what dogs have loved is purer than this
Chapter 01: first base (martyrdom)
Chapter 02: second base (raising the dead)
Chapter 03: third base (eye contact)
Would that Addam's death, if not particularly untimely, had been due to his earnest and steadfast championing of the rights of the exemplary Blades he traveled with. Would that Addam had stood for something, instead of just in the face of it, and been the hero that not just the Tornan humans but all of Alrest, creatures great and small and common and beast, needed.
Minoth saw that, in embittered retrospect. A human savior who didn't half understand didn't deserve to speak for Blades, but someone had to start. What could have been...what they all could have been a part of.
Addam died a failure because he hadn't done enough. And so, Minoth would die inching closer and closer to blasphemy against the Praetorium, not to make Addam a posthumous martyr, but to make someone, somewhere, wish such a hero would come again.
As for Minoth himself? Oh, still a coward. But maybe someday...
Grief is a deeply personal experience, of course. It is one of the most acute and diverse, yet wholly unifying, aspects of the human condition.
Blades, of course, do not grieve their Drivers. It's a classic truth, and a dramatic one.
Would you admit to counting the number of times you'd visited a loved one's grave? Would you admit to choosing that as an alternative to marking the time?
But, then, if you can count, you can lose track.
Minoth knows the date, abstractly, but has stubbornly destroyed his ability to subtract back to 3564.
He has not touched the body, has not dug the grave.
Suppose, however, that someday he does. That someday, the late Aegis's Driver revives, decrepit, to the touch of his chosen Blade, and to the bullishly powerful grief of which only he knows the scope.
If only he were here, then...
A bottled soul, which takes on its awakener's wishes.
Minoth had not expected hallucinations. Had not once thought himself a conscious proponent for the grave-digging and arcane revival of one highly historically (un)scorned Tornan prince. Was it selfish, that he did not immediately claw out his own Core, the better to stop up this unordained flow?
For one failed experiment to create another, through sheer yearning...
Having never had a hallucination, Minoth isn't sure whether to be surprised that this one doesn't go away when he furiously blinks his stinging eyes.
The erstwhile corpse doesn't even spare a swallow, let alone a cough, before rasping out:
"Can you see me...Minoth?"
The five senses. Taste (but Minoth does not consider himself a physical necrophiliac); touch (buried in armor, no pulse points are available); sight (check), sound (check), smell (just dirt, here).
Perhaps the sixth, then. Minoth responds in the affirmative when he feels Addam's eyes cradling his soul.
What euphoria, to be seen.