"Just water," Skandra's answer was lazy. "I wasn't hungry."
The truth was, he could have eaten as much as ten starving weasels, then the weasels, but that wasn't how it worked when a nation decided to throw you into a cell. Aeotha didn't have any questions. Leironuoth's questions were merely procedural - do we need to stop and have a snack before we got out to kill someone? Skandra had seen Leironuoth dancing in some near battle, and the elf was doing it alone. As always. He did not know how he knew, but a lion would never lose a fight to a wolf, and in any case Skandra did not think his being there would help matters at all. When you trusted your friends - really trusted them - you believed them regardless of how much they could or couldn't explain.
He trusted Leironuoth to win, and to do the right thing. Anything else was a bonus.
"All right, Aeotha, since you want the truth," and he rolled his head, one shoulder to the other. "The truth is, I'm the agent of a sleeping god. My god isn't like yours. He doesn't dream. He doesn't see the future in the moon, or in the leaves of the tea. He knows that something is coming to destroy this world. Something that could turn the dragon and the moon to dust. And he decided that the best plan of action was to set myself and a mentally unstable, possibly suicidal she-elf in its path. So far he's one for two, and that record might change as the week goes on. Am I making any more sense than I was two weeks ago? Is this picture starting to come together for you?"
The anger he felt was real. Not anger for Aeotha. It was anger for Ao. That rage dragged him away from his cot, and led to a vicious kick. Bars rattled. Stone dust shook loose of its moorings, the cracks and crevasses where it had been since the cell was constructed. This dust floated gently on nonexistent wind. It looked for all the world like smoke. Skandra thought of his cloves, then, and he was angry anew.
"Elemmire turned against us. Against me. I didn't see it coming," and the sigh was not forced, either. "But that doesn't change facts. Everything we've faced until now was a distraction. Tuoth. Eiron'aith. Machinations designed to blind the chosen from seeing the truth. This world was never meant to go on. We were meant from the very beginning to die at a time of someone else's choosing. Your goddess is a slave to the order what arranged for our end. And if you want this world to go on, you have two choices. Convince the moon to back your play, on faith. Or decide that people are more important than oaths and deities, no matter who they're sworn to. Because when you come right to it, Lorien already made her choice in this. She's resigned to the march of fate. But I'm not."
He was leaning against the bars now. Staring at Aeotha, as though that would somehow make a difference. Yet it was the sneering cruelty one normally saw out of Skandra Tyullis. That was a fact that surprised even him. Only determination on his face, and a sort of focus reserved for other - higher - beings. She had to see the truth. Eiron'aith was a pimple. Tuoth was less. Gershul nothing more than luck. A thousand other names of a thousand other lives ended, and none of them woth remembering, save for one important point. They were all pawns on a deity's board unless they chose something else. And all of the things that made Aeotha that beautiful, wonderful beacon of hope - everything that made her people follow her - might be sacrificed, if she wanted those people to live.
He did not think she had it in her. Skandra didn't know if that was good, or bad. In this case, he supposed they were damned no matter what they did. That was what happened when you let a god decide your worth.