i think my favorite thing about essek’s backstory is the sheer arrogance baked in to everything he’s doing. it’s not just, i need to save my mother, it’s I need to be the one to save my mother.
even acknowledging that hiding his mother’s illness is treason and therefore asking anyone for help would be asking them to commit a crime at best and risking getting turned in at worse, AND acknowledging that he’s probably tried to appeal to the bright queen+kryn dynasty to let him study the beacon (if he wasn’t too paranoid to do so) and they said no, essek DOES still have people he could’ve turned to.
they added verrat for a reason*, they showed us that essek isn’t actually alone, and that there are high-ranking figures that don’t agree unilaterally with the dynasty’s rules. essek could have confided in verrat or others, hell he could have tried to petition the crown to let him at least research typhros and try to find a cure. surely the dynasty would support trying to cure the one thing that kills them forever, no? idk maybe it’s a stretch but i’m just saying essek had options
but essek decided that not only could he not trust anyone in the dynasty (effectively saying everyone in the dynasty is too blindly religious to entertain anything he has to say, looking down on them for their, in his opinion, ridiculous devotion) but he also decided that he will be the one to unearth the secrets of the beacon when centuries (millennia?) of people before him could not.
essek thinks he can crack the code while deceiving the dynasty right under their nose and working with a foreign, antagonistic power with unknown motivations. he thinks he can control this situation he’s created and he thinks this so resolutely that he is willingly, knowingly, risking the lives and souls of himself, his family, and his country.
essek’s arrogance comes through in so many of his choices and interactions (sneering to trent about how it would take centuries to teach trent the basics of dunamancy despite only being a century and change old himself, his snide comment to his mother about her faith, the fact that he LITERALLY floats above others) and it’s one of my favorite things about his character because he is smart. objectively, he is smart. and yet his belief in his own intelligence makes him do such stupid things. not only is this realistic, but it’s FUN
it’s so fun to me how he disdains the dynasty for its “blind” belief in the luxon but doesn’t recognize his own blind faith in his own abilities. and (putting this below the cut bc spoilers for campaign 2 and essek’s story)
(via essektheylyss)