Juli looked up at the clear night sky, her eyes gradually adjusting from the brighter lighting of the banquet hall. She responded quietly to her companion. “There are too many stars to count tonight. All the brighter and well-known stars in the constellations are surrounded by so many others, fainter and fainter until they exist at the very edge of what I can perceive... The night sky is always so beautiful, regardless of how good or terrible the times are. The stars don’t care about what imaginary lines we draw on our maps, or why we think it's so important to kill the people beyond those lines...” It was an admission she would normally never make—Juli was loyal to Theiri, but deep down she could not justify why those imaginary lines were worth so much real bloodshed. But Sanguine had no true loyalty to either side in this conflict—that much she could be fairly certain of. So perhaps he would understand what she meant.<br/><br/>“You know the literal darkness much better than I, but I suppose both of us have existed in figurative darkness all our lives. First all I knew was grinding poverty, seeing fancy carriages go by while the people around me fought over scraps of bread and which corners we could each beg on. At fifteen I went off to war, learned how it felt to kill and to lose friends. All the acts of bravery, the joy in feeling such amazing camaraderie with my soldiers—ultimately they put that darkness in even starker relief. And now here I am in the halls of power, watching vain and vapid people worry over their pathetic little lives of comfort—most caring about the poverty in the streets and the deaths on the battlefields in only the most distant way. It's the darkest of all here.”<br/><br/>Juli heard the assassin’s guide barking in the distance, but did not think much of it—for all she knew, the wolf had cornered a tasty squirrel.