Mason's quite possibly the edgiest character I've ever come up with. Cut him some slack, he's going through his emo phase as the world falls apart around him. This is spoken to Goldie, a fey noblewoman with good intentions but a less than friendly reputation as far as our speaker's concerned.

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No, no, I can't. I can't trust you.

I mean absolutely no offense by this, absolutely none at all, but I can't trust you. And before you ask, yes, it is because you're fey, in part.

I'm gonna take magic theory for GCSE, if we ever manage to fix the world back up enough that the education system can start again. There's a bunch of people who were planning on taking it just because they were doing practical magic and that's recommended, or because their parents told them to, or because their friends picked it. I could go on.

I am not one of those people. I picked magic theory because I have a genuine interest in magic. My genuine interest in magic has led me to books on magic, and some of those books on magic have chapters on the Fair Folk, and in every single one of those chapters there is said as clear as if it was in bold and underlined, "You can't trust the fey."

So I can't trust you.

And I know people in books can be wrong, I know all about that, but there's one book that I know doesn't tell lies, and that's got one hell of a story in, involving various betrayals of trust, and other, equally scary things. I'm almost certain that you had nothing to do with it, but I'm not about to risk it. I'm sure you can understand why.

There's other things too - I could go on for a year or five, but I don't have five years to talk. I have five minutes.

Recently I've found that it's not such a good idea to trust people you've known for a long time. I don't know. It sounds stupid, but it really isn't. You can't bloody trust anybody, or at least, I can't.