In the ancient stories, was He not offered the same choice? To leave the world of pain and vice and betrayal and heed the call of blood? To escape the X and the days spent in agony as each drop fell from His heart into the waiting chalice? Compared to that suffering a swift blow to the neck seemed a mercy, but still her heart recoiled from the inevitability of it the moment she saw there was another path.

A hungry light filled her eyes, and she took Constance by the hand. Her blood, so hot, so base, so human spoke to her as it did to Him. Her heart pounded and the passion seemed like it would overwhelm her as it had so many times before.

And then, at last, she understood.

"I crave life," she said. "I crave it as I crave drink. I crave it as I crave battle. I crave it as I crave glory and praise and riches. I thought that my vices were individual things, a collection, an array of seven. I thought that because I could stand tall upon the field I was not a coward but the rage and battle lust felt to me then the exact same way as I felt when I craved your offer, the same feeling of passion that had me strike down the cursed King."

For a moment the grip of her fingers was so hard, so trembling. She thought of battling the demons of her horse, and though the demons were no longer garbed in a tonne of muscle they were far more fearsome for all of it.

"It is all one vice, Constance. One craving. My flesh hungers and my spirit is silent, and so hunger is my master. If I take your offer, unreconstructed, I shall become a faerie indeed but one from the worst of stories. Craving made immortal, grasping hands in an eternal garden, thief of children, shameless and free. I am not a flawed knight; true, but for one damnable mistake. I am a dragon caged in flesh no less than Lady Sandsfern, and the devil at the crossroads revealed the end of that path as a lesson to [i]me[/i]. And here I stand upon a second crossroads, and this time the question of wishes is put to me alone."

Her hand slipped away from Constance's as easily as air, when a moment before it had been holding with the terrified and terrifying strength of a fearful giant.

"In that world you would be a maiden trapped in the talons of a dragon. Though you did not answer my question, you did so by omission: in that world you would not be happy. So I tell you, faerie-devil, Constance, one who I love too much to crave, I tell you of the one wish I do have: That you somehow find happiness."

She looked away into a light, gleaming and distance. "Whatever that happiness is, I shall fight for it. I shall slay dragons for it, even if the dragon I must slay is within myself. A knight can do no less."