Snippet #1454843

Bruce didn’t listen to what Ryuu said. He was at the brink of fainting, passing to and from consciousness so his hearing came and went, however, whatever he heard he didn’t pay much attention to. Time wasn’t a factor for him either; too drunk to care, time merged together and seemed to pass by like the wind. Has an hour passed? A month? A second? Why bother now? Bruce thought, having to regain his trail of thought after every question in order to remember what he was talking about.

Bruce’s drunkenness seemed to…Fade? He didn’t know what it was that had done it but it was making him think straighter, see straighter, and he could actually control what he was doing and saying. He got up slowly as the alcoholic affect hadn’t seized to exist, yet, and looked at Asmara and sighed deeply. “I suppose that I lost it,” Bruce said blankly and sighed again, heavily.
“I’ll be honest…I meant everything that I said,” Bruce confessed, though he didn’t seem ashamed by it, more…Annoyed that it had to be explained. “When…When I was a boy, I lived in a farming community, pretty far from civilization, so we were left to tend to ourselves for the majority of the time,” he explained while he slowly got up.
“We were, apparently, rather close to a migrating group of Elves that lived in the woods and well…We got along fine, no fighting or anything, and our Chantry leader, Ser Daniel, made sure that the two of us got along fine and whenever there was a problem it was him to dealt with it. It went fine till-” Bruce swallowed a chunk of spit before he continued-“I…One day, my best friend was taken away from me. She was so beautiful and I truly did love her, but she was a mage and the Templars came and took her.
When I looked for Ser Daniel he was nowhere to be found and I talked to another, Ser John who explained to me that Mages were evil by nature, that they wished to see everyone and everything destroyed. Maybe not now, but later, when they were older. I was so scarred and…Confused that I. I think I was close to killing myself to have shown sympathy for such a being, I would have drowned myself if my father wouldn’t have stopped me. Oh…How he hit me for being so idiotic.
Anyways-” another heavy sigh as Bruce walked back to the camp-“After a while I got a better, sort of, and went to play in the woods…I saw Ser Daniel in a groove with an elven woman…Kissing.”

Bruce forced his lips together so he wouldn’t start to sob before he continued his story, “I can’t describe how much that man meant to me. He was my idol. THE man I wished to become in my future, but when I saw how he just stood there and kissed an elf…I was disillusioned and I ran.
I told my dad, and he told Ser John, and when Ser Daniel came back…He was greeted by pitchforks and fire. Arrested by his own people, and only three days later more Templars, like Ser John, came and they burned him alive, right in front of us and told us that we had done something good by turning ‘this traitor over’. So they said before they told us to prepare for battle against the Elves.”
Bruce stopped. He needed to breathe, to calm himself before he continued. The edge of the camp was near but he didn’t feel ready to enter yet, not until he looked at Asmara and continued.

“Every man and woman who could fight joined the Templars. They left and never came back. That meant my father too, but it didn’t end there, oh no…It didn’t stop there. The Elves, who wanted revenge,” Bruce almost spat the word out, “Came to my village with fire, arrows and sorcery. Slaughtered the rest of us, old, children, women, even the animals were killed…I and five others survived as our mothers threw us down to the pigs’ food where we were hiding till the screaming had stopped and till we couldn’t hear the elves anymore.”

They were now inside the camp where Bruce finished off his story. “I ran…Never looked back. I never looked for my mother. I went to the Chantry, they took me in and before I knew it I was being trained as a Templar by Ser Gunthar, I told him everything that I had lived through and he told me that what Ser John had done and said was true, he told me that I had seen what would happen if mages weren’t taken away from society, and what would happen if the elves weren’t kept in the Alienage. Over and over again, he stressed the fact that neither were to be trusted and those who were both were living abominations, yet…” Bruce trailed off and looked at Asmara. “You are not an apostate. You are a chantry believer, and you do not practice evil magic. You are a living beacon of hope that there exists good in this world and that what we true Templars are doing is for the better. Elven mages can be educated to use their magic for the better and still follow the Chant.”

Bruce had put a strange emphasis on the word, ‘true’. What did he mean? Was there such a thing as false Templars? Were they like Ser Daniel, whose crimes were almost nothing. Or was it something greater and much more…Dangerous than mere Templar fanatics? Whatever it was, Asmara seemed to have caught a very strong form of respect from Bruce.