I little more insight to Áine’s fears. Born into a world that was always at war, and being an apprentice to a War Priestess, she had to wonder what success would bring her.
How does she see our world after all of that?
Bata Neart
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Áine’s a lover, not a fighter. As Aoife may find out after the flashback is done. 😛
Hmmmmm. Aine was pretty warlike when she thought the girls were enemies. Is this why she didn’t kill Aoife out of hand?
@Azrael: I prefer to think of her as a lover who can be a fighter for those she loves.
As for poor old Aoife…well…her luck has never been *that* good, as shown by her record with Ashling. However….you never know…
@Delta: Pretty much. Aoife’s Leinster-Harp bandeau identified her as an enemy to Aine, and her reaction was to disable and restrain.
Even during the conflicts that Aine has been through, I feel that she would only use lethal force as an absolute final measure.
That kind of force never really seemed necessary against 2 untrained 21st Century teenagers who weren’t really much a match 🙂
Well, Aine will probably only gradually come to understand what our world is like over a period of time. She’ll probably be happily surprised to find out that it’s been 70 years since the last major war. And then utterly horrified when she realizes the scale of that war and what we consider to be minor conflicts. I just hope that when she starts taking classes that she won’t immediately wind up in a history class about WWII – watching news footage from the war without preparation could be pretty traumatic for her.
@Kessy: I certainly can’t argue with the scale of warfare in the last hundred years or so, but the Bata Neart is capable of delivering a blast of fire to dwarf a flamethrower or Napalm bomb, and is machine gun fire or a grenade that much worse than seeing the Cauldron-Born tearing a person to pieces?
She would be sickened, of course, But I wonder how much of it she wouldn’t be able to handle.
@Delta: War has always been horrific from the very beginning. I wasn’t thinking of the manner of killing, I was thinking of the scale. Entire cities reduced to rubble, thousands of people mowed down in a matter of minutes, that sort of thing.
Anyway, the dialog here gives me the impression that Aine hasn’t actually seen much combat. But if she has there’s the question of PTSD.
@Kessy: Like I said, I can’t argue with the scale of destruction.
The concept of PTSD is an interesting one, here. I don’t claim to be an expert, but so far Aine doesn’t exhibit any of the symptoms that I know about, and her unbridled joy at finally becoming a :”Battle Witch” would seem to indicate that she’s not repulsed by war (at least as a concept).
Your point that she probably hasn’t had very much battle experience is a good one, and this is probably a other case of having to wait until Rawr tell us how she feels. *Quivers with anticipation* ^^
@Delta: It is *very* tempting to reveal what I have planned for this little plot point, but I think that will ruin things for you.
However I can tell you that ever since I first conceived Áine as a character I had considered a situation where she discovers how history over the past 1500 years has played out. Needless to say, if you had lived in 500 AD hoping for a future filled with peace…humanity’s record between now than then would be the stuff of nightmares.
There is a chapter planned for how this is handled. I just haven’t decided if that chapter will happen in this ‘book’ (the next 3-4 chapters) or the next book (after Chapter 12). It may be in this book, since I’m kind of making Áine the focus of Book 2 (inter-spliced with Ashling trying to learn how to be a witch).
@Kessy: I think she’s already a bit ‘shell-shocked’ by the situation in which she has found herself. However, in many ways war has sculpted her life so far, and for most of that time she has been a victim. There’s a lot more I still need to reveal from her past, but I will eventually show how she ended up in this situation.
@Rawr: You know, the record of the last millennium and a half is not all bad. Right now, we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous time in recorded history. Think about it – you can walk from Gibraltar to the Baltic Sea alone and unarmed without fear or danger. In Aine’s time that would have been unthinkable. By 500 CE the Pax Romana was crumbling and nearly gone, and beyond Rome’s border anything could happen. The peace we have today has held for 70 years, and before 1914 the world had largely been at peace for almost a century. The UN and the EU are remarkable institutions, even with their shortcomings. I imagine Aine would find a visit to the UN headquarters in New York really moving. Not to mention that plagues and famines are largely things of the past. For all of our problems today we have come a long long way, and I’m sure that would be very apparent to Aine. Not to mention that 1,500 years is probably a literally unimaginable length of time to Aine.
Well, so far, she’s not wrong. Aine seems to be about as well-meaning and harmless as she can be.