We've... seen so much death, Pride.
Pride stared, some part of his stomach sinking with annoyance, and for once he voiced it. His tone, though, was mild, if dryly amused. "Livius, we have seen maybe two Gembound die."
At Livius's request, he bit back his irritation further. Why did it seem, sometimes, as though half his duties were emotional support for his king..? You're supporting a friend; it isn't a duty, he told himself. And lowering himself down to his knees, he buckled--rather literally--to the task once again.
Pride made himself comfortable on the rock, adjusting his position lying near the throne, as he thought back on their history together. "I am sure we will both die eventually, but what is important is doing what we can meanwhile. I do not think any of us are bound to live forever, bar perhaps the so-called Masters? But who knows." Pride, at least, had no plans to die any time soon. "As for stories..." Hell, what could he even say? "Neither of us has been alive all that long. There isn't all that much we have run into, I think. I would tell them that you overcame great hindrances--your stone, mostly; that it caused you great distress early on but that you pushed past that to be royalty. That you are an example that anyone can overcome anything, with enough fire and determination," he began. He tried not to hate every minute of this; his impatience at the weasel's insecurity, at their need for validation, battled powerfully with his liking of Livius as a friend.
"I would tell them that despite your small size, you mastered magics far beyond what most would ever touch, and often discovered new ways to use it, ways no one else had ever thought of. -You have yet to teach me how to control someone's movements," he added, a reminder delivered with, again, dry humor.
He then looked to the throne, again, thinking. "I would tell them that you faced enemies far larger than you, and more numerous, to protect an ally's pride; and that you were struck down, only to rise stronger and more fierce than ever." Okay, a little overdramatic, but he felt that was probably quite all right with Livius. "And I would tell them of the battles with the enemies of the caves, and how at first you tried to treat them with mercy, and when they only betrayed you, you at last put them down." He glanced off to one side, trying to summon up a magical image: to reform the light itself to dance in wondrous shapes. He wanted to show Livius, casting Reseda down into a fissure in the rock--and then Reseda slinking back, only to be slain. Though--without the more gruesome aspects, at least. As he spoke, the images shone there, dancing and shimmering, seeming to ignite the drifting dust motes of Orion's air that sifted down through them.
"I would tell them that you trained those of your Kingdom who requested it; that you offered an ear when others asked you to listen," he went on, more because this was the sort of thing a king should do, and because Livius had mostly listened when he'd asked. He himself had rarely approached them with anything personal, though; it had always been business, with him. But that was his problem, not theirs. "That as a wise, just king and friend, you were always open to change, if it were good change." Flattery, perhaps, and reinforcement of what Pride considered useful. But again, true enough.
He paused, watching as the dust-glittering light-formed Livius faded from the air before them, where it had stood for a moment larger than life. "What else would you have me tell of you?" he asked, idly. Part of him wondered what stories Livius might tell of him, if he died, but he didn't really care all that much. His legacy was not part of his pride--the actual changes he might make to the caves were far more important.
Time wound down, as they spoke, until sleep drifted in. But it mattered little; it was clear, now, what was to come, and in whose hands the Seven would be carefully stewarded--until Livius's return.