WE ARE NOT
WHO WE USED TO BE
I don’t know who has taught you this place’s history, but I would fire them.
Orestes does not need to say, I have taught myself. The libraries he has scoured, the journals he has read; Orestes's understanding of Novus has extended far beyond a foreigner's. No, he has stayed awake for days at a time pouring over the history of Solterra; enough time to know it was never meant to be a monarch. No, Solterra was a hundred tribal identities forced to coincide. Forced to reconcile. But how does one explain that to someone who has not lived it? Orestes’s smile is cool, now; a Sovereign’s smile. Although it counts as an expression, it is truly expressionless, just as light is when it glints off a sword. He might have taken stock of what August said, if his response did not simply reveal him as another enraged and hurt orphan. Orestes had seen plenty of them, and plenty of them native to Solterra.
“Perhaps your mother and others should have been prepared for the dangers of a war-torn country. Denocte was at war with Solterra. Where were you going, August, to be put in the line of that raiding party? That is the argument you are making, is it not? That Solterrans should have had the strength to wrench themselves from an impossible situation and dethrone their past monarch as he starved them, stole their children, and sent them to a war they did not believe in? That we should never have allowed ourselves to become victims. That’s a duel-sided mentality, my friend. That war was helmed by Zolin's madness, child soldiers and slaves, not the warriors of honour in Solterra's history.” Orestes, once, would have let his heart bleed for this tragedy. He would have offered pieces of himself to right the wrong belonging to generation’s past. What is more than that: he would have sympathised. But his deprecation for weakness stems from himself; it stems from the one mistake he made that he will never make again, when he stood upon a cliffside and asked a warring nation for peace. It is the same thing he had told Boudika: It is in your nature. He knows when he delivers the comment, as deftly as one would place a blade between the ribs, Solterra has changed him.
But there are lions, and there are lambs.
Orestes has decided what he will never be again; or allow his country to become. What he does not say is that of course the responsibility belonged to other monarchs, if they cared anything for their countries and they watched Solterra descend into a madness Sovereign-by-Sovereign. Where had their armies been when the people of Solterra were first enslaved, before those of any other nation? Where had their armies been when Zolin preyed upon the weak of his own nation—a nation that relied on their monarch to defend them… and more importantly, what had made them believe they could rest behind their city walls at peace, while Solterra declined? The madness always spreads.
I was very nearly a slave here. Orestes’s eyes gleam as the sea does in sun; brightly, almost glinting. Yes, he wants to say. Perhaps you would then understand it, rather than venting this survivor’s guilt upon city and culture you don’t even understand. After all, Orestes had been slave. Orestes had born witness to exactly what powerful men will do to those who are weaker, even if it had not been in Solterra. The sun at his brow aches, and aches, and aches and he nearly bursts out, what would you say if I told you this is not a sigil of Solis, but the sigil of my own slavery? The marker where they bled the Soul from my body? Orestes had been a slave.
And now?
Well, Solterra was not Raum. Solterra was not Zolin.
Solterra was the desert sun on the crest of the Mors; the way it baked the dirt of Elatus canyon; the coastal sea rutting against the desert dunes. Solterra was Ariel’s fury and a teryr’s scream and it was never, ever meant to be helmed by tyrants. If you go to a circus to watch a tiger perform, are you not just as guilty as it’s captors? When you watch idly from a distance, when you allow the excuses of your country—it isn’t us, oh, we don’t deserve this war—to expand upon the justice owed to humanity, are your hands not red with the same blood of tyrants? Orestes says instead, “Raum only existed because Denocte allowed him to. And I do not excuse Raum, or Zolin, but they are not my country. And they never were. Megalomaniacs, narcissists, tyrants—they don’t care whether it is Solterra, Terrastella, Denocte, or Delumine. They will burn whatever they touch and the rest of the country burns with them. It could have easily been you.”
Denocte.
Delumine.
Terrastella.
Were they not the lucky ones? Spared the pain of slavery, of monarchy, of all that Solterra bore witness to?
The greater evil, Orestes thinks, is not weakness. It is indifference. As far as he is concerned, the death of August’s family is the responsibility of a government that watched Solterra fall and did nothing to prevent it, to intervene. A just war is better than one where men die for no reason.
That is decidedly not why I’m here.
There is much more Orestes might have said—and things more unforgivable than what already was. When August says, I wondered how it would be, Solterra being led by a foreigner, but you seem to fit in pretty well.
What should be a compliment settles with Orestes almost as an insult. But somehow he manages to smile back, even in the face of August’s rejection. There is a simmering rage within him, unexpected and arcane. “You as well. Hopefully you enjoy your stay, and Aghavni is a far better host than I."
It would be a lie if Orestes’s mind did not jump to the vulnerability of his companion’s back; the piquing of Ariel’s interest, an animal evolved to hunt from an ambush.
The conversation has left him flustered and full of an unaccustomed anger, one Orestes has rarely experienced in his life. He returns his eyes to the tree; admiring it and the growth it represents. What a simple thing, Orestes thinks, to be a tree. The only growth they concern themselves with is upward and outward. But men? Well, that is a different story entirely. There is a stale taste on Orestes’s tongue, like metal, and when he turns from the garden it is to walk down one of the citadel’s long corridors, adorned with sigils of the sun.
☀☀☀
"Orestes" || "Ariel." || @August
