it's not so simple as all that

Addam is not Minoth's Driver. Minoth is not Addam's Blade. Addam did not awaken Minoth, and Minoth did not resonate with Addam.

If that's not it, then there must be another word for it. Another way to quantify, to qualify, their relationship. For there is something there, there was a connection. We know Cole didn't write the play like a conscientious historian. So there must be something more to it.

In all things unraveled, it helps to start at the beginning. Addam was born in Leftheria, the result of a careless affair between a king and a common woman. Minoth was born in Indol, the result of a careless affair between a clergyman and his quest for power. Neither of these creations were conscious choices. As they say, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

If that's so, and if Minoth can choose a different Driver and Addam can establish a bond with any Blade, then why isn't the supersedance valid? Why don't we say, yes, families of choice are often closer and kinder than the ones who ungratefully rear you? Say one goes to one, and the function is defined?

Because Minoth is cagey and Addam is fearful. As they dance that brutal, pathetic dance, about each other's hearts, they ask, silently: Is that all you need? To be harmless? Is that all you want? To be untamed?

Addam is a man paralyzed by unbound, formless consequence. He does not appear so because he excels at selecting alternatives to the more contentious path, presenting a pathology completely antithetical to someone who doesn't know where they're going, what they're doing, why they've been able to achieve what they have. There's that old saying about power lingering, but why did he even gain that power? Perhaps because he was afraid to say no.

Minoth is a man who has seen all consequence, all its extent. He appears exactly so, worldly and weared, but he also stands down from larger conflicts, because he has been hurt stepping close to them before. No one bothers to ask where he's going, what he's doing, why he's been able to achieve what he has. No one cares; the answers are everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing, deliquent and empty of grandeur.

Addam's father, meanwhile, is perfectly content to let Addam continue to present his false image. Truly, Torna has no one who would fit the bill better - if there is even one Driver like Lora around, she's not going to show her face in the circles whereover the Driver of the Aegis must preside. Amalthus is much of the same; Minoth's cooperation means nothing to him, his independence in fact little more than a convenient scrap of evidence to serve undermination for the dubious morality of the other Aegis but an available one all the same.

So they're similar, even the same. So they're ordained to rise and fall together. So their incompatibility is only feasible, is only reconcilable. For them to accept each other would be for them to reveal glaring insecurities, inconsistencies, in their characters as played.

It wouldn't be fair, if they loved each other. It wouldn't be right. And that's not what Drivers and Blades think, usually.

It's not so simple, they say.

But isn't it?