POV: Alric
The chains crack. And for the first time in centuries, he feels.
Not the curse's version of feeling, which is not feeling at all but the specific mimicry of it that the curse produces when it wants something from me — the manufactured urgency of compulsion, the false heat of oath-enforced responses, the hollow version of every genuine state run through the curse's machinery until the original is unrecognizable. I know the difference between those and actual feeling the same way you know the difference between a copy of a thing and the thing itself, which is the specific knowledge of someone who had the original and watched it get replaced and has been living with the copy ever since.
What's happening right now is not the copy.
