People in Brunnhold often found it safe to assume that Berna could be trusted to stay stable and not derail to diablerie.
It had started to seem like she might be the right stuff for a servant position of higher rank than housemaid.
The galdori generally felt that the gated passives probably were grateful for having been given a life as servants. They never lacked housing and food. It was so much better than being abandoned on the streets of some other city out there to meet a cruel fate as best they could. Street children use to be rounded up either by factory owners who weren’t averse to exploiting them as workers under prison-like conditions, or by criminal who didn’t hesitate to exploit them for criminal ends. Some also wound up as beggars or sellers of small things like for example candlesticks and died of starvation or froze to death in the snow. There were also plenty of tales about how those sometimes left life in an explosion of diablerie and took other people with them.
Brunnhold with its firm but proper treatment of gated servants was fortunately better off. The passives mostly arrived as ten years old children who had recently been galdori who hadn’t passed the tests. They had already received a basic training in good behavior and most of them adapted to their new role in society, eventually. Despite that they were cursed they were actually seen as more trustworthy than humans and wicks. They had after all been galdori once upon a time, their families in the past had been galdori, and it was assumed that they still felt loyal with their former race. They were preferred for the more demanding servant positions.
In short, the gated passives had been lucky. They had everything they needed and it was even possible for them to pursue a career.
One day, thought Berna, one day I will rise and become way more than I am today. Ambition and hard work will take me to the top. Even though I am a passive, I will become famous and my name will mean something. Nobody will dare to call me “scrap” again, when I reach the pinnacle of what a passive can become.
What are they really, those galdori who must work by endlessly complicated “conversations”, or the wicks with their “chatting”, compared to the passives? They are blind babblers. We passives need no words. We don’t command the Mona, the Mona commands us. I think we can be seen as the envoys of the Mona itself and serving the Mona is our only true servitude.
We are channels of the power of magic itself. There is no higher position to reach in servitude.