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+--- Thread: We Don't Want To Anger Morven (/thread-1597.html)
RE: We Don't Want To Anger Morven - Matías - 05-10-2025
Matías did not rise at once. He remained seated in the deep, humming stillness that followed Jay’s words, watching the man across from him as one might watch a falcon still bristling from the winds of a long hunt. The wall bore the mark of a blow meant for something greater than plaster; Jay’s hand still dripped from it, crimson catching the sterile light like ink spilled across a ledger of debts too long unpaid.
He felt the gravity of the moment. What had passed between them was not forgiveness, but neither was it wrath. It was the space between gun and holster, the narrow moment when a man chooses to lower his aim rather than pull the trigger.
There was no hatred in his heart for Jay. There might once have been, had they met years ago, when Matías was still a creature of the old world, when he spoke violence like a native tongue and moved through the domain of his family’s empire with quiet certainty.
He had advanced their power like a dutiful son, not blindly, but without apology. He had not done these things with malice, but neither had he questioned them. He was an Amengual. That was enough, and family came first. But the dynasty had fallen, and in the ruins, something had shifted within him. Not abruptly, and not with revelation or weeping or a saint’s conversion, but slowly, like a mountain eroding under constant rain. And now, here he sat, not washed clean, but worn into something new. The same blood in his veins, the same fire in his spine, but pointed elsewhere.
When he climbed to his feet, there was no rush in the movement, no need for ceremony, only the simple honesty of a man completing what he came to do. He looked to Jay not with challenge or sympathy, but with the cool steadiness of one man acknowledging another across the battlefield of memory.
He stepped back from the chair and let the silence fill the space between them, not as a weapon, but as a final offering. “I thank you,” he added, “for not returning my name to the fire with theirs.” His eyes flicked briefly to the wall cracked and bloodstained, then back to Jay. “Some debts cannot be repaid. But I believe some balances can be redrawn.”
With that, he turned. He did not hurry to the door but neither did he look back. He left behind no excuse, only the quiet gravity of a man who knew what he had been, and had chosen to be something else.