by Duquesne » Sat Sep 21, 2019 7:27 am
The man takes time to balance his hat upon the pommel, reaching after to draw the edges of his coat closer across his chest; the desert is still on him and even a mildly cool night affects him now. Regal and well-worn buttons are fastened, tightening the man’s coat to his frame.
“It does comfort,” he says, voice light enough to match her whisper; there can be no softening the rasp at this hour and no need. “As you describe, it does — “ a high collar turned higher against his neck and throat “ — but I am with you. I cannot imagine the consequences. Terrible thoughts, unproductive.”
He rides in silence for some moments, anticipating the movements of the animal under him and absorbing them into his posture without ever losing seat. But looks at her here, observing her profile in the light reflected from the moon’s surface high above. A musing study, this.
“You speak eloquently,” he says, his interruption of the quiet nothing like interruption at all, but a natural and seamless addition to the quality of the atmosphere here. There is a sound to his voice, a sound like a smile. “That rhythm of thought is powerful; a platform.”
Listening, he hears the cadence of her skirts’ whispers and the hush of grass bending as she passes over, the sound of her footfalls joining the high step thuds of hooves, the sometimes flick-swish of tail and clink of tack as Dilys controls her prance. Beyond them, insects chirp and purr, though not as exuberantly as they had during Myrken’s warmer nights. An owl screeches distantly in the forest. And somewhere into this choreography of sounds, the man discovers Gloria’s proximity, a hand on the stirrup iron, a pace to match Dilys.
Into this, she asks him a thing that quiets the breath in his lungs. Questions no one asks — and ones no one has ever asked in quite this way before. Direct, innocent questions that reach into the heart of a deeply complex matter.
And what must she think when the man says nothing at all for long moments, long and meditative moments — and then, “Answers to those questions do not exist. They do not exist because no one has ever asked them, not as you just have. People prefer to take their measurement from assumption on this subject, using a narrow strip of understanding to inform their judgment of events and of my role in all of this. They never ask, only assume, only weigh the realities of what happened there against ignorant preconception." The architect falls silent after this, for a time, viewing the threads of hard-hearted sentiment he feels here distantly; views them as what they are, but artifacts of consciousness. "You had the decency to ask, so I will tell you what I can: I will give you context.
“There are things in this life we do and then do not remember, with intention.” He is in mind of something Glenn wrote. “Moments of history that serve us better forgotten or else heavily cloaked. We do this because to observe them in remembrance is equal to untold pain.”
A pause to breathe a near-silent breath, allowing the filling of lungs to straighten his spine, there under the weight of his pack. And it is not the sword causing this heaviness, but something else; sensation on the spine.
“I took an oath," he says, voice steady and evenly paced throughout this accounting; the voice of a man in reflection as he peels back the cloak on this story, for her sake. "My friend the king gave me a task and I did it to the utmost of my ability.” Utmost is the not the word for this; it falls well short. And in those days, his was unquestioning loyalty, three-quarters foolish, the rest being genuine heart. Naiveté at its finest. “This was to investigate a list of individuals and determine their connections to a troubling rumor, one that pointed to invasion. That — reality — was already in motion by the time I uncovered enough to understand. By then, my entire world was collapsing — neighboring forces crossed the border and tore a swath into Provincta and she fell in a matter of hours; too quick a victory to not be engineered by someone. There was absolute chaos everywhere. No one was prepared for defense. Many military leaders were on leave for royal holiday. The armies, cavalry, and archers were assembled in parade training in the south; supplies had not been replenished in the city; war machines stood idle without operators. Soldiers rushed to assemble themselves in defense but lasted only minutes in frenzied street combat. All shortcomings and slight inconveniences in the state of our military and civic defenses on that day rapidly became overwhelming disorder and confusion; an elegant and destructive choreography of errors. People simply – fled – in panic without provisions, without anything at all, into the countryside.
“And there they were slaughtered by the thousands as the enemies we did not know we had left a swath of destruction hundreds of miles long, all across Lanessian greenlands in a matter of weeks. Provincta, bright and regal, became a city of bodies, fire and smoke. Troops took the palace. The entire royal family, dead. Civic leaders, lords and ladies, almost all were dead. The realm was suddenly without its ruling body.” The man draws a slow and stabilizing breath, asserting control over a stir of instinct, here low on the spine. He is calm, but his memory is not. “And all I could do was — continue my investigation with narrow focus, hunting for those responsible. I took an oath. This was my guidepost for a time.
“The force that drove me to calculate my enemy, it was my fuel to burn. I was already suffering the smoke by the time I left Myrken Wood to return there, as the invasion was happening. And navigating the madness of the countryside to reach Provincta was — “
A small gesture of hand, a gentleman’s effort, as if to clear away a darkness; and not the night, a different darkness.
“So ensued a self-directed course of action. Single-minded, foolish, dangerous action. Though the chain of command was broken, I had my orders and I had authority, and these were the only tools available to me at the time.” Calmly, the man has just passed over years of occurrence. "There was no thought of turning aside, of stopping. I — had to fulfill my oath to the king and try to secure justice for him, for us all."
He lifts his hat from the pommel and places it on his head, mindful of the tilt forward and to the right; this so that he might free hands to return to coat pockets. “The rest is not important. What is, the story of how Lanesse fell to such betrayal and how she stood up after and retaliated.
“If you truly desire to know my part, you must ask someone who was there. They will have the truth — real knowledge of the nuances of my actions there, for good or ill — knowledge I do not have.”
The man narrows his focus down onto the night sounds around them, casting a net of senses across the landscape to help calm and distract his thoughts. He cannot be certain he represented himself well a moment ago; it gives him pause. He looks to her again now, walking beside Dilys, hand on the stirrup iron still, with all the sounds of night flooding in. It is a peculiar moment, seeming as if he has just returned from a very different environment. Perhaps he has, in remembering.
“It is an ancient name for the civilization that once existed where the desert now sprawls, formerly the seat of power in that region. r’Chyr’laud means nothing in the language today, but in its archaic form and context, it roughly translates to Seas of Qas, a reference to ancient tribal lore surrounding the origins of my mother’s people; my father’s also. r’Chyr’laud is not the name of that point of origin, that original people — so ancient we cannot remember what they called themselves. So, we call them Qas, the r'Chyr'laud — cumbersome word and the only name we have for that much older kingdom; an empire. Our ancestors.
“So few know that," he says after a breath, and looks at her. "Only a handful now. We have gone from the mightiest of ancient empires to less than one hundred. A troubling perspective, why I will not stop fighting to protect our tradition and mythology, our language and those few surviving kin. Lanesse, she stands on her own now. The desert tribes, they do not have such luxury; not yet, but they will."