"If you have some specific suspicions I can definitely give you a larger escort temporarily. I suspect Barik and a Scarlet Fury are plenty intimidating for anyone who isn't a hardened criminal, though."

"She's got us there, scrap-man."

"Did Nerat pick you as an escort specifically because he knew it would be me you'd be inflicted on? --My apologies, Iron Marshal. I'll do my best."

"Unfortunately, I can't say Nerat wanted to annoy you specifically, Barik; Verse and I worked together on the whole...Cairn...thing.  I expect this was his idea of a friendly gesture.

"...You do have a point, Marshal; 'A Fatebinder, a Scarlet Fury, and an Iron Walker walk into a bar' sounds like a jester's quip; you never see all three together.  Sells the way we're all pissed off about this, for sure."

"I have not earned that rank."

"You have. You do not hold that rank because you are currently not capable of carrying out the standard duties of an Iron Walker or wearing the standard uniform. Should you be stripped of the relic the Edict trapped you in, you will be given Iron Walker armor the minute Isotanis has refit it to you, and he will have a suit ready the hour he hears of it, because he knows it, and I know it, and I don't think there's a single Iron Guard who doesn't know it. The only soldier in this camp who doesn't know it is one particularly stubborn man named Barikonen."

...Ophelia pats Barik's shoulder, carefully.  "Trust me, you are in very august company when you doubt yourself.  You will be in even more rarified company should you overcome the doubts you have, and claim what you have earned by your own merit.

"...Perhaps we should give him a title, if the promotion is unavailable for technical reasons," she asides to the Marshal, sotto voce but not too quiet for anyone to hear.

"If you judge it useful to claim you have an Iron Walker as one of your retinue, I can declare him an Iron Walker without reservation."

"Commander, I do not wish that promotion. Please do not give it to me before I can uphold it properly."

"...If the Fatebinder considers it your duty, you have no right to refuse. But if she doesn't... 'Iron Cliff Barikonen' seems adequate."

He slowly nods and turns to Ophelia.

"...Thank you, but...I think I must decline this, Iron Marshal.  To force a man into a role he would die inside to take is a horror; I will not do that to him.  And as much as I appreciate this, I have known Barik for a day and know he is no Iron Cliff.  That said...Barikonen," she intones the name, and what comes after, like a prophecy, a curse, "You need a place like a fish needs water."

"If you do not find one yourself, one may well be made for you."

"I can see it now; Stormgraven Barikonen, sole survivor, the Lone Stone Shield who has endured so much, forever set apart - 

"Would your phalanx want that?  Ask that of you?

"...I didn't think so."

Her voice is oddly gentle, now, as she continues speaking.

"I think, Marshal Erenyos, that it may be best if we return to the question of whither and how to promote this man, as he has rightly earned, at a later date.

"Barik, take some time to yourself to think.  And not to self-recriminate; it helps no-one.  I will not have it occurring under my command any more than I will tolerate it from myself.

"Verse, with me, if you would."

Barik reacts... approximately in slow motion, moreso than usual. Like he is spending too much effort on understanding and processing what she just said to pay attention to things outside of his head. But he manages a nod before she leaves.

She follows, looking unimpressed.

"He wasn't much of a thinker even before he got wrapped in that outfit, you know. You might overheat his brain."

"He needed a kick in the pants.  He still needs to be freed from the weight of his phalanx's graves.  ...And that is, I think, rather unfortunately literal.  Where else could that metal have come from?  Where else could his phalanx have gone?  They were lost in the reading of the Edict of Storms, which made the Bladegrave.  ...Which is odd, now that I think about it; did - I believe it was Nunoval, if I recall correctly - not warn them?

"I agree that he's not an impressive thinker - but that's not what I pushed him for.  That's not how I see him growing.

"His ability to endure impressed me.  He'd have been well within his rights to die with the rest of the unit whose ghosts still haunt him - and yet, he didn't.  He clings to life with a tenacity I've yet to see rivalled, no matter how many of his troubles are self-inflicted expressions of grief.  I think he'll rise to overcoming them the same way he rose to surviving the Storm, given a good incentive.

"...Which reminds me - while I know that trying to sheathe your wit entirely is tilting at Spires - please consider whether you'd appreciate someone making a 'jest' about your comrades before you make a quip about what remains of his?  You two...have this in common."

"If he can't take it, that's his problem," she says dismissively. "I don't beat myself up and it was much more my fault than his, there's no way he was there without orders."

"...The things we are given no choice in often hurt the most."

She blinks away the thoughts of grinding stone.  Of having not been quite enough, no matter that she tried - of not even this, but having failed herself in the moment.  She could have armed Seeking-Sheath, and the other hand-picked javelineers, with a glass-tipped spear, full of the acid that made her the Stonemelter, when the pitch failed to truly hinder Cairn and she reached for more desperate measures.  She didn't, because she did not recognize that it was a time to dare desperately lest the challenge swell before her to something insurmountable.  She didn't have enough of the acid to truly harm Cairn, rather than merely hurt him, when she did deploy it, betraying her own philosophy that when one strikes to kill one should be all of sure, quick, and kind.

You are already snuffing out a life, no matter how nasty, brutish, and short.  There is no reason to be cruel when you do.

But she digresses.

"That said...that is a thought for another time.

"What I'd like to ask you to consider, in this, is...

"There is a sort of person you are.

"You care about your sisters.  Sisters in battle, if not sisters by blood.  I couldn't spend that long with only you to watch and not see it.

"Do you want to be the sort of person that means you need the armor you've grown around your grief, now that they've been taken from you?  Even if it hurts someone you blame?

"Do you think the fire of anger will cleanse you?  You are no Forge-Bound - the fire you seek to harness only burns what it touches; it leaves only ash behind.

"Do you want to be the sort of person who will never have sisters again?"

She growls, "I'll keep the damn fire until I find the ones who killed them and rake them over the coals. And when that's done, maybe then I'll think about pointless abstract questions about who I am."

She's a little rattled, in a way she doesn't have practice hiding, though she's done a decent job trying.

Oh, there it is, the passion, stoking a roaring blaze - "Have you ever known me to do something without a point?"  (Her expression, in this moment, conveys volumes.  Sadness, worry, pride.)

Now, to forge something with it.

"But to more directly address what you've said...

"I am not saying to snuff that fire out, but to bank and mind it - to be careful what you let it feed upon.  To be careful that you burn only bridges you want burned.

"Is Barik one of those?"

The question is dropped with a curious lightness, given the subject matter.  Not a lack of taking it seriously, no - but the presence of absence of weight, like she had asked 'will you be wearing the red dress or the blue dress to the ball?'.  The ball, of course, being serious - but not the dresses.  They are equally valid choices, is what her tone conveys.

"Oh, I burnt that one years ago. Somewhere between the insults, the shooting down his letters from home when I was bored, and the blackmail."

"My, that sounds like quite a tale.

"But the question was not if you thought you had burnt that bridge - it was if you wanted to.  Did you?"

"I mean, why not burn it? He was just some Northerner; I didn't know him from any other Disfavored before I asked someone to read me the name on the message I'd shot down. Trying to blackmail him was just a way to pass the time before we got sent back into the war."

"I don't really do things I don't want to. Or think much about what I want. It's never felt complicated."

Ophelia - blinks.

"Usually one uses resources such as blackmailable secrets to achieve a goal, though I suppose 'entertaining oneself' is not not a goal, in the end.

"I must admit, though, that the idea of not questioning why I want what I want is incredibly foreign to me.  I wonder what you'd find, if you looked."

"I guess there was a time I bothered to think about that. Back when I was a farmer's daughter and perpetually bored and frustrated. But then I realized that I felt alive the few times I'd gotten into fights, and the Chorus was passing nearby, and I never looked back because I have what I want. Blood. Risk. Respect, fear, whatever you call the two of them together. And my people, who don't expect me to be anything I'm not."