echo Three days after the fall of the Sovereign Kingdom of Lithia and the murder of its teenaged heir, you arrive at a tavern.
It’s not a remarkable place. It’s got a wooden sign hanging out front declaring its name in bright letters and grimy windows that likely haven’t been wiped clean since before Lithia’s last war a decade ago. Its wooden facade is sturdy but not especially inviting. It looks like what it is– the sort of place locals only go to because their parents went there when they were younger, and their parents’ parents went there too, and so on and so forth. It’s a bar that hasn’t moved in the– you lean forward and check the inscription on the wooden sign, just below the tavern’s name– four hundred years since it was founded.
There are dozens of places just like it here in Lithia’s capitol city. You’ve lived here a long time and you know what to expect within. The drink will be middling and the conversation will be full of rumours and cityfolk gossip. If you were here to be nourished, in either body or mind, you’d be disappointed.
But you aren’t here for food, or drink, or stimulating conversation. You’re here for what the bartender won’t be charging anyone for– the rumours and gossip.
The door creaks as you push it open and enter. You’re enveloped immediately in humid warmth, the air thick with the scent of stale beer and cooled sweat. A shabby fireplace in one corner lends the place a hellish sort of light, casting the tavern’s occupants in red tones. The bartender doesn’t look up as you enter, and neither does anyone else. People sit huddled in little groups staring into their cups of drink, the space filled not with conversation but with the charged silence of people’s thoughts.
You know exactly what’s on their minds.
Losing a war tends to give people a lot to think about.
You pick a group of folk at random and make your way over to them before sitting at an empty table. You rest your elbows on the wood tabletop, then rest your chin on your open palms. As you wait for someone to break the silence, you consider the energy of this place.
You had expected the people in this place to feel defeated, hollowed out, but that’s not exactly what you see on their faces. Visible are the signs of war from afar, the effects that trickle back to peoples’ homes all the way from the front line– the thinness of starvation, the exhaustion of feeling under constant threat. No one here is a soldier, but everyone has paid a price for the war– in taxes; in produced food and weapons; in sons and daughters sent out to bleed for the nation. You wonder how many people here have lost loved ones amid all the fighting.
Eventually, someone speaks, snapping you out of your contemplation.
“You know what? I’m glad she’s dead.”
There’s a beat of silence as the words are absorbed by the speaker’s companions. He’s sitting near you, frowning into his mug. He has a mess of brown hair and a black expression on his face.
“Excuse me?”, a scandalised-looking woman coughs. “You can’t mean Her Highness?”
The initial speaker snorts. “Not our Highness anymore, is she? Six feet under as she is. In an unmarked grave, likely.” He pauses to take a swig of his beer. “And no, I don’t mean her. I mean the kid. The queen-to-be. Everyone’s favourite princess.”
A wave of shock goes through the speaker’s companions. Speaking so lightly of the death of Lithia’s Queen and princess so soon after their deaths seems in poor taste. They haven’t even had a funeral yet, their bodies still in the hands of the occupying Serisian military up at the palace. They had been taken from there, and now there they remain as their killers decide what is to happen to the nation they once ruled.
You imagine the Queen of Seris sitting on Lithia’s throne smiling, and suppress a surge of fury.
The group responds to the first speaker now.
“Come now, Harlan, that’s no way to speak of the dead. Let alone the dead who never wanted war in the first place.” A bearded man puts his hand on the initial speaker’s– Harlan, presumably– shoulder. “And what’s this nonsense about the Princess, huh? What’d she have to do with any of this? It’s a monstrous thing, killing a child.”
Harlan’s expression darkens further, and he shrugs off the bearded man’s hand. His next response builds in volume and audible anger as it goes on, the true extent of his scorn revealing itself as fury bleeds into each syllable. “They didn’t want a war, I didn’t want a war, yet here we are. If she really hated the idea of it so much, maybe she should’ve convinced her husband to call it off. She sat next to all the power in the kingdom but she let us get into this mess.
“And now that it’s over, I want to be sure it stays over. And sadly, that means the Princess had to go. Her family had its shot at leading us. Look where they got us!” He flaps a hand at his surroundings, as if to indicate the battered state of the country at large.
“Thousands of parents, sons, daughters, dead. Even if the Serisian bastards kept her around as a puppet ruler, who’s to say she wouldn’t have wanted revenge? Maybe she would have tried for a second round. Dragged us all back onto the battlefield again and got rid of the rest of our good children.”
Harlan shook his head in distaste. “No. This is for the best. I’m sorry for the way it turned out, but they had to go. For the good of all of us left.”
You survey the faces at his table, and find that some of them are looking at him with sympathy now. They may not think that killing a teenaged child of monarchy was righteous, but they can more than understand a desire for lasting peace. The war had taken so much from them. Seeking revenge might feel good in the short term, but it would more than likely lead to further devastation in Lithia.
“For the best? It’s for the best we let them trample over our soil and topple our King and Queen?” A new voice pipes in from an adjacent table. The voice’s owner is a heavyset man with greying hair, who’d turned around midway through Harlan’s speech and who was growing increasingly red in the face as he listened. “Where’s your pride as a Lithian, boy?”
Harlan rolls his eyes and takes another swig of his beer.
The greying man leans forward and continues speaking to Harlan with passion in his voice. “You think we should just take everything they give us? The death, the burnt up buildings, the destroyed roads, bridges, all of it? It isn’t right, damn it. My own daughter’s younger than the princess was and they killed her same as any soldier. Spitting in our faces is what they’re doing. The cruelty of it– I can’t imagine what goes through a man’s mind as he does that.”
The man sits back as heads from Harlan’s table turn towards him. The faces don’t condemn him, but they’re a far way off from agreeing with him. He pushes on, undeterred.
“I don’t know about winning or losing, but I do know this– peace with them just isn’t right. I don’t want another war but those Serisian killers have got to pay for this! I want–” he falters as he searches for the right word– “justice! Gods help us.” He punctuates the word justice with a pounded fist on his table.
The silence in the wake of his declaration is deafening– for a moment. After a few breaths, the whole tavern rumbles to life as every customer voices their opinions. You try your best to listen to all of them, but most of their arguments boil down to the two sides Harlan and the greying man have carved out.
There are the war-weary folk, willing to swallow Serisian occupation and a dead royal family if it means peace, and the enraged, justice-seeking ones, whose desire for what is right outweighs what is pragmatic. The discussions are heated, with much gesticulating and pounding of fists. Voices rise in anger, passionate tears are shed, and drinks are spilled in the chaos.
People curse the Serisians, calling them heartless thugs and barbarians for winning the war and executing a teenaged princess.
They curse the Lithian army, calling them cowards and weak-willed fools for losing the war and letting the royal family be captured.
Soon enough, the debaters move on to cursing each other, for being idiots who’ve had too much to drink.
You leave just as things break out into actual drunken violence. The sound of the brawl accompanies you as you push open the tavern door and step out into a chilly Lithian evening. You’ve gotten what you came for.
Opinions. Thoughts from common folk who felt the war from a distance but were never in it themselves, the citizens of a nation whose flags are now being torn down from buildings and streets. Seris now occupies Lithia’s capitol, and the aftermath of the war they won now occupies your thoughts.
You chew on the arguments presented in that tavern as you walk aimlessly through the Lithian streets. Your gaze strays to the tall, glittering roofs of the royal palace in the distance, and you think of executions.
Even in defeat, the people of Lithia are left with a choice. They no longer have their Queen, King, or Princess, but they retain some dignity. They get to choose their path to the future. They might decide to accept the lost war and move on with their lives, bearing the weight of a shattered monarchy, or they might prefer instead to pursue vengeance against Seris, to make right what is now wrong.
The choice between an existence under the watch of Seris, or a renewed battle to return to the way things used to be.
The choice between peace, and justice.
Your search for further thoughts on the aftermath of the war brings you to the city square, where the Serisian army are camped out.
Their tents range in colour and complexity, a hodgepodge assembly of fabrics and support beams that cover nearly the whole cobblestone surface of the space. In peacetime, this area would be used for celebrations or holidays; feasts and military marches, birthday festivities for the princess or her parents.
Now it’s filled with several thousand foreign soldiers. There will be no national celebrations for the foreseeable future, evidently.
You drift over towards the largest tent, a grand one with the flag of Seris proudly planted out front. The fabric for its roof is a grand red, stretching out to cover a space larger than the tavern you recently visited. No one stopped you on the way and no one stops you now as you brush aside one flap of rich red fabric and step inside.
A crackling firepit sits at the center of the space, a boar being roasted atop it on a spit. Men and women, all soldiers, bustle about the place in good spirits carrying food and drink. You glean from the medals they bear and the insignias on their armour that they’re all high ranking officials. This is not an official celebration commemorating the Serisian victory but the mood certainly is celebratory. The officers chatter excitedly about the future, about what riches they’ll carry back home, toasting to the health and prosperity of Seris.
You’re not in the mood to listen to these people boast, so you pick your way through the revelers over to the quietest corner of the tent, where an older man with sad eyes picks at his meal alone.
He looks up at you as you approach. You register a brief moment of confusion in his eyes before he smiles and waves a hand at the wooden crate beside him.
“Please! Have a seat,” he says congenially. “Pardon my impoliteness, but we don’t really have proper chairs here at the moment. We’re making due with what’s on hand.” You eye the wooden crate he’s offered you before sitting on it. Painted letters down its side proclaim in white, ARROWS. His crate bears the same text.
“I assume you’re here to ask about my part in… all this.” He gestures vaguely at the celebration around him. He sits apart from his fellows, despite bearing more badges on his chest than the rest of them. You had noticed the polite but distant way he interacted with his fellow soldiers. He seems to be someone important, yet someone who holds himself at arms length from his men. As well as being an intriguingly sombre figure amid all these relaxed and smiling faces.
“I could tell you I’m proud of my success here. I’ve done as good a job as anyone could expect, as commander of my division. Being chosen to be the one to break through into your city was an honour. My troops were as proud as any I’ve seen on earth, their smiles as bright as the sun glinting off their polished helmets. As for me, though? Eh.” He shrugs, spearing a sausage on his plate with his fork and bringing to his mouth.
“It’s a living. What can I say?” He chews as he speaks. “I won’t stand here thumping my chest at you like you deserve the indignity of this defeat. We went to war, we all did our best, and my side just so happened to win this time. Our steel was fortunately sharper, the aim of our archers truer. Maybe it was even my strategic genius that won us the day, at all those bloody battlegrounds. But in another world, one not far off from this one, I’d be buried now somewhere without so much as a marker for my name. So it goes.
“I’m not interested in the politics of it all, either. I can’t give you any deep, informed opinion about this land’s long history, or the score of grudges between your kingdom and mine. I don’t share my troops’ er… unfortunate nationalism. I don’t think you folk are any worse than mine just because of where we were brought up. It’s not about your Queen or mine. This isn’t personal, nor is it a thing of glory, to conquer you. War’s no place for sentimentality.”
He pauses for a spell, gaze drifting towards the scattered officials of his army, the hard men and women under his command. “You know why we’re here, in this open square, instead of squatting in your inns and homes and churches?” He turns his gaze up, towards the opening in the tent’s roof through which smoke from the firepit leaves. Looking out at the night sky, that divine space full of stars, vaster than any human conflict will ever be.
You shake your head.
He grunts, then says, “It’s because we’re not here to displace you. This was the order from above– an order I very much appreciated, despite the dearth of proper furniture it’s left me and my troops with. We’ve ended the rule of your monarchy, yes, but we’re not here to make all your lives a living hell. I like to keep the killing and discomfort to the battlefield, personally. It’s not a part of my job I much anticipate, kicking innocent families out of their homes so I can sleep in their beds for a few weeks.
“So I set up shop here instead. Tents aren’t the most waterproof I’ve ever been under, but that’s fine– dry place, this kingdom of yours. I do as my superiors tell me, and sometimes they tell me to do things I really agree with.”
The commander sets aside his now-empty plate. You blink, surprised. You hadn’t noticed him working his way through the rest of it after that initial sausage.
He folds his hands across his belly and sighs, leaning back against the red edge of the tent. “Sometimes those orders I agree with are nice and neighbourly. Like us camping out here instead of stealing your homes. Sometimes… they’re not so pretty.
“I’m sure you’ll hear it soon enough, assuming you weren’t there yourself. The executions of your royal family– that was my doing. I picked the executioner, the location, all of it. I gave the final word to end the life of your King, your Queen. Even your princess.” At that last word, his voice cracks. He clears his throat, brows furrowing as he gathers himself for his justifications.
“It’s not… godly. I know that, of course. Killing an innocent girl, little more than a child, really, who had no part in the war? Not something you do to sleep better at night. Would that the old sweethearts had no daughter in the first place. But this is war. Civilians are one thing, the leadership of the enemy is another.
“…you want to know how I feel about the dead heir?”
You confirm her question again. She sighs, and it feels as heavy as the crown on her head looks. Adorned with rubies as red as the blood her kingdom has spilled in their search for them. She looks at the mirror at you. Even the mirror isn’t hers, it used to be yours.
There are bags under her eyes unbefitting of the image of the perfect royal heir to the new kingdom.
“I was there for her execution. My whole family was. Dad said it was a custom I would have to grow used to, and he wanted me to experience it for the first time. I watched them burn all her things after they executed her. It’s a symbolistic gesture to show the total decimation. Among the frilly dresses, the noble books, everything, there was a small stuffed toy.”
“…I keep one too. It’s childish, I know. Unbefitting of someone of my lineage. I keep it hidden. My parents used to berate me constantly for being attached to him as a child. I wondered if it was foolish for me to vent and rant my frustration and feelings to a piece of cloth stuffed with cotton. If I was truly so alone that I was talking to an inanimate object. I felt stupid. It’s the worst feeling in the world. You probably know it well. Being stupid, idiotic, when you’ve been brought up with only the highest education, part of the greatest kingdom on earth.”
“Seeing that stuffed toy burn to ashes, the fact it was even there in the first place- did she too, vent her hatred and frustrations to it? I recognised the books that were burnt. I have some of them in my room at my kingdom, too. I know those novels are famous literary material, but for some reason I didn’t think she’d have them too. She probably had tutors too. My old math tutor said he taught royalty before and I’m afraid to ask if she was one of them.”
“I don’t want to be the crown heir. I’m only 16. That should mean something to me, but I’m only quoting what I’ve heard people say. All my life, I’ve had to do this, so I don’t know why me being only 16 has been such an issue to the anti-monarchists. These are my responsibilities. It is my duty to the people to rule with wisdom and might. Gods, they were probably her duties, too.”
“If I wasn’t my father’s daughter, would I have had more people to talk to than my teddy bear? If she was from a kingdom allied with mine, we could have become friends. Friendly at first, with the fake sweet smiles we’ve been taught to upkeep our whole lives. Then one day, maybe we would have found out about our shared loved of stuffed toys. We could secretly buy them for each other. Exchange them under the table at important political meetings. And we would have found someone else who could understand, truly understand the foolish grievances we had.”
“Yet it is just a possibility. A dream, wishful thinking, that was cut short the moment the executioner’s axe slammed down on her neck. Could I have done something to stop it? Was there some way I could have interrupted it without ruining the reputation of my bloodline? The reputation of my family, my kingdom, my people? I can’t. I can’t think of a single way. For all the strategy classes, chess games, philosophy classes I’ve studied, I can’t think of a single way that I could have, at that moment, stopped the axe from falling.”
“It’s a cruel joke. I’m the crown princess of Seris. One day, I am destined to become the one that protects my people, even at the cost of others. Be kind to those under me, and ruthless to those who oppose me. To be the rightful wielder of my kingdom’s power. Yet, thinking about it, it seems more like I’m a slave to the power than the power is to me.”
“The court wizard once brought up the idea of alternate universes. It hasn’t left my head since that execution. Somewhere, in an alternate universe, I’m the heir of Lithia instead of Seris. I am the one whose room is currently occupied by the crown heir of the kingdom that conquered mine. I am the one whose neck kissed steel before it took my life. I am the one who had to die as an example. It is my teddy bear that burnt to ashes that day, all my grievances and hurt poured into him burning alongside it.”
“I don’t want to die. I don’t deserve to die. And neither did she.”
“That is my opinion. I’d try to persuade you to swear an oath of silence, but I don’t think you’ll be telling a living soul.”
She’s silent after that. Staring at you in the mirror. Something in you, some feeling, stirs, even if you don’t know what it is. That emotion gave it away. Recognition flickers to life in her eyes.
You panic. And before the princess can even blink, you disappear from the reflection.
You remember his face, and he remembers yours. His face goes as pale as a ghost, which you think is a little funny. You’re not sure who he is, other than you knew him, but he begins talking before you even utter a single word.
“I knew they were coming. I wasn’t drunk, high, or any pathetic excuse I could ever dream of. I was as clear sighted that day as I am now. I-I’m sorry, just.”
His breaths are shallow and quick, like he’s been cornered. You give him a few seconds to pull himself together. A gut instinct in your non-existent gut tells you this is out of character for him- or really, whatever perception you had of him.
“…it was a clear night. It was a full moon, and all the stars in the sky were shining as bright as ever. It was more than enough to illuminate the gleam of helmets, swords, and bows in the distance. There were so many of them. I don’t know how they managed to get so close, I thought we were winning. Maybe that was a lie to stop us from panicking. I- no, I don’t deserve to ask you if it was an intentional lie. Even if it was, then you were justified, because I did panic.”
“…my husband and son both live near the castle.. They…I’ve heard all the legends about the Seris’ army. They leave no survivors. Ice fills their veins rather than blood. The only blood they have is the blood of those who they’ve killed, that stain their hands. They would kill my family.”
“The fact they got that close to the castle, without anyone else but me knowing- we were losing, your highness. Any other watchmen must have been dead, or had simply given up and let them pass. Death lurked, no, death was here already.”
“If I had told my superiors about them, the royal family would have fled, and the war would continue. They’d hunt you down like hunting dogs. It didn’t matter that the kingdom could have fought back! They don’t care, they don’t give a damn about the people, they would have razed and burned any normal citizen in their way, and my family- my family wouldn’t survive.”
He’s trembling. Choking up. You can hear the tears he’s holding back. So many emotions you never saw when he was alive.
“I’ve heard the legends. I knew- I was always looking in the mirror for you, scared of every single foreign reflection, thinking it was you. Dreading you’d come when I was expecting it the least- but now, here you are, your highness.”
He doesn’t even have his sword with him. It’s just you and him, in his bedroom. There’s no fight in the watchman you once personally picked for his role.
“The one who betrayed you is the first to die. I know the legend. Then you’ll kill all the others. I can’t stop you. Just- please, don’t kill my family too.”
“I know what I did was wrong and that it went against everything I ever stood for but I was tired, everyone was tired of the constant war, all the bloodshed, distant relatives dying more from the Serisans than illness or age, we just wanted peace and- I just wanted my family to be safe.”
Your family is dead. His is alive. He doesn’t know though, that you can still choose to pass on. Let misdeeds be misdeeds. There are two choices here.
To choose between justice or peace.
It’s up to you.
Written by: Hoe Yan & Ryan
