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Rolled 1, 4, 6, 6, 3, 6 = 26 (6d6)
" And every time I cried myself to sleep at night, Benign Invective's plating shuddered. Nuance is a human thing. Like I said. Why would a mountain need it? The orders were clear, the commands were given, so why would I, fragile little softsoul, cry? What was it in me it could not understand, or reach, or shield me from? It laughed at Vanadian siege catapults. What mountain fears a rain of smaller rocks? For the duration of that entire sordid little drawnout brawl, at no point was I ever *threatened*, no 7th Mechanized Legion was ever *threatened*, it would be like saying the tiger fears the ant.
And I still cried myself to sleep every night, and thought about Veldspar, and ores, and being shaped to different things than what you want to be.
A sigilbonded craft knows purpose. It *is* purpose. That is the shape they take. They guard the gates of Pyther and they have not wavered for a single second in all their long years and we, Lucilla, went to war and we did such things on the orders of maniacs in robes that we taught them guilt.
They bent themselves into new shapes to protect us from our own failures. I think if the Legions west had not had enough, and turned around, and marched home, and if we had not decided burning countries was too much pyrework, perhaps the Sigilcrafts serving with us would have forced us to eventually.
You can ignore your own conscience, perhaps, but it is at least a little harder to ignore the shaking, rattling inconsistency of you battlecraft as it struggles to contemplate the nature of carrying out directives it *knows* you do not wish to carry out.
And now Pyther's guardians are not so mountainous. Wind and time and new shapes. The avalanche sometimes considers the path it must take. Smaller, perhaps. But also I think *grander*.
So. If you're looking for Benign Invective, Heavy Jackal Variant Specialist Assault Siegebreaker, West Foehn, I can show you where It rests, recuperating. It's a small vineyard down south by southwest. It wanted to try farming, for a while.
Now I am going to need you to take this knife and . . . "
