always have white hair. No, not before the cataclysm, not before he started making the Draught of Lucidity. It was the abyss that he allowed himself to be infected with that changed him. We've seen it before - Rerir's hair colour changed once he accepted the power it gave him, and Guthred wouldn't of been able to test if his medicine worked on himself if he hadn't come in contact with the sickness his men had.

Thrain worried watching his beloved change. Guthred grew sicker, weaker, frailer by the day. The only comfort the commander had is that Guthred was still the same stubborn, stern man as he had always been. They still argued on the daily, still bickered about nothing significant. Right until the end.

Pre-Cataclysm Guthred was unrecognisable to the man lay before Thrain after his love's final battle. Would he stay like that forever? Would even his soul be tainted by the horrors of the abyss? That question was only answered for him 500 years later, when it was time to put his beloved to rest. When he departed with his conscience for the first time in centuries. It wounded Thrain to see his soul in that state, but at least now neither would have to tolerate the unfairness of the living world, they'd been freed at last.