However, when you think of war, this is what you’d expect, right? Someone who is competent, almost violent. Dangerous, powerful, bewildering, sadistic, cruel. Håkon fits almost all of these categories, except perhaps for the sadism and the cruelty. He is violent, yes—he prefers violent video games, when push comes to shove, he will fight and he will be bloodthirsty, he is powerful in both presence and in powers, he is dangerous because he is a being that humans tend not to want to associate with. This is the aspect of war. But war holds many different meanings—while war destroys, tears apart families and cultures, leaving behind suffering and injustice, war is also the clash of perspectives. It’s through war that multiple perspectives are put into light, and the perspectives can then grow and become nurtured. It’s through war that the voices of the weak eventually make it out into the public. War is emotional. As much as war is strategic, faceless enemies that brutally slaughter the opposing side, war cannot occur without the clash of emotions. And this is also Håkon—this nurturing, brutal, emotional side of war, this is also what’s within him. To be honest, he gains no true pleasure from war. While war makes his hair stand on end, his heart beats faster, and he gets a high off of the adrenaline, but at the same time, he hates war. Hates it. Hates it, hates it, hates it, because unlike most adrenaline junkies, he’s seen war over and over again, in various forms, and it robs. It steals. It takes things away from people who deserve them. And the part in him that loves the world knows that war is horrible for humanity. Horrible for everyone who has to witness it.

His deepest wish is to eradicate war.

And he isn’t particularly quiet about this.

Because at the core of his being, he is an incredibly lonely individual. He is terrified of being lonely. Imagine his relief when he realized that there are three other beings who shared his fate, and who will support him throughout the millennia. He makes deeply cherished friends every lifetime, not because society needs him to, but because a lifetime without friendship, in his opinion, is not worth living. He knows that lives are short. While he will be reincarnated, time and again, the people that he has fallen in love with will likely be dead by the time he is reborn again. He only has one lifetime to meet them, to get to know them, to make a connection. Therefore, he will fight to the death in order to spend one more day with the people that he cherishes.

This is the true nature of war.

They do say love and war are two sides of the same coin...