[P] babylon burning

[Raziel]

R A Z I E L


—

R

aziel had visited the colosseum twice as a boy. And at first, he thinks of those gladiatorial memoirs as sharp. 

It is not a haze but a map. Every cheer, every song, every surge of blood-drunk victory is etched into parchment only he can see. The wine ran red and smooth. His mother had worn her finest jewels, her finest lupine smile. The sun shone viciously under the weight of Solis' eye, as he watched his children die against his name. What a wonderful day! It's all there.

Or is it?

Wasn't that a different world? When the air felt heavy with an aurelian righteousness, when blood and gold were indistinguishable. When Solterra stood tall on the broken shoulders of a generation of slaves. If he thinks hard enough, if he looks in the right corners of his mind, he can see them now, where before they were merely essences in the fabric of a broader memory. Their faces evade him still, their eyes might have been any shade of blue, black, green, but their shadows remain -- as do the remnants of all blistering things. A body scorched by fire will leave a charcoal stain; oh he has seen it, smelt it. There were too many to count. Rats in cages, swarming in the flesh-eating noon-heat, flinching when the gates swung open and death knocked a little too keenly. 

Why, then, were they a revision? How could he have failed so gravely to carve them into his memory in the same detail he had given nigh-on everything else?

Foolish questions. Naive and sour. Of course he knew. 

Back then, their merit met not even the dirt on his hound's feet. They were an abstraction, a nothingness in the frame of his grand measureless existence. They were not living breathing souls but pieces of recycled plastic to be toyed with and discarded; they were not even worth the armour on their overdrawn bones, if they were so lucky to be awarded such. 

How many lifetimes hide under his skin? 

He stands now in the shade of Solterra's greatest arena, listening to the crowds as they begin to gather once more, smiling grimly to himself at the ludicrousness of it all. Time is a flat circle and this desert kingdom is more cyclical than most. The warriors might be different -- they might have their own names, their own freedoms, but the sentiment was still the same. They would die like small black beetles on the floor of that theatre and in years to come nobody would remember their faces, either.

Raziel does not wonder if his opinion of slavery, of the lowrun life that hums in the capitol's gutter, has changed. 

An optimist, ever hopeful in their quest for such rare faith, would say yes. How could it not?

The truth, as always, is far uglier than that. 

§


History has its eyes on you

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