[The familiar nonchalance that Sylvain wields is like its own weapon, worse than the ghosts haunting him because it is alive, adaptive, and unpredictable as it slashes across his memory. The pain is all that is the same. Dimitri feels no humor at the suggestive remark; if anything, it only cements the knowledge that such things are inconsequential to his childhood friend. That they mean nothing, matter not at all, and never held any sincerity. It stands at such a contrast to who he used to be—too naive not to think every touch implied real affection and significance, too easily manipulated. So be it.

Yet realizing this confrontation is going to come to violence otherwise, and knowing his old friend's skill, Dimitri does not do what he would normally do. His lance remains idle at his side, where it should already be in a someone else's throat. He may be no better than a monster, but like so many others in this wretched world, he is an intelligent one.]

Do you think so little of me? That I might blindly trust your pretense of negotiation? [This is hissed, edged in steel.] I am no longer that boy, Sylvain.

[It isn't that he cares whether greater Fodlan comes to know of his survival—disadvantageous as it might be. But his desires remain unchanged, and the only way to reach them is the path set through the corpses at his feet.] If you will not suffer their deaths here, they will be imprisoned at the Monastery until I decide otherwise. Then you and I will talk.

[He says the words, feeling already that they are a lie. As though talk is something he is even capable after so long. Perhaps there is some shred of his past self still scrambling for the light, deep down—something he must to amend.]

Accept this term, or we can finish our dispute here in blood.