All Around Glacia...
A single snowflake is a simple, tiny thing. Small and delicate, it is easily ignored, overlooked, destroyed.
Like whispers. They started off quiet, just a word here and a nod there. Secrets passed between trusted friends of good deeds done and supplies left behind. Where to leave a message to call upon some helpers who did not seem to understand that it was the lot in life that the weak must suffer for the strong to thrive. Of Blood who treated landens as equals, not inferiors, and people stranger still. Word spread through Glacia like a cold wind and only those most exposed to the elements took heed.
A single snowflake can be disregarded without notice, but as part of a multitude, it becomes something much greater. As part of a snowstorm, it takes on a life of its own and becomes infinitely more dangerous. Only the most wealthy and insulated can afford to ignore a blizzard; everyone else is forced to take notice.
Through the winter, the snow continued to fall. More fell in the towns and cities to the south, like fluttering pieces of paper that blanketed the streets in words and images, in shadows of truths so chilling that people swept them from the ground before children could look at the grisly pictures printed upon them. Still, out of sight didn't mean that the snowflakes had been forgotten. People would talk about the chill in murmurs, in pubs over drinks barely touched. In beauty salons with distracted looks in their eyes as winter fashion and the usual gossip was forgotten. The snowflakes had piled up, and people who wouldn't have noticed before were watching what they had once thought was steady footing begin to slip.
A blizzard is dangerous, but an avalanche more deadly still. A torrent of snow the size of mountains capable of leveling any building, no matter how wealthy or stately. Even the highest of the high could not avoid an avalanche that was coming for them; neither money nor prestige nor power can force an avalanche to change its course.
All that devastation starts with just a single flake of snow. What would happen, you suppose, when it was people at the heart of the avalanche?
Whole Territories could fall.
***
Hunner watched his daughter from the corner of his eye. Astrid had finally stopped flinching every time there was a knock on the door, had stopped clutching Riesa so tightly the child whimpered anytime they went out in public. This morning, she seemed more like her old self, the sweet cheerful daughter he remembered from before that Blood bastard had seduced her and then abandoned her once her belly began to show.
She was humming a song as she mended a shirt, sitting in a beam of weak winter sunlight. Riesa was sleeping in her cradle being rocked by Astrid's foot. It was the first time since they had moved into this small cottage that Astrid had allowed the windows to be open, had risked a stranger seeing her baby girl and barging in, demanding that they return their little Ludmilla.
Hunner hid a smile and turned his attention back towards the wooden dowel he was carving. Perhaps now Astrid was finally accepting that this was real, that they had escaped and were safe and no one would take Riesa away from them again. Every morning when Astrid woke to find her daughter still asleep in the cradle, she would audibly thank the Darkness. Hunner did not. His thanks went to a band of young adults, Blood and landen and something altogether different who had defied the aristos of their town to sneak Riesa back and return her to her real family.
Astrid could continue thanking some vast concept that blessed the Blood and ignored the landens. Hunner would put his trust in someone that listened.
***
They were going home. After the run through the winter snow, after exhaustion, nightmares, injuries and, worse, watching their friends fall one by one, they had been granted leave to go home. Some had chosen to stay behind. The General had kept them as safe as he possibly could from the smoke that still caused him daily pain, and, nightmares aside, they wanted more than ever to see this war to the end.
Some hadn't been given the option. The final few steps had brought burning breaths to a handful of them as inky horrors swept through the cave, mere seconds before midnight wings had folded around them and swept them away to safety.
They were unfit to fight, the last few of Jonothon's soldiers, and speaking, especially through Glacia's winter cold, was sometimes a burden, but that didn't mean they were going to leave the war behind them. As they traveled, as they made their way back to the towns and villages that they called their respective homes, they gave accounts of the fall of Yllestad, of the nightmare that had chased them ceaselessly through the cold and the dark.
There had been six of them, in total, that had been sent away, told that they would have to find a different way to serve their Queen and their people. And as they went their separate ways, as six dwindled to five, to four, and so on, another voice, rough and slow and sometimes thick with pain, stayed behind to tell the story.
People would happily listen to a new story in the dark of winter. Days were cold, and nights were long, and there was nothing like a new tale of horror and heroism to make them seem warmer and shorter.
This one spread quickly, gaining momentum with every ear that heard it and every mouth that passed it on.
It was all the more potent a tale when people were shown for themselves by the wounded soldiers telling it that it was true.
***
This is a cleaner death than I deserve and for that I am sorry.... Written in a shaky hand, the suicide note was found pinned to the body, neat and fastidious like the Steward himself was, err, had been. The note was unmarked and the clothes it was fastened to were clean and sharply pressed. He had taken no chances and chosen a clean way to die, to ensure that his note was completely legible when it was found. It contained apologies and recriminations, but most of all, it contained accusations.
In it, he confessed that the rumors were true, there were several abandoned landen villages within his Queen's District and that they had been emptied deliberately. An emissary from the Ruling Council had arrived at the Court and privately asked if she would be willing to part with several villages' worth of landens. In exchange for three years of tithes paid by the Ruling Council, she had agreed. Neither she nor her Steward had asked what would happen to the landens the emissary took and he did not volunteer.
When I heard stories of the maddened army, I had to know for certain. So I traveled to one of the desolate villages to see if there was any clue to where they had gone or for what purpose. I knew for certain the stories were true when I saw no personal items had been taken and the stores were all intact. But the buzzing of the flies drew me to the well and I saw what happened to everyone the emissary deemed unuseful.
Hell's fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness have mercy. But not on me. Not on anyone in Glacia who bargained away the lives of their people in exchange for goldmarks...
By the time the Queen heard of her Steward's suicide and the damning note, it was too late. Too many people had read it, or a copy of it, or had heard of the contents from a trusted friend. Her own First Circle rose up against her; it was her own Master of the Guard that separated her head from her body.
She was the first Queen to suffer that fate. She would not be the last.
***
"It's too much."
The two men stood impassively, shoulder to shoulder in her doorway, and the village Queen of Fréwihr squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and looked each of them in the eye.
"The tithes have gone too high. My people have given all they can give, and it's been a long winter. We can't afford any more. We'll starve well before the spring thaw, if we do."
"You were told when your farmers were seeding the land last year," one of the males, a Warlord wearing the Purple Dusk said. "You knew this was coming. It takes supplies to fight a war, after all, and Lord Hobart's bitch-Queen niece is doing all in her power to see to it that this one drags on."
"And if we don't pay?"
The other male, a Summersky Warlord Prince, simply gave her a predatory smile.
"If you don't pay, then you'll be seen as a drain on the war effort, then, won't you? Fréwihr can't continue to thrive on the shoulders of Glacia, existing in spite of the Territory's best interests, can it? Now, if you had something more substantial to offer than wheat and wool…"
She didn't dare step back, even as the pair of males looked at her, sizing her up like a piece of fresh meat. They smiled all the more. The fear and resentment she was feeling were plain as day in her psychic scent.
"And if I do?"
"Then we might be convinced to collect the equivalent of the last payment you made," Purple Dusk purred, leaning forward to have himself a good look down the front of her dress. "And allow you to pay the rest back at… a more opportune time."
"Then take what you need, and go."
It wasn't until several hours later, after the two males had left a receipt stating that Fréwihr's debts had been paid in full, while the village Queen was mending the tears in her bodice, that she dared to show any emotion at all.
"We look forward to doing business with you again in the spring," they had said.
Her Consort didn't ask, that night, what had happened to her dress. He didn't ask, either, why she was crying. He simply held her until she fell asleep with a needle and thread still clutched in her shaking hands, offering no more than comfort and safety in his arms. And, the next day, he wrote a letter back to the Consort the next village over.
Yes. Here, too.
***
Yllestad.
That was the word on the mouths of those who realized just what worth their home held in the eyes of Hobart. Farming communities, trading communities that had suffered hard with the rise of the tithes, uncertain that they'd be able to afford the next one. Villages that, for one reason or another, had expressed some sort of unhappiness in the way Glacia had been run, after Hobart's rise.
Witchblood.
A word that many knew the meaning of, but few had ever been given cause to worry about, was sweeping over those communities now. An entire field of it had burned in the North, a city dead, and a village left abandoned to the ravages of the smoke. There was a gripping fear now, choking anyone who had ever wondered, just what was their home worth, in the eyes of Hobart.
Village after village, town after town, people set out on foot, en masse, to see just how much danger they were in. Some settlements found nothing. No witchblood fields, laying under the snow, waiting for a tongue of witchfire to set it ablaze. No spread of deadly poison, the land's way of exposing unmarked graves, to make another statement, to try to kill she who would be Queen.
Some settlements found nothing. Some settlements found far more than they had ever wanted to find. Fields, entire expanses of flowers, wilted in the winter cold, sitting above the bones of countless dead, a vast majority female, sporting a wicked fang under one fingernail. The graves were new enough, in some cases, that faces were still recognizable, preserved in the cold.
Some of the smaller villages near such fields decided to evacuate entirely. They wouldn't let themselves become another word to be whispered in fear, another example of the state of the Territory that they called home. Others sent out sentries, often Warlord Princes, always volunteers, sporting the darkest Jewels each town could find. They'd watch the fields in shifts while their families attempted to live out their day to day, knowing that just beyond the walls of their homes, there was the threat that they, too, would suffer the same fate Yllestad had.
***
The word of the emptied villages was told to any that would listen, and occasionally those who would listen were those who made a life for themselves by telling and re-telling. Once, it reached the ear of a Southern bard, one who took it upon himself to visit the villages, to see these ghost towns with his own two eyes. Making his life on the road, singing for any who would listen, he was no stranger to some of the villages that had been named, and found himself standing in the middle of the silence of the first he came across, horrified and overwhelmed.
It helped, somewhat, that he found a small sign planted in the village center that simply named the place and asked that prayers be said for the inhabitants who passed away. Impressed by the lack of animosity and the grief he could feel from the group that called themselves Karla's Commandos, he wrote a song, to honor the fallen, to make certain that the story these villages had to tell would be immortalized. Would be heard.
Soon, the entire Territory was singing that song, a memorial to far too many needless dead.
Mother, o mother
where were you that day?
The children they were playing
And the old ones asleep
Mother, o mother
the sick and the well
Gone, gone. Mother, say why
The houses stand empty
the fields are undone
the beasts are a roamin'
for their masters are gone
suppers boiled over
drink left half-drunk
oh, oh. Mother, say why
the people were taken
their Queen they would fight
no choice were they given
no thought for their lives
Mother, where were you
the day that they died
Gone, gone. Mother, say why
He closed their minds, my brethren
their hearts, they could not see
He sent them after Glacia
to die in misery
So in your embrace we hope they may be
oh, oh, Mother of Night
***
The thing about an avalanche was, once it really started to pick up speed, there was nothing stopping it. Not even immovable objects. Word spread, as did dissent. Glacia's people weren't happy with what had become of their home, they were sick of being tithed past the point of desperation, and far too many were wondering the same question, Will we be next?
This avalanche rolled through Glacia, down from the mountains in the North, echoing upward again from those who were shocked and sickened by the actions of their Queens in the South, until it swept through Glacia's capital, Sidra, with a clear message.
No more. What had once been an unknown, a usurper Queen who had no business ruling their Territory, was now being seen as a savior, every other tongue in the city bearing a tale of an army of Blood and landen, united for love of a Queen and for their home, traveling from the North to the South to pick up the pieces left behind by Hobart. Everyone seemed to have a story, a cousin in the North whose home had been salvaged by Karla's army. A brother in the South whose daughter had been rescued before she could be broken. An innkeeper in Sidra itself who swore that he could see Karla's own first circle rescuing his patrons as his business burned to the ground.
The Avalanche hit Sidra. And, as Avalanches do, it left chaos in its wake. The same people who had lined up to hiss and boo she who would be Queen now roamed the streets, attacking those that wore Hobart's loyalty on their sleeves, burning anything that bore his name, or the name of the false Queen that still sat at the head of the Territory. People had seen enough. They had heard enough. Sidra had been left mostly untouched by Hobart's cruelty, but for how long?
No more, they cried into the streets, and they demanded justice. Justice for the landen villages that had been emptied and twisted, sent off in droves like helpless sheep for the slaughter. Justice for the fields of witchblood, marking the mass graves of those who would not serve. Justice for a Province Queen whose own sister had turned against her, poisoning her mind in Hobart's name and filling her thoughts with rats. Justice for the people bled dry with tithes that existed only to cater to aristos who already slept on sheets of silk while village Queens threw away their dignity so that their people wouldn't suffer. Justice for the daughter of a Queen and Consort who had been stricken down in their prime, who had been forced to flee the Territory so that she could reach adulthood unbroken, who had won the right to step up to take her mother's place and rule her home in the old ways.
Justice for Yllestad.
Justice for Glacia.
Hobart glared out the window, his mouth twisting in a sneer. "Bloody savages," he snarled, letting the cloth-of-gold fall curtain fall shut. "They're practically lapping up the blood."
Outside the window, the Ruling Council's chosen lamb had been led to the slaughter. The rioters had nearly stormed the estate, demanding justice for Yllestad. Some of them had been calling for the deaths of the entire Ruling Council. He had fobbed off blame on some poor soul and denounced him in front of the mob. They'd called him a liar, but Hobart noticed that hadn't stopped them from all but tearing the man apart.
Ludmilla had stepped outside to address them and had been pelted with refuse and offal and had retired to her rooms in tears. That was probably for the best, however. The last thing he needed was another woman caterwauling while he tried to plan what to do with his little bitch niece. Perhaps it was time to replace Ludmilla with a younger, more pliant Queen. Ever since the vote, she had been trying to be more involved, asking questions and pestering the males, and offering her input where nobody wanted it.
When the High Priestess had come to him in Little Terreille and spun her tales of power and glory in ruling Glacia from the shadows, she hadn't mentioned it was going to be hard. He had to do everything around here and even the muscle she had sent him over the years were insolent and disrespectful.
Like, say, the Green-Jeweled Warlord Prince that was still gazing out the window and snorting. He seemed amused by it all, the bastard.
"I don't see what you find so funny," Hobart snapped. "You were supposed to make sure the bastards were in Yllestad before you burned it down, you ass! You were supposed to take care of the problem, not make it worse! Instead of having a dead niece, I've got a mob out there screaming for my blood!"
And Ludmilla's, but that was less important. Hobart cared about her in that she was the most useful tool he had at the moment. Certainly not at the risk of his own skin.
"Relax, Hobart," Lemmik said idly, tossing himself into a chair. His consistent failure to use titles was one of the things Hobart found most irritating about him. His Jewel and caste outranked Hobart's own and he used that as license to treat Hobart as a social equal as well. "You've satiated the mob's desire for vengeance. They're starting to head back to the city."
"Easy for you to be so nonchalant," Hobart grumbled. "You can go back to Little Terreille if this goes badly for us. What have I to look forward to?"
"A short rest of your life, most like," Lemmik drawled. "I'm fairly certain your bitch-niece is looking forward to baking your kidneys in a pie."
"If you're not going to help, get out!"
"As you say," Lemmik said easily, standing and sauntering to the door. "You might want to figure out your next plans and fast. The wolves are howling at the door."
Hobart tried not to shudder as the door closed behind the Warlord Prince. He was right about the wolves, damn him. And the Blood sacrifice that they'd thrown at them was only going to hold back the avalanche for so long.
[NFI, NFB, OOC appreciated. Co-written with the amazing not_a_parakeet and heromaniac whose help and beautiful words cannot be overestimated. Trigger warning: mention of suicide.]
Like whispers. They started off quiet, just a word here and a nod there. Secrets passed between trusted friends of good deeds done and supplies left behind. Where to leave a message to call upon some helpers who did not seem to understand that it was the lot in life that the weak must suffer for the strong to thrive. Of Blood who treated landens as equals, not inferiors, and people stranger still. Word spread through Glacia like a cold wind and only those most exposed to the elements took heed.
A single snowflake can be disregarded without notice, but as part of a multitude, it becomes something much greater. As part of a snowstorm, it takes on a life of its own and becomes infinitely more dangerous. Only the most wealthy and insulated can afford to ignore a blizzard; everyone else is forced to take notice.
Through the winter, the snow continued to fall. More fell in the towns and cities to the south, like fluttering pieces of paper that blanketed the streets in words and images, in shadows of truths so chilling that people swept them from the ground before children could look at the grisly pictures printed upon them. Still, out of sight didn't mean that the snowflakes had been forgotten. People would talk about the chill in murmurs, in pubs over drinks barely touched. In beauty salons with distracted looks in their eyes as winter fashion and the usual gossip was forgotten. The snowflakes had piled up, and people who wouldn't have noticed before were watching what they had once thought was steady footing begin to slip.
A blizzard is dangerous, but an avalanche more deadly still. A torrent of snow the size of mountains capable of leveling any building, no matter how wealthy or stately. Even the highest of the high could not avoid an avalanche that was coming for them; neither money nor prestige nor power can force an avalanche to change its course.
All that devastation starts with just a single flake of snow. What would happen, you suppose, when it was people at the heart of the avalanche?
Whole Territories could fall.
***
Hunner watched his daughter from the corner of his eye. Astrid had finally stopped flinching every time there was a knock on the door, had stopped clutching Riesa so tightly the child whimpered anytime they went out in public. This morning, she seemed more like her old self, the sweet cheerful daughter he remembered from before that Blood bastard had seduced her and then abandoned her once her belly began to show.
She was humming a song as she mended a shirt, sitting in a beam of weak winter sunlight. Riesa was sleeping in her cradle being rocked by Astrid's foot. It was the first time since they had moved into this small cottage that Astrid had allowed the windows to be open, had risked a stranger seeing her baby girl and barging in, demanding that they return their little Ludmilla.
Hunner hid a smile and turned his attention back towards the wooden dowel he was carving. Perhaps now Astrid was finally accepting that this was real, that they had escaped and were safe and no one would take Riesa away from them again. Every morning when Astrid woke to find her daughter still asleep in the cradle, she would audibly thank the Darkness. Hunner did not. His thanks went to a band of young adults, Blood and landen and something altogether different who had defied the aristos of their town to sneak Riesa back and return her to her real family.
Astrid could continue thanking some vast concept that blessed the Blood and ignored the landens. Hunner would put his trust in someone that listened.
***
They were going home. After the run through the winter snow, after exhaustion, nightmares, injuries and, worse, watching their friends fall one by one, they had been granted leave to go home. Some had chosen to stay behind. The General had kept them as safe as he possibly could from the smoke that still caused him daily pain, and, nightmares aside, they wanted more than ever to see this war to the end.
Some hadn't been given the option. The final few steps had brought burning breaths to a handful of them as inky horrors swept through the cave, mere seconds before midnight wings had folded around them and swept them away to safety.
They were unfit to fight, the last few of Jonothon's soldiers, and speaking, especially through Glacia's winter cold, was sometimes a burden, but that didn't mean they were going to leave the war behind them. As they traveled, as they made their way back to the towns and villages that they called their respective homes, they gave accounts of the fall of Yllestad, of the nightmare that had chased them ceaselessly through the cold and the dark.
There had been six of them, in total, that had been sent away, told that they would have to find a different way to serve their Queen and their people. And as they went their separate ways, as six dwindled to five, to four, and so on, another voice, rough and slow and sometimes thick with pain, stayed behind to tell the story.
People would happily listen to a new story in the dark of winter. Days were cold, and nights were long, and there was nothing like a new tale of horror and heroism to make them seem warmer and shorter.
This one spread quickly, gaining momentum with every ear that heard it and every mouth that passed it on.
It was all the more potent a tale when people were shown for themselves by the wounded soldiers telling it that it was true.
***
This is a cleaner death than I deserve and for that I am sorry.... Written in a shaky hand, the suicide note was found pinned to the body, neat and fastidious like the Steward himself was, err, had been. The note was unmarked and the clothes it was fastened to were clean and sharply pressed. He had taken no chances and chosen a clean way to die, to ensure that his note was completely legible when it was found. It contained apologies and recriminations, but most of all, it contained accusations.
In it, he confessed that the rumors were true, there were several abandoned landen villages within his Queen's District and that they had been emptied deliberately. An emissary from the Ruling Council had arrived at the Court and privately asked if she would be willing to part with several villages' worth of landens. In exchange for three years of tithes paid by the Ruling Council, she had agreed. Neither she nor her Steward had asked what would happen to the landens the emissary took and he did not volunteer.
When I heard stories of the maddened army, I had to know for certain. So I traveled to one of the desolate villages to see if there was any clue to where they had gone or for what purpose. I knew for certain the stories were true when I saw no personal items had been taken and the stores were all intact. But the buzzing of the flies drew me to the well and I saw what happened to everyone the emissary deemed unuseful.
Hell's fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness have mercy. But not on me. Not on anyone in Glacia who bargained away the lives of their people in exchange for goldmarks...
By the time the Queen heard of her Steward's suicide and the damning note, it was too late. Too many people had read it, or a copy of it, or had heard of the contents from a trusted friend. Her own First Circle rose up against her; it was her own Master of the Guard that separated her head from her body.
She was the first Queen to suffer that fate. She would not be the last.
***
"It's too much."
The two men stood impassively, shoulder to shoulder in her doorway, and the village Queen of Fréwihr squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and looked each of them in the eye.
"The tithes have gone too high. My people have given all they can give, and it's been a long winter. We can't afford any more. We'll starve well before the spring thaw, if we do."
"You were told when your farmers were seeding the land last year," one of the males, a Warlord wearing the Purple Dusk said. "You knew this was coming. It takes supplies to fight a war, after all, and Lord Hobart's bitch-Queen niece is doing all in her power to see to it that this one drags on."
"And if we don't pay?"
The other male, a Summersky Warlord Prince, simply gave her a predatory smile.
"If you don't pay, then you'll be seen as a drain on the war effort, then, won't you? Fréwihr can't continue to thrive on the shoulders of Glacia, existing in spite of the Territory's best interests, can it? Now, if you had something more substantial to offer than wheat and wool…"
She didn't dare step back, even as the pair of males looked at her, sizing her up like a piece of fresh meat. They smiled all the more. The fear and resentment she was feeling were plain as day in her psychic scent.
"And if I do?"
"Then we might be convinced to collect the equivalent of the last payment you made," Purple Dusk purred, leaning forward to have himself a good look down the front of her dress. "And allow you to pay the rest back at… a more opportune time."
"Then take what you need, and go."
It wasn't until several hours later, after the two males had left a receipt stating that Fréwihr's debts had been paid in full, while the village Queen was mending the tears in her bodice, that she dared to show any emotion at all.
"We look forward to doing business with you again in the spring," they had said.
Her Consort didn't ask, that night, what had happened to her dress. He didn't ask, either, why she was crying. He simply held her until she fell asleep with a needle and thread still clutched in her shaking hands, offering no more than comfort and safety in his arms. And, the next day, he wrote a letter back to the Consort the next village over.
Yes. Here, too.
***
Yllestad.
That was the word on the mouths of those who realized just what worth their home held in the eyes of Hobart. Farming communities, trading communities that had suffered hard with the rise of the tithes, uncertain that they'd be able to afford the next one. Villages that, for one reason or another, had expressed some sort of unhappiness in the way Glacia had been run, after Hobart's rise.
Witchblood.
A word that many knew the meaning of, but few had ever been given cause to worry about, was sweeping over those communities now. An entire field of it had burned in the North, a city dead, and a village left abandoned to the ravages of the smoke. There was a gripping fear now, choking anyone who had ever wondered, just what was their home worth, in the eyes of Hobart.
Village after village, town after town, people set out on foot, en masse, to see just how much danger they were in. Some settlements found nothing. No witchblood fields, laying under the snow, waiting for a tongue of witchfire to set it ablaze. No spread of deadly poison, the land's way of exposing unmarked graves, to make another statement, to try to kill she who would be Queen.
Some settlements found nothing. Some settlements found far more than they had ever wanted to find. Fields, entire expanses of flowers, wilted in the winter cold, sitting above the bones of countless dead, a vast majority female, sporting a wicked fang under one fingernail. The graves were new enough, in some cases, that faces were still recognizable, preserved in the cold.
Some of the smaller villages near such fields decided to evacuate entirely. They wouldn't let themselves become another word to be whispered in fear, another example of the state of the Territory that they called home. Others sent out sentries, often Warlord Princes, always volunteers, sporting the darkest Jewels each town could find. They'd watch the fields in shifts while their families attempted to live out their day to day, knowing that just beyond the walls of their homes, there was the threat that they, too, would suffer the same fate Yllestad had.
***
The word of the emptied villages was told to any that would listen, and occasionally those who would listen were those who made a life for themselves by telling and re-telling. Once, it reached the ear of a Southern bard, one who took it upon himself to visit the villages, to see these ghost towns with his own two eyes. Making his life on the road, singing for any who would listen, he was no stranger to some of the villages that had been named, and found himself standing in the middle of the silence of the first he came across, horrified and overwhelmed.
It helped, somewhat, that he found a small sign planted in the village center that simply named the place and asked that prayers be said for the inhabitants who passed away. Impressed by the lack of animosity and the grief he could feel from the group that called themselves Karla's Commandos, he wrote a song, to honor the fallen, to make certain that the story these villages had to tell would be immortalized. Would be heard.
Soon, the entire Territory was singing that song, a memorial to far too many needless dead.
Mother, o mother
where were you that day?
The children they were playing
And the old ones asleep
Mother, o mother
the sick and the well
Gone, gone. Mother, say why
The houses stand empty
the fields are undone
the beasts are a roamin'
for their masters are gone
suppers boiled over
drink left half-drunk
oh, oh. Mother, say why
the people were taken
their Queen they would fight
no choice were they given
no thought for their lives
Mother, where were you
the day that they died
Gone, gone. Mother, say why
He closed their minds, my brethren
their hearts, they could not see
He sent them after Glacia
to die in misery
So in your embrace we hope they may be
oh, oh, Mother of Night
***
The thing about an avalanche was, once it really started to pick up speed, there was nothing stopping it. Not even immovable objects. Word spread, as did dissent. Glacia's people weren't happy with what had become of their home, they were sick of being tithed past the point of desperation, and far too many were wondering the same question, Will we be next?
This avalanche rolled through Glacia, down from the mountains in the North, echoing upward again from those who were shocked and sickened by the actions of their Queens in the South, until it swept through Glacia's capital, Sidra, with a clear message.
No more. What had once been an unknown, a usurper Queen who had no business ruling their Territory, was now being seen as a savior, every other tongue in the city bearing a tale of an army of Blood and landen, united for love of a Queen and for their home, traveling from the North to the South to pick up the pieces left behind by Hobart. Everyone seemed to have a story, a cousin in the North whose home had been salvaged by Karla's army. A brother in the South whose daughter had been rescued before she could be broken. An innkeeper in Sidra itself who swore that he could see Karla's own first circle rescuing his patrons as his business burned to the ground.
The Avalanche hit Sidra. And, as Avalanches do, it left chaos in its wake. The same people who had lined up to hiss and boo she who would be Queen now roamed the streets, attacking those that wore Hobart's loyalty on their sleeves, burning anything that bore his name, or the name of the false Queen that still sat at the head of the Territory. People had seen enough. They had heard enough. Sidra had been left mostly untouched by Hobart's cruelty, but for how long?
No more, they cried into the streets, and they demanded justice. Justice for the landen villages that had been emptied and twisted, sent off in droves like helpless sheep for the slaughter. Justice for the fields of witchblood, marking the mass graves of those who would not serve. Justice for a Province Queen whose own sister had turned against her, poisoning her mind in Hobart's name and filling her thoughts with rats. Justice for the people bled dry with tithes that existed only to cater to aristos who already slept on sheets of silk while village Queens threw away their dignity so that their people wouldn't suffer. Justice for the daughter of a Queen and Consort who had been stricken down in their prime, who had been forced to flee the Territory so that she could reach adulthood unbroken, who had won the right to step up to take her mother's place and rule her home in the old ways.
Justice for Yllestad.
Justice for Glacia.
Hobart glared out the window, his mouth twisting in a sneer. "Bloody savages," he snarled, letting the cloth-of-gold fall curtain fall shut. "They're practically lapping up the blood."
Outside the window, the Ruling Council's chosen lamb had been led to the slaughter. The rioters had nearly stormed the estate, demanding justice for Yllestad. Some of them had been calling for the deaths of the entire Ruling Council. He had fobbed off blame on some poor soul and denounced him in front of the mob. They'd called him a liar, but Hobart noticed that hadn't stopped them from all but tearing the man apart.
Ludmilla had stepped outside to address them and had been pelted with refuse and offal and had retired to her rooms in tears. That was probably for the best, however. The last thing he needed was another woman caterwauling while he tried to plan what to do with his little bitch niece. Perhaps it was time to replace Ludmilla with a younger, more pliant Queen. Ever since the vote, she had been trying to be more involved, asking questions and pestering the males, and offering her input where nobody wanted it.
When the High Priestess had come to him in Little Terreille and spun her tales of power and glory in ruling Glacia from the shadows, she hadn't mentioned it was going to be hard. He had to do everything around here and even the muscle she had sent him over the years were insolent and disrespectful.
Like, say, the Green-Jeweled Warlord Prince that was still gazing out the window and snorting. He seemed amused by it all, the bastard.
"I don't see what you find so funny," Hobart snapped. "You were supposed to make sure the bastards were in Yllestad before you burned it down, you ass! You were supposed to take care of the problem, not make it worse! Instead of having a dead niece, I've got a mob out there screaming for my blood!"
And Ludmilla's, but that was less important. Hobart cared about her in that she was the most useful tool he had at the moment. Certainly not at the risk of his own skin.
"Relax, Hobart," Lemmik said idly, tossing himself into a chair. His consistent failure to use titles was one of the things Hobart found most irritating about him. His Jewel and caste outranked Hobart's own and he used that as license to treat Hobart as a social equal as well. "You've satiated the mob's desire for vengeance. They're starting to head back to the city."
"Easy for you to be so nonchalant," Hobart grumbled. "You can go back to Little Terreille if this goes badly for us. What have I to look forward to?"
"A short rest of your life, most like," Lemmik drawled. "I'm fairly certain your bitch-niece is looking forward to baking your kidneys in a pie."
"If you're not going to help, get out!"
"As you say," Lemmik said easily, standing and sauntering to the door. "You might want to figure out your next plans and fast. The wolves are howling at the door."
Hobart tried not to shudder as the door closed behind the Warlord Prince. He was right about the wolves, damn him. And the Blood sacrifice that they'd thrown at them was only going to hold back the avalanche for so long.
[NFI, NFB, OOC appreciated. Co-written with the amazing not_a_parakeet and heromaniac whose help and beautiful words cannot be overestimated. Trigger warning: mention of suicide.]