Steinbjorn: Priorities and Pragmatism

I have never really understood honor.

You would think that I would. I spend enough time around it. My wife certainly understands it, and would follow it to the death. So it's not that I've never seen it, it's not that honor is unfamiliar, or that I despise it. It's just that I don't get it.

Sometimes I think that's how Valdis and I have kept each other alive. Her conviction keeps us going through times when anyone else would falter. And, for my part, there are times when I can look at a situation, consider the finer points of right and wrong, cost and benefit and, sometimes, make a decision that one with a sense of honor could not.

I know enough about honor to know that I should keep these things to myself. Tupper's hat was a fairly innocuous example, an attempt to convince one who should probably not be on this quest that he is not welcome, without resorting to sending him to a distant plane of existence.

I've done much worse.

We were sent to destroy a lich once. It was a foolish quest; we were not remotely powerful enough to stop the damn thing, but we were sent anyway, just the two of us. Face to face, it could have killed us, but it decided that it would be more... interesting, I think, to toy with us. It was awful, a great blur in my memory, nothing clear until I found myself, alone, in the dungeon of the lich's fortress where I found... something. To this day, I'm not entirely certain what it was. Some great demon that would, under normal circumstances, as soon consume my soul as speak to me.

But he was trapped by that lich. Somewhere, I knew that Valdis was trying to fight the thing, probably dying. And if she wasn't yet, she would be soon, and she would fight that damn undead or die trying.

She would die. I knew it.

So I let the thing out. All it wanted was to destroy it's captor, so I let it out. And Valdis later expressed her curiosity as to how the lich had ended up dead before she ever found him.

She still doesn't know. She didn't know then. And, should that illithid find it's way out of its cage to take vengeance on it's captor, she won't know now, either.

It pains me to lie to her.

But if it keeps her alive? It just might be worth it.