"… Was it worth it?"

Alexa doesn't bother trying to hide the pain in her voice. She's not being cruel or making fun of you, Lacedo. Really, she's not. She's trying so, so hard to be kind, but she [i]needs[/i] you to understand. She's being earnest, she's hurting, and she knows that if she gets this wrong, you might not listen to her ever again. So when her voice catches, when her chest aches with tightness, when tears prickle at her eyes, she does nothing to stop it. She's not making fun of you, Lacedo. She's trying to tell you what she wishes someone had told her, all those years ago.

"You did it. You won! Generations of prophecy, of myth weaving, all fulfilled. Glorious victory over the ancestral foe. The Alcedi own the sky. The years of training, the centuries of dreaming, all of it, for this moment. How do you feel?"

Hollow, she'd put money on it. You put on a good face and smile because that's what you do. Your troops are doing their best not to notice the empty spaces, at least not in public. And you know that they need you to be smiling too, because that means things are alright. And so you take that hollowness, that exhaustion, all the aches and pains presenting the bill after the battle is done, and shove it away until you have time to yourself to process.

"You're in the right place if you want the Alcedi to serve humanity," she presses. "Here, with an imperial princess, after winning such a dramatic fight for her? Humanity will have no choice to but sit up and take noice. Wow, that Alcedi combat servitor design has more legs than we gave it credit for. The Alcedi are the hot new thing. Every aspiring warlord has an army of their own--Alcedi swarming across every planet, fighting every fight. Everywhere, Alcedi clan elders and soldiers alike are able to look back at this moment as the turning point in their species, when they made it big.

"Every fight in the galaxy. Alcedi. After every fight, Alcedi littering the field, Alcedi pyres sending Alcedi souls home. But it's alright to feel this way, because you're filling your [i]purpose,[/i] the reason you were made, and if you die, well that's alright, because humanity can make more of you when they need you."

It's hard to keep a level voice there, and not let bitterness poison every syllable.

"Up until the point when they don't. You fight for them, you die for them, you're born, you live, and end yourself on the point of their petty squabbles, and then they replace you. They find a newer design, a better design, and then you're abandoned.

"You say it's serving humans, or dissolution and extinction, one or the other. [i]I[/i] say that the only way to [i]avoid[/i] dissolution or extinction is to not play the role they've given you."