What time is it?
It’s time to doodle Carver and cry over him!
If he were real I would shower him in love and confidence boosters because I just have enough patience to put up with him and his nearly constant brooding.
Some people aren’t heroes. Most aren’t, in fact. They can be little brothers or big ones or both at the same time, a contradiction of terms. Broad shoulders with plenty of chips on them. And bare arms, but a few tricks up their sleeves even so. And a stubborn chin and blue eyes and hair that a champion’s hand used to tousle, pretending to muss it up, when really it was the only way to pull a leaf or twig out without Carver throwing a tit of a fit about it.
They don’t go down in history. They aren’t written, either, save for a footnote. They’re the great sweaty sword-armed masses of Thedas, familiar as the hills but not quite as big, one of countless voices chiming in to gossip in the taproom, or snort, or chuckle, if only begrudgingly, because the only jokes that ever hit home are the ones that hit below the ribcage, below the sword belt.
Where you’re soft. Vulnerable. Where only family knows you hurt every night, clenching your jaw until it cracks when you yawn.
The steps you’ve traced—back and forth, the same paths forged by other, better men. Not bigger. No one could be bigger than you, Carver. Always hitting your enormous melon of a head on low-hanging beams and skinny little Lowtown doorframes. Always stubbing your toe or banging your knee, or charging into a fight you just can’t finish. Somebody else throws a fireball and there it goes, up in flames—grand, burning things wielded so easily, licking at the sky, devouring every other chance in sight. Until only the fire remains.
And you don’t think about the sturdy oak that was chopped up for kindling, or the acorn it once was. Simple. And so many of them no one would think twice before kicking them out of the way. Not worth even a copper, those. The tree branches practically give them out for free, don’t they?
Only one or two take root. And even the ones that do have lightning to look out for. The axe. Birds building nests. Hawks in their perches, so much finer with their feathers than the dependable branches and their regular little leaves.
You only notice when one falls. When it doesn’t offer the unnoticed comfort of a bit of bloody shade. And you never thank it for the respite, do you? No. You don’t notice it at all.
And people are like that. Well, most of them. Living their lives. Laying down their roots. Being torn up, replanted, repurposed. Thinking they’re important; knowing they aren’t. But that doesn’t keep them from taking up their fair share of space. While castle keeps are built and bards sing stinking ballads and heroes fight dragons and little Hawkes are hungry for leaving the nest, but they might as well eat worms.
All you can ever really see, from wherever you are, is your own small patch of the great big sky.
