Dark Rise reread: Prologue

[spiritsphere]

I'm doing a reread of Dark Rise and Dark Heir for meta and fanfic purposes, and while I sure don't have the patience to make a post for every chapter, I noticed some fun things in the prologue that I thought I'd put on here.

The prologue is from James's point of view, and we see Marcus the Steward from his perspective as James taunts him. Some things hit differently after having read the second book. One of them is James and Marcus's relationship, knowing that James used to follow him around as a kid and that Marcus was still arguing against the other Stewards for James's sake. It adds another layer to their interaction.

We can also see Marcus as a parallel to Anharion:

"All those vows. You've never really lived at all. Don't you wish you'd been with a woman? Or a man."

This sounds exactly like something Sarcean could have said to Anharion, now that we know more of them from Dark Heir. Did they once have a scene like this, with Anharion the fallen and defeated knight, still retaining his nobility and righteousness even when beaten and in chains? Or is it James speaking to his past self? Then we get this:

"Beg me, then. Beg me on your knees to kill you. Do it."
James hadn't thought Marcus would do it, but of course he did—he probably loved it, on his knees in an act of martyring self-sacrifice. Marcus was a Steward, had spent his life keeping vows and following rules, believing in words like noble and true and good.

We don't know what happened with Anharion during and after the war yet, but this is really feeding some of my pet theories. But I'll go into that in another post, once I'm done with my reread. For now, I'll end this by noting the sad irony of James's taunt in the first quote when Marcus was captured after spending a final night at an inn with his shield-mate, not really keeping to their vows.