New year, new read. If funny how the choice was for sleeper agent, and there was a decent streak of avarice because of the loans, but her recent career looks more like
And I actually found a typo, which tells you how much this initial part is usually skipped.
Presumably they're not solely concerned about spiders and or finding landscape string to steal.
It is fascinating, but it is worth pointing out that Mathilde came about her drive to succeed beyond rational measure from the traumatic yet formative years in service to Stirland.
She was thrust into an entire province in not just crisis, but secretly in shambles. She had to scramble to get the province back on stable footing (even without taking Sylvania into account). She had explicit and blatant reason after reason thrown into her face as to why "good enough" just
doesn't cut it in the face of the Empire's foes. She couldn't just do a decent job, even if being thrown into the position she was not at all prepared for would warrant a merely decent performance. The province's finances and legitimacy depended on her outright finding the feudal contracts and tax agreements, and for that she
had to succeed fully, and quickly.
The castle wasn't secure against an enemy with a history of infiltration. So she had to lead and perform that job by herself, under her own initiative. She almost got clawed in the face when she stumbled upon the reality that the castle
was infiltrated by enemy agents, and had to scramble to try and uncover the breadth and depth of that threat as quickly as possible.
Stirland's poor economy was being strangled by a major business cartel. She was just one woman, and she had to deal with the entire thing decisively. She devised a strategy using all of her assets and abilities and played to her strengths to destroy her foe completely in one fell swoop.
The undead were building up towards a war, and Stirland was hardly a bastion of strength. But when opportunity came knocking in the form of a dragon mercenary, she had to make the most of it. She brushed up on a plethora of spells to make herself more personally potent and capable as an agent of her Elector Count.
In the campaign against Sylvania, the war was brutal, its lessons harsh. Victory was hard-won and mistakes were often punished severely. It wasn't just failure, it was lives on the line. And when bad luck struck repeatedly at Drakenhof, she took it upon herself to take up the Runefang and see her dead leader's campaign to its completion, because she refused to accept leaving the job unfinished.
In the Karak Eight Peaks expedition, Mathilde's performance was stellar, but clearly driven by a desire to avoid a repeat of the failures and tragedies of Sylvania. Every trap she discovered during infiltration and sabotaged was many lives saved and potentially the difference between victory and defeat. She took great personal risks repeatedly because the stakes were high and she might make the difference for entire armies (and she did).
Mathilde's development as a character was around people determined to try and succeed against the (very long) odds to better the world for a lot of people, when failure would mean potentially devastating results for those same people. They would change the world for the better against the odds or die trying. It was true in Stirland and true at Karak Eight Peaks, and Mathilde is not the type to balk at such attitudes from her comrades. Mathilde
hates failing, and that hatred was born of the trauma from failures in her career and living with the high stakes often featured in her endeavors, where she knows that failure could be (or
would be) catastrophic for lots of people.
But she's also a Ranaldian. She has a hard time resisting golden opportunities presenting themselves, even if capitalizing on them is quite risky and difficult. For her, a powerful wizard, the kinds of golden opportunities at her level are
big opportunities indeed, with commensurate difficulty and risks. And combined with her nature as a Grey Wizard, where she is good with aligning her interests with her duties, and it translates into being a massive overachiever who gambles for very meaningful stakes in a very calculated manner.
