Dartanian

Dartanian Dartanian spends Coven trying to get out of a war he's already helped make worse. By the time he turns against the Wizard, there are people on both sides who have very good reasons to distrust him. He's burned witches alive. He's served an organization that experiments on them. Deciding he wants peace doesn't make any of that disappear, and I think the story is better for letting those problems follow him. Major spoilers for Coven, including the ending. Avril starts getting through to him before he admits it. He calls her gathering a terrorist training camp; she describes peaceful classmates. Then he sees her crying. He's been told witches don't have feelings, and here's one grieving in front of him. When the Wizard orders him to kill her rather than let the coven take her, Dartanian finally asks whether she's an innocent witch. His alliance with Baba Yaga is uncomfortable from the beginning. She sees the Crusaders as killers, and he knows how thoroughly their leader has manipulated them. Before they enter the base, he insists on getting a chance to talk to his brothers without her killing them. He's spent enough of his life fueling hatred. He wants to break that cycle, even while Baba can see that his feelings for Avril are another reason he's putting himself in danger. Then the Wizard makes his choice for everybody. When Dartanian exposes the deal with Liza, some of the men still believe their leader. Others listen. It doesn't matter. The Wizard locks them in together and releases gas. Dartanian tries to pull one man through an escape hatch, and the closing door cuts him in half. That's a brutal way to show him exactly what all that brotherhood meant to the man running it. He keeps fighting alongside the survivors, but the Knight takes those men out too. Dartanian eventually blows the Knight apart with a grenade. With Baba's help, he captures the Wizard, only to find that shooting him won't solve anything. Liza has given him another four hundred years of life. So Dartanian puts him in a coffin, fills it with cement, and seals him inside. The Wizard gets the time he wanted. He just doesn't get to spend it the way he planned. What I appreciate is that Dartanian doesn't become easy to agree with after that. When Baba discovers the captive witches at the underwater station, he worries that releasing them would give Liza more allies. When she destroys the weapons developed through experiments on witches, he argues that destroying the research means those deaths were in vain. He's trying to change, but he's still carrying the thinking that made him useful to the Crusaders. He does get Avril free. She refuses to leave while the coven is still standing, so he gives her a rifle and explains that its power-inhibiting effect can be reversed. That detail ends up saving her when Liza takes the weapon and uses it without understanding both settings. Dartanian doesn't survive the fight himself. He goes after Gaia to stop the attacking plants. A vine punches through his abdomen, and he shoots her as he falls. His last request to Avril is that she stop the war. He dies before he can finish saying it. Baba initially treats that as him paying for his sins. Avril sees somebody who was finally trying to do something different. She finds the resurrection spell in Liza's book and brings him back. And his first reaction is fear. He tells her she shouldn't have done it, because now they'll come for him. The issue ends without identifying who he means. So even resurrection doesn't give Dartanian a clean escape from what came before. He gets another chance to live, with a warning attached that Avril clearly wasn't expecting.