Spoilers for the end of The Last Herald-Mage on highlight:
Yeah so, uh, Van dies in a self-sacrifice move that he sends Stef away for; Stef thinks at the time he's being sent to get backup and doesn't realize until he literally feels Vanyel explode. As well as the loneliness of a broken lifebond—which feels like his heart is literally bleeding out of an open wound in his chest basically, a big echoing space where you should feel someone else and they're not there—he's upset with himself for not realizing, angry at Van for not letting Stef choose whether to stay or go, trying just to get out one last work of art—to tell the world what really happened to Vanyel before anyone who wasn't there or didn't know him could romanticize it—before planning to go off and die. The book doesn't actually have THIS fucking miserable an ending but Stef doesn't know it yet.
He also like. Grew up on the streets with an abusive caretaker who he knew was planning on selling him into prostitution when he got too old to be useful to her as a sympathy ploy when begging, but he is comparatively over that one.
Re: ONE MORE THING--
Yeah so, uh, Van dies in a self-sacrifice move that he sends Stef away for; Stef thinks at the time he's being sent to get backup and doesn't realize until he literally feels Vanyel explode. As well as the loneliness of a broken lifebond—which feels like his heart is literally bleeding out of an open wound in his chest basically, a big echoing space where you should feel someone else and they're not there—he's upset with himself for not realizing, angry at Van for not letting Stef choose whether to stay or go, trying just to get out one last work of art—to tell the world what really happened to Vanyel before anyone who wasn't there or didn't know him could romanticize it—before planning to go off and die. The book doesn't actually have THIS fucking miserable an ending but Stef doesn't know it yet.
He also like. Grew up on the streets with an abusive caretaker who he knew was planning on selling him into prostitution when he got too old to be useful to her as a sympathy ploy when begging, but he is comparatively over that one.