They walked through the warmly lit kingdom, trees towering high. It was bustling, but not crowded, and they headed toward their camp.
She looked around thoughtfully, her eyes absent; she was thinking carefully about something, her brows furrowed.
She laughed a little, considering this. "Just... what makes a person good, you know? I lied to that goblin back there about it being my birthday, and I did it without blinking an eye. I was feeling guilty about it, and I was trying to figure out if the fact that I felt guilt counted for anything."
He looked thoughtful. "I think it counts for something if you feel guilty. But honestly, I think he would have sold it to you anyways."
Her face may have fallen a little bit and she frowned, looking down at the ground. "So not only did I lie, but it wasn't even necessary."
"But..." She sighed, looking up at him. "We need to question these things, you know? We need to question the balance of was it worth putting that 'bad thing' into the world. Did enough good come from it, you know?"
She pursed her lips before shrugging. "Then it's bad," she said. "But, I mean... it's not so simple, you know? People don't just do deeds that are just bad. They do selfish deeds, which are deeds that produce a 'bad'..." She paused, frowning. "I don't like that terminology. Let's just say a negative. Negatives and positives. So, people do things where it gives everyone else a negative. Right? But for the one person, it's a positive. That's where selfish deeds come from." She shrugged again, tipping her head back to look at the sky. "I think that we all do those selfish deeds. The ones where the negatives outweigh the positives. We all do that. But I think that if we want to be better, to be truly better, we need to ask ourselves how we can do things that give more positives than negatives." She fell silent for a moment, and the tips of her ears went pink as she realized she was rambling. "...or something."
He looked thoughtful as well, but was fairly quiet. Once she was done talking he waited a moment before replying. "Do you think I can be redeemed despite everything I did?"
She paused before she looked over at him in surprise, her brow furrowed and her face softening. “I guess that depends if you want to change,” she said after a moment. “I would never reject you if you wanted to change the way you interacted with the world.” She laughed a little, shaking her head. “But I’m not a great person anyway, so who knows? I might be totally wrong about that.”
She laughed a little again, looking up at him. “I’m the only person you’ve met that hasn’t tried to kill you. That doesn’t make me a good person.”
"That's not why I think you're a good person," he said flatly, as the light of their campfire got nearer.
