"I think it is more different than you realize." Erthe could feel a shred of anger. Primrose might be a sweet woman, someone he could easily find himself liking, but she was spoiled and naive if she thought their situations were anything alike.
"So you shut yourself off, draw everything that makes you who you are inside and bury it deep, hide it from the world. Then what? The years crawl by, eating away at your soul until you can't even remember who you are anymore. Is there a real you? Or has the shell you've shown off the real you now? Life and the world corrodes you until all will to fight it has been stripped away and you can't even remember why life is worth living. Until one day you wake up and all you want is for it to stop. Forever. Until you long for your outside to be as dead as your inside already is." His voice was low, but rather than angry, his tone was so very...defeated.
Erthe knew, because his life was already like that. What reason did he have to keep living? None. Except to keep Primrose safe, as he had sworn to Jain he would do.