I hope you're...somewhere.
When Amalthus first awakened Minoth, there was an awe on his face, a joy, a light that he hadn't felt nor seen since it had gone out of his mother's eyes some ten or fifteen years prior. It had been beaten out of her with a rock. Unfortunately, Minoth didn't have quite the same immediacy, physicality, brutality of violent intrinsic disillusionment upon which to blame the gradual loss of his Driver from the inside out.
Because that light captivated him. He was a Dark Blade, he was born standoffish and brusque and wry but only behind the curtain, he had every predisposition to be independent and like it, but he wasn't. He perceived Amalthus as a young thing, as a wavering soul desperate for someone to be on his side without possible question, and Minoth didn't just resign himself to that fact, he signed himself up to it, for it.
How stupid that was.
For years, he grinned his broadest, swaggered his finest, spun his satire towards every wayward Quaestor as Amalthus worked his way up through the monks' ranks. He chased that smile, the strangely toothy awkwardly endearing flash of white between pale blue that should have so obviously portended the gloom.
Oh, indeed, how stupid that was, for it hardly ever came. Not at Minoth's jokes, not at his successes, not at his misfortunes, not at his stories he read to children gathered at the fountain in Poldis Circle (and these he very nearly seemed to disapprove of, so close did he come to snatching away the manuscripts wholesale at every tiled turn), not even at his spirited translations of old Judician texts, because if he was going to be forced to do it (or even if he came upon this summarily unappealing duty of his own volition, for the purposes of doing it to them before they did it to you, or something like that), he was at least going to do it his way.
Did Minoth perhaps translate the instructions that led to his mortal downfall at Stannif's ever-still ever-shaking hand? Did he, perhaps, in his blind quest to earn some safety, some blessed peace, via curried favor, go too far? It would only have been in his learned nature, after all. Amalthus was always one to go too far. The experiment hadn't done anything to change that. It hadn't needed to.
Where did the love go? If this is love, why do I hate it so much? A father should not be hard to please. A guardian should not keep guarded their esteem and affections. Those to whom and to which you owe your very life should not hold it over your head like an unattainable carrot.
Not even the Architect did that. Better to have an absent father than a present but distant one, hmm? And Amalthus wasn't even his father. So what right did he have to pass a blithe standard over Minoth's mind, always just out of reach, always casting the tinge of toxicity and power-struggling dynamics over their relationship?
He was his Driver. So that gave him all the right in the world, didn't it?
Didn't it?
One day, among battered refugee encampments in Coeia, Minoth saw it for the last time. He didn't even see it fade; as Amalthus tended to a wounded man's head, bandages gruesomely wrapped to keep all that was crucial from spilling, his lips quirked into that uncharacteristic shape, and he seemed pleased with his work. With his work? Not only with his work. With the life of that man, with the spirit, with the gratitude, with the humanity of it all.
So he's happy, Minoth thought. So there are things in this world that can make him glad he's in it. But not me. I was just a mistake he made. Fair enough. I'm sure there's something I can be useful for. Right? Not the experiment, no, and maybe he would have been glad if I'd turned out right, but...someday. I will be.
I hope. I wish. I pray.
For the rest of their time providing assistance there on that Titan, Minoth kept his distance. He hated how easy it was to do, too. As much as he despised hearing Amalthus call his name (ruder and ruder things he whispered under his breath every time it happened, and then cursed himself for it all the same), it was somehow even worse not to hear anything. No feedback, nothing purchasable. Just...silence.
Easy also, then, to convince himself it was as much a service to Amalthus as it was to himself; to stay out of the way, where he couldn't ruin anything, where a Dark Blade could keep his dim cast of a failure away from the thin, attenuating tendrils of the light.
It must be my fault. He doesn't like me because I'm wrong for him. Or rather, he doesn't like me because I would be wrong for anybody. No. There's nothing I can be useful for. Nothing I can be good for.
Later that week, on a solemn grassy hill, when Amalthus found that same man ransacking a house and killing its inhabitants for the want of a few stone worth of gold by way of precious possessions - perhaps to sell it for food and shelter that the Praetorium would gladly have given him, perhaps not - he did not smile. Not at the justice, not at the baby, and not at Minoth, when he saw his Driver mounting the incline and followed at a safe measure of paces behind.
Then, on the cliff's crest, Minoth saw. Where he had taken his incessant inability to make his mark with Amalthus and extrapolated it to his worthlessness among all the world, Amalthus saw one too many examples of crude, self-serving humans and took it to mean that all of humanity was cursed. Was a curse.
"Amalthus, you can't-" Minoth, you can't either. Not if you stay here. So he didn't. He doesn't need me, after all. He doesn't even like me. He hates me. He must. And I don't need him either. Whether I hate him or not...that's a different story.
By and by, there was Addam, so eager to please and, following on as brilliant consequence, so easy to please. Or are those two things really connected? No matter. He was bright and seemingly untainted by all of what he had seen, which promised to be not much at all and then again promised to be quite a wide gamut of what will go between persons, and what will oftentimes refuse the same. And even Addam did not do to Mythra what Amalthus had done to Minoth, regardless of every other idiotic bumbling-fumbling mistake he made.
So Minoth asked of Addam, one day among the astonishingly tight-knit group of eleven weary battle-worn souls, "Why are you so happy?" What's got you smiling, and doesn't it hurt to be that way? Day in and day out, sun up and sun down, on and on and on and on?
Aren't you tired? I know I am, but what are you? And Addam raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips, put a hand to his chin, and considered - or pretended to, anyway. At last, his rejoinder: "I'm happy because we are alive. Isn't that enough?"
Because we are alive. Because we walk this earth, in all our petty insignificance. Because we see the world and because we don't have to see any sort of higher god, because all we are asked to look upon is each other. Yes, Addam had been tasked by whatever universal machination to look upon Mythra and to look after her, but that didn't change who he was. He'd had enough time to make that much clear to himself, and to others. Not that Addam Origo was a grand bastion of constance, as his father was, but that who he was was who he was, through and through.
Minoth thought all this, and then he tried to crack any sort of a bland, depthless grin. One like Addam's, except not quite - because Addam's wasn't like that anyway, it was a limit to infinity to chase after such a surface-level sunbeaming thing.
"Really? Me too." I guess. I hope. I hope I guess. I guess I hope.
And to Amalthus? I hope someday you can be. I hope all the negativity you shoved so listlessly, so purposelessly my way turns itself out into something, somehow. I hope the Architect answers your prayers someday. We all deserve that. Really.
Because if I do, you do. And I think...I think he answered mine.