User:SilverCrono/Father of Silence


 * THE FATHER OF SILENCE

THE QUEEN came to his office and he wanted to weep.

“Good morning, my liege.”

“I need something from you.”

“The last time you asked me that,” he said, with all the weight of the dead on his shoulders, “I lost the woman I love.” The Queen said nothing. He looked up at her and saw eyes closed and arms crossed. The Baron exhaled. “I have no one left to sacrifice.”

“I would not ask you that again. Now I need you to kill for me.”

“Do not ask me that. Please.”

“It is your job.”

“My burden.”

“You are all I have left to ask from. The only one.”

She was right and he knew it. The wind rattled against his cracked office window and the Queen looked lonely. Her flawless black dress was still tight near her stomach where a life had been. She could sense his resignation. “There is a rebellion that will rise soon. I need it crushed before it gets to its feet. Before people hear of it.”

“How easy you give me such a cruel order, my lady.”

“Nothing of this is ever easy.”

The Baron could already hear the sad strings of his cello, deep as the guttural moans of the dying. “I remember when we were a revolution.”

“As do I. That is why I know when action must be taken. Before they can stand.”

“They?”

“The rebels. Inusians. They plan to overthrow me. Assassinate.”

“I do not understand. The Inusians have a nation, beneath Chancellor Maebyss. Why do this?”

“Their nation is in the south, beyond the mountains. Foreign, baron lands. I hold their ancestral home. Theirs is a scorned fury. I know it well.”

The Baron of War started to say something else but stopped. He felt the cold in his bones already. It was better, he thought, not to remind her that she was ordering him to kill for what she claimed to be born with.

“I will not ask you to forgive me. Only to trust a queen is never wrong.”

The memory hurt him. He had only heard someone else state that, someone he had no longer. The Baron closed his eyes, tired, mournful, cold. “I do not think you wrong. I never did. Neither did she.”

“Thank you.” Then she was the Queen again, never nostalgic, never regretful. Only others. “You will find them beneath Mortis.”

The irony stung like winds heavy with ice and hail. The Baron let his eyes peel open when he heard the door to his office open again. His Queen stopped halfway through it, door’s shadow hiding all of her face but those piercing, weaponized eyes, gold as Asearya Jyukyu’s immortalized corpse. “Return,” the Queen commanded, simple and loud. Another order.

“For the Queen’s glory.”

The outside of his train car was covered in Imperialist graffiti. Largest among the illustrations and slogans was an image of the Queen’s face. Her eyes looked more alive there tan in her actual face. Pools of strength and power the color the sea used to be. He dreamt of drowning in them as his empty train car cut through the frozen, wasted earth. A thousand ice-blue reflections shared the ride with him, all of them silent.

He ended up spending three days in the ruins of what was once the great city of Mortis. The first day, he acclimated himself to its under-city and became an Inusian again – abandoned his uniform, pulled off the dirty rags of a man dead on the street, visited multiple bars and bought various drinks, all in that first night. On the morning of his second day he met with an intelligence officer of the Queen’s that told him information on where to find the meeting of the Inusians. They would gather in the ruins of a church above ground, he was told, and would share information and make plans for their assassination plot late into the night. By noon on the second day, he had found the church and set up enough explosives beneath the falling snow that the entire block that the church sat on would burn with the push of a button.

The job would be easier than he thought. The Baron had imagined he had been singled out for this task because it was going to be difficult, would result in a harsh battle requiring the use of great violence, but upon realizing just how openly it was that these people engaged in revolutionary action, he realized that the Queen had ordered him to crush this as a lesson, as a way for him to know what it is he had to stamp out around all of the country. This was not just an act of suppression, but rather a forced realization of the tenuousness of the empire. He returned to the under-city, only to enter the church again that night.

The meeting was much less militant than he thought. If not for the rare moment of seriousness and actual rebellious conversation, he would have imagined that his information was wrong. Everyone there traded false names and pseudonyms at the beginning of each meeting before drowning themselves in drink and sharing news of the empire amongst themselves. They spoke of killing the Queen rarely and nonchalantly between stories of under-city infrastructural progress and gossip. The leader of all discussions among them was a woman that introduced herself only as the Mother. She was as tall as Tasshon and full-figured, with almond eyes that sported deep bags beneath them.

The Baron met with them, blended in with them, drank with them, laughed with them, shared stories with them, listened to them, and mourned for what he had to do.

On the evening of the third night the mother pulled him aside in the midst of the second meeting and requested to see him in her office. Her breath and his were heavy with alcohol but neither of them were drunk in the slightest. He could tell in the sureness of her step, the tightness of her grip, and the way she looked back at him in the office, when he closed her door behind them and she sat behind her desk. The mother aged ten years in a single exhale.

“You are a traitor, a spy, an assassin, or all at once.”

The Baron blinked. “You knew.”

“Of course I did. From the moment you walked in, I knew.” She folded her hands together. “I respect that you did not bother denying it. With such confidence, I can tell you are either supremely talented, or you have no regard for your own life.”

“I thought I hid it quite well.”

“Oh, you did. Wore the right rags, nodded at the right words, paid the right amount for a casual donation. Played at being drunk just enough to blend in and draw no suspicion to yourself. The others have no idea. But you could not hide your eyes. They were too calm, too strong. No one here is composed that well. We have all been consumed beyond control by our hatred of that woman.”

“The Queen.”

“Yes. It is not rare to dislike her, so I imagined – stupidly, I see – that we would be best hiding in plain sight.”

“You did nothing wrong. But the Queen prides herself on having eyes and ears everywhere. You joke on killing her as some others do, but it is too consistent to be a joke. Your fantasy plans are too real at times, make too much logistic sense. Little escapes her.”

She nodded, and looked thoughtful for a long moment. “You came here to kill me.”

“Not just you. Everyone.”

Another sage nod. “You will not leave this building alive if you kill me now.”

The Baron considered that. It was not a threat. “I have been ordered to return alive.”

“And I have been ordered to kill the Queen.”

“By whom?”

“The souls of my dead. Who else could command a heart of ice like mine or yours? Who else commands yours?”

“Who are your dead?”

She flinched at his avoidance. Blinked, but nodded in acceptance of it. “My sons. My granddaughter. My husband. My parents. All, stolen.”

“I’m very sorry.” His face darkened. “Truly.”

“I’m sure you are. But do you understand what you are sorry about? Do you know an inch of that pain?”

“I do.”

“Doubtful. You are young. Scarred, likely, but you have not lived as long as I have. Did not have as much to be taken from you. If you did, you would have abandoned your mission already.”

“I can’t do that. It was an order.”

“What is your name? Your true one. You seem young to be an assassin.”

“Tasshon el Divrus.”

She inhaled through her name. “El? So you were a noble.”

“My father was a marquis in King’s Town. That is all.”

“Does he still live?”

His jaw clenched. “I don’t see the relevance of this. I don’t want to waste your time, or mine.”

“With the push of a button under my desk, I could have you seized and shot before the entire congregation. Answer my question, sir.”

“No, then. My father passed in the famines after the Separation. He left me no inheritance and no lands.”

“Were you surprised by that?”

“No. He never liked me, and I never wanted his position or his wealth that would lead me to be a soldier at best and a tyrant at worst. That bothered him. Always did.”

“And now you are a soldier for a tyrant.”

“He would be proud. I know that.”

She laughed, and laid her hands on the desk. “I myself married into the midfix of El. My sons were so close to becoming full adults. Their childhood was comfortable and they never wanted for nothing. They were good boys who loved and lived well. Do you have any idea what it’s like, to have that taken from you, to bury your own flesh and blood? To fail at even that, where there aren’t any flesh left to bury?”

The Baron’s heart twisted in his chest. “I do.”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “Oh?”

“I am a father. But my son is… not mine. And his mother is dead.”

The mother leaned forward, eyes strong and wide. “Then my pain is familiar to you, truly. Our pain. You are one of us.”

“Yes.”

“Then join us.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m offering you a chance to join us honestly. You would be welcomed with open arms, and the things you know of the Empire would save many lives. Abandon your mission and your usurper queen. And keep your life.”

He closed his eyes and sighed.

“You are a father, Sir el Divrus. An Inusian father with a child stolen by a Mortisian queen. Have you no rage? No patriotism, no pride, no shame?”

“I do. In spades.”

“Then why do you still serve the Queen?”

He could not look into the well of his soul into the doubts. Could not tell her. So he said nothing.

“I see it in you, Tasshon el Divrus. She has stripped you of everything. There is only the hatred left. It sleeps in you still, but it is there. We will welcome it. We can rebuild with it.”

“Do not ask me to kill for you. Please.”

“You won’t have to. We have people for that. All you need to do is supply us with information.”

“That will not be enough for long. You will have me kill. You will have me hate. Is that your way?”

“No. It is the way of your Queen. We will use the usurper’s tools to dismantle the usurper’s house.”

“You are wrong. The Queen does not thrive only on hate or only on the desire to kill. She is not evil.”

“It is evil to summon wars, to command and conquer, and to ruin. She has done nothing but. You think she cares for this world. You are wrong. Just another brainwashed Imperial.”

“No. I know too much of wars, and too much of the Queen. This was never the world she wanted. She has lost, too. She has sacrificed, too, all for a greater good. If we all took revenge on the ones we lost when this world split open, there would be no one alive right now. Why do you think you have the right to act like this, to kill the only one with the ability to restore life to this broken world? Why does your hate blind you so?”

The mother exhaled and closed her eyes and convulsed for a moment as if something in her throat were seconds away from forcing her to vomit. Then she willed her eyes open, and the Baron saw no tears in them.

“I hate your Queen so much for the same reason she hates me. Us. The same reason my children are dead. My husband is dead. My mother is dead. My granddaughter is dead. My homeland is dead. Our sweet, strong, old Inusia, with its supple, enduring earth; its forests of evergreens and its green mountains, its winds of ancient and fruitful glory. Its heat drenched days and its nights of peaceful autumn winds. Its honey-sunrises and the intimate sunsets on its black coasts. She has killed them all. She has forced their silence. I can’t hear the ghosts of my sons or my husband. I can’t even look wistfully at the land stolen from beneath me. I can’t look fondly on the home taken from me, because it has all crumbled and been buried beneath snow and her Empire. All that is left for us are scars on our hands from the burying of our dead. Scars on the terra from the falling of the snow. She made an empire on the suffocation selfishness of snow. She has killed even the rain. She has silenced the dead. She has erased our fields, made illegal our history. She has stilled the seas. Her men have marched on our bodies. Your men have marched on our bodies. Your men have carved out our graves and made city beneath them. Your men took our heartland and made throne out of its ribs. Your war burned our cities to ash and then burned that too. Your empire made a coronation ceremony out of our funerals. Her empire was built out of all our children while your people sung a language we taught you in triumph. Her new empire rose beneath clouds heavy with blood and tears the Goddess did not dare let fall. She ordered even the Goddess to abandon her sorrows for us. She robbed us of even our mourning and our right to be mourned for. Made it a capital crime to mourn. To be born enemy. She claimed to fight a war two thousand years in the making, for a country we raised up from dirt and cracks in the ground and conquered fairly. She killed her own parents just to gain the emotional strength necessary to cause the deaths of our innocent families and to crack open the skies. We gave her country its children. We wrote its histories in our own tongues. We rebuilt her country in gold. I watched my golden home become sepulcher the color of dust. I watched my bloodline dry up and become a river of dust. I watched our sparkling rivers dry up and become fading lines of dust on a map of the dead. I hate your Queen because I have nothing left but hate in me. There is nothing left for me to love in this world. There is no one left for me to love in this world. There are no more places to hide, no more songs to sing when the ghosts of my family haunt my memory. There is no more sadness in my heart, no more desire to make amends or force my spine upright again. There is only the hatred. I have become the hatred. We have become the hatred. We have all lost everything. We do not need to bring her Empire down to act on it. We only need to kill her, to soak and bloat her wretched body with blood. The fire of Inusia will burn again at the slightest hint of weakness in your empire, let alone the dying of your queen. The seeds have begun to germinate in the hills of dust. The skies and the Goddess will finally weep for us again. The only thing left for me is the hatred and the dying. I have become the dying. We all have. All of us, we have nothing left but this. Our bodies continue to sleep, to wake, to eat, to build, to work – but our minds and our hearts are always thinking of one thing, this one thing, always and forever. I was a mother and a wife, and now all I have to hold in my cold bed is this hatred, this dull hatred. But I know it will never leave me. I have nothing left.”

The father left the office and he wanted to weep.

He left in the third night without retrieving his hidden uniform. Of small mercy, he did not signal the building to burn until he was at the train station. It was a crime and a defiance, but he hoped that the mother left when he saw the plume of fire rising to the gray skies as his train began to groan away from the city of ghosts.