Subterfuge was never Bessie's strong suit so, when the subject of her impending and inevitable death came up and she wanted to smile it off, her expression was instead twisted and pained. Nevertheless, she tried to play it off. To pretend as if nothing was wrong.
"Haha, what do you mean? I mean… we all die, yeah, and I get into lots of dangerous situations and am not the strongest so I might die sooner rather than later, but you shouldn't joke about that…"
The words felt like sand in her mouth and she couldn't help but trail off. Denial always worked best, but it usually worked best for *her*. Lying to herself was easy, but others… Her thoughts were cut off by the pungent scent of sulphur and Crataeis' wave-like voice.
"Are you telling Us that We're wrong? Are you suggesting that you're more than just some ordinary minotaur-blooded halfbreed?"
"W-well."
No.
Originally this was going to be a short chapter but it grew to be just short of 4000 words. Dear god, sometimes I just don't know what my characters are going to do until I write them. Anyways, this was an attempt of writing some more emotionally hard hitting scenes/ covering some heavier topics. It's something that I feel I don't do enough in my novel and something I want to improve on going forward, so I hope it had alright emotional and story beats.
Beyond this chapter, I'm going on vaction next week to finally meet up with my long distance partner and I'm very excited, but that might also put a delay on next chapter. I suspect next chapter will be shorter anyways, so we'll see, but this chapter was also supposed to be short and we all saw what happened today. Anyways, I mostly am just giving this as a heads up in case there's a delay. For schedule updates and conversation though, please feel free to join my tiny discord here: https://discord.gg/hJWSVx2uhT
And as always, I hope you're having a wonderful day!