Aldric continued recounting his experience.
"So when Edmund talked about artifacts that corrupted their wielders, that drove people to obsessive behavior, that made good people destroy themselves chasing impossible standards..." Aldric gestured helplessly. "I saw Theo. Saw what unchecked perfectionism could do. And I thought—if tools could make that worse, amplify that need, push someone past their limits faster—they needed to be locked away."
Marron set down the Precision Blade carefully. "But Theo didn't have a Legendary Tool."
"No. He just had talent and trauma and no one to tell him it was okay to be less than perfect." Aldric looked at the blade. "But if he'd had a tool that made his work even better, that showed him what true perfection looked like every single time, that never let him fail even when failure might have been healthy..."
"You think it would have killed him faster."
"Yes."
