A gift for pyrefly!
Title: A Game for Two
Dedication: Happy General Winterness and Holidays thereof, pyrefly!
Game: Suikoden III and V.
Characters: Albert, Yuber, and Shula Valya; briefer appearances from Luserina Barows, Lymlsleia, her consort, Toma, and the Prince. Gratuitous discussion of Milich Oppenheimer and other notables.
Pairings: A lot of things implicit, but nothing overt; also, I gave Lymsleia a consort.
Rating: PG.
Word Count: 2100
Warnings: Spoilers for who survives both games, and for the positions that certain characters take in the new administrations thereof. The story takes place in IS 488, almost four decades after Suikoden V and twelve or thirteen years after Suikoden III.
Summary or Description: Albert is welcomed to Falena, for certain definitions of "welcome". The Queen, you see, does not like opportunists, and her command staff likes traitors even less.
--
A Game for Two
spun expressly for Pyrefly, with holiday wishes,
by Mithrigil Galtirglin
---
in solis 488
Apparently I'd lived in Falena, specifically the castle district of Stormfist, for three seasons in my extreme youth. This was Ambassador Valya's explanation for welcoming me "home", when he did so some thirty-five years later. There he stood on Estrise's docks with a fairly sizable honor guard, all of them women browner than the planks, and he spread his arms and welcomed me "home", then sauntered forward like no man of nearly seventy has the right to do and kissed me on both cheeks.
Yuber was at least amused.
I knew a fair amount about Ambassador Valya, but a rather insufficient one compared to what I am accustomed to. In the case of a given dignitary, that I know more about him than any other man actually makes some kind of difference. Ambassador Valya hid his secrets in his outward extravagances, diluted his devious mind with intrigue. Had I not known General Oppenheimer I would not have met another of Valya's kind. Perhaps I had not--Oppenheimer is a thing unto himself, as Valya--but even so, the bold strokes and easy laughter of this man, though I knew to inspect them, still had me on guard.
To the point: in Valya's reputedly capable hands, my…return to Falena, I suppose, was not to be without peril. It stands to reason that the first inference I made was to compare him to the most dangerous man of my Grandfather's time.
"So," he began, as we made for the appointed inn, "what is your purpose in this country?"
"Curiosity," I said.
When he breathed so deeply, the jewels on his chest chattered with one another. "Ah, the briefest answer, and the most true. Her Majesty will be pleased."
I was to meet the Queen in question after a relatively long journey upriver. "So her Majesty is not one for words?"
"Her Majesty is not one for opportunists," Valya clarified, "and their commanderships do not get on well with traitors." He said this under the sun, in a common-toned voice, loud enough that the phalanx of people around us could snicker and mask it with footfalls and coughs.
Commanderships, the plural. This I knew the source of. Apparently as early as I had been here, before the Queen was of marriageable age, her brother had been given the title conservatively meant for the prince-consort. Not to dispense with tradition, the Queen had conferred the title on her husband as well, without divesting her brother of it. Prince Freyjadour was the Tir McDohl of his day; Commander Richard, the Ferid Egan of ours.
"And what is your purpose in this country, Ambassador Valya?"
His laugh--a true one, I reason--was the type to slow and stop our procession. He covered his mouth when he did it, like a woman. Very like a woman, in fact; his face, though no few wrinkles had stamped their presence into it, was clean-shaven and shapely, and his hair was long and a rather delicate-looking lavender. "My, the brief and true answer is 'Hope', I suppose, but all those have been fulfilled. I suppose that 'Habit' suffices. All of my things are here."
As if on cue, the lady guards joined in his laughter, leaving me to conjure a smile and Yuber to scoff.
"You are prince, in your land, or something akin to it," I said, as capable of audacity as he, when called for.
"Falena is my land, as yours," he corrected, raising a finger as if to shush me. "Surely a man of your worldliness knows that not all are welcomed home at the river's end."
I took advantage of a passing shadow to smile. "I will take the honor in the spirit it is given, but the river herself cast me adrift."
"Then you had best ask her forgiveness for your insult," he said, tapping his finger twice against the air, "or it will be a very hard journey tomorrow."
--
"You've met your match, Silverberg." Yuber favored windows, these days, and was at mine when he said this, staring out at Estrise as a seaborne fog swallowed it. Someone was going to die tonight.
I sighed.
"You knew we'd meet him, coming here," Yuber went on. In addition to his favor of windows, he'd developed a propensity to look at me with only one of his mismatched eyes at a time. The silver one, he'd found, was the more effective of the two at keeping mine.
"The trouble with people like that is the extent to which they downplay their prowess and past accomplishments. Knowing he existed is insufficient." I set down my pen. "You can't know how powerful a man like him is through mere hearsay, Yuber. His combative faculties have always been mediocre. His rank, sufficiently low. His exploits dwarfed by those of the people he dedicated himself to. He's not like me, not like Grandfather. Not even like Caesar." It occurs to me. "He's like you."
"This I have to hear," the Demon said, and turned from his window.
I had to look at him with both eyes, but the effect was much the same. "Are you even remembered in the Republic?"
He scoffed.
"All the 'maggots' who would are already dead, perhaps? Confined to a mention in some military annals that cite you served my Grandfather as commander of some company? Perhaps rumors of the Black Leviathan have spread so far?"
By this time it had gotten easier for Yuber to infer of me. "And what's his deal, the Desert Rose?"
"Apt," I said, "but no. I wouldn't be surprised. All the renown of his most active period has been diverted into the more public heroes--the current Commander, for one, Belcoot in Stormfist, Dinn of Sable, Admiral Raja," and of course Merces, but damned if I would mention that name again. "Most of these are less able, but more noteworthy, and so likely to be attributed with the actions of those supporting them. I knew Valya was one of those."
"Kill him."
"Probably not."
Someone else was going to die tonight. "What's your excuse this time."
"For one, self-preservation. He's not in my way. He'll never be on my side, but he's not in my way, and he's useful, neutral." Come to think of it, "Very useful, neutral." But. Damn. "He knows I'm thinking this."
"Kill him." Such a simple creature, Yuber. And yet.
--
Valya did not know Ritapon, and insisted that a man of his age had a mind of lead, worn to smoothness where most often used but apt to chip when pressed too hard. I humored him, and instead we played at Chin-Chin-Rorin. The game is relatively innocuous, if no one is cheating.
"You remind me of a friend I had long ago," he said after the second time he won. "Certainly not in your appearance--he was ahead of his time in fashion, ah yes, much like my sister--but in the manner in which you analyze me."
Now this is the aspect of his demeanor that frustrated me so. In that one pass, thrown off so gently but not carelessly, he admitted to several things. He has or had a sister--I did not know that--he meant to equate me with someone he favored, and he knew I was testing him. It was as if to offer multiple forks in a path, 'where would you have this conversation go?', and from there, the analysis is in his court and he strips me of power.
He would also discern many things from my answer. Did I wish to know more about him and his family? The friend with which he'd equate me (and I did not quite shudder to think he meant Oppenheimer, though I would not put it past Valya to have been intimate with the old bastard)? Did I wish to continue this volley of audacious deflection, and admit to analyzing him and all he said? To do the last is like letting slip your glove enough to bare the Rune upon your hand.
"And to think," I said, batting the dice into their cup, "I compared you to the same man when first we met." It is a game for two.
--
It was not as if anyone else could see it; Yuber stalked the waters that night. Valya's riverfare, the Nifsara, was powered by Flowing Rune, not the Kamandol fans that my Precipice ran on. As such, because I knew what to listen for, I knew the nature of the shrieking reptilian chaos in her wake. Blood does not run upstream, and for this, I was somewhat thankful.
I found the lack of overt attention paid to Yuber, in general, somewhat disturbing. Granted, he had always been something of the mantor in the room, and to acknowledge his existence was tantamount to inviting his blades to your neck, or worse. But for all he'd been given a cabin of his own, Valya's women averted their eyes whenever they passed. Perhaps they actually could not see him, and he had picked up some new glamour; perhaps it was a custom of Armes, as it was decidedly not one of Falena. I never asked.
I spent most of that night off starboard and astern, appraising Sol-Falena. The river would bend up to the city the next day but for now we seemed to retreat from it. It was, as I expected, a tactically secure city, though not so much as what I recalled of Stormfist, and reminded me of what the island of Nirva was fast becoming. In its glow, I listened to the distant patter of Yuber at play. Ask forgiveness for your insult, I recalled Valya implying.
One does not acquire the services of a Demon without a modicum of spirituality. One does not revere posterity without acknowledging the presence of arbiters. One does not strive for godhead--a mortal variant thereof or otherwise--without reverence for those who have already attained it.
"Home," I recall murmuring, at some point.
--
Contrary to his warning, and obviously enough, the river did not swallow us, and we were greeted at the docks--grand towering things, bone-white and bruise-blue--by an escort of two Queen's Knights, and the Prime Minister. One of the Knights was a notable, Sir Toma, the other merely named for one; and Luserina Barows, well, that is a name it is impossible not to know.
Valya did not accost her and kiss her on both cheeks, for the record.
Barows made it abundantly clear to me that she knew my circumstances, in a manner both subtler and more comprehensible than Valya's. My accommodations, temporary. My audience with the Queen, brief. My assignment of a guard, explicit, and my tour of the city accompanied thereof. She was a severe and careful person, from the creases in her dress to cast of her eyes, and all I expected. It was almost refreshing to be treated with such paranoia, after Valya's cavalier attitude toward my foreign policy, or lack thereof.
But for all her insinuations, Barows did not lead me to a cage, even a figurative one.
"We welcome you," not home, "Lord Silverberg." Framed by her brother and consort--towers not unlike those at the docks--Queen Lymsleia appeared rather small and mousy, twined in her robes and crown, her hair never silver but beginning to grey. "I trust the Ambassador has treated you with kindness through the journey?"
With her preference for brevity in mind, I answered, "Yes, your Majesty."
"This gladdens us to hear," she said, in the fashion that rendered it a plain lie. "But the heart of this matter seems to have been taken by the currents, beyond Our sight; what is your purpose in Our country?"
On her right, the Prince, bone-white ensconced in black and gold as he was; on her left, Commander Richard, tall and hale and plainly dangerous, smiling congenially. "Curiosity," I answered, loud enough that Valya, to my right, could hear it twice.
--
"I have multiple copies, of course," I told Valya, "but I can think of no other more appropriate to entrust a set to than you, upon this river." I can be as audacious as this man, I distinctly recall thinking. "The journals narrate my doings for the last three decades."
I had succeeded in rendering him speechless, at the least.
"It would be imprudent to publish them," I reminded him, "and certainly not in the original language. But I leave the choice to do so ultimately with you. Burn them, translate them, censor them; consider my life to date my offering to the Feitas." Let her mercy, authority, und so wieter. "I am to abide by her rules, when I am here."
He rolled his dice. They clattered like old bones in the lacquered bowl. "This Republican game leaves too much to chance," he said. "So; 'Ritapon', you say?"
-----------
--
Dedication: Happy General Winterness and Holidays thereof, pyrefly!
Game: Suikoden III and V.
Characters: Albert, Yuber, and Shula Valya; briefer appearances from Luserina Barows, Lymlsleia, her consort, Toma, and the Prince. Gratuitous discussion of Milich Oppenheimer and other notables.
Pairings: A lot of things implicit, but nothing overt; also, I gave Lymsleia a consort.
Rating: PG.
Word Count: 2100
Warnings: Spoilers for who survives both games, and for the positions that certain characters take in the new administrations thereof. The story takes place in IS 488, almost four decades after Suikoden V and twelve or thirteen years after Suikoden III.
Summary or Description: Albert is welcomed to Falena, for certain definitions of "welcome". The Queen, you see, does not like opportunists, and her command staff likes traitors even less.
--
A Game for Two
spun expressly for Pyrefly, with holiday wishes,
by Mithrigil Galtirglin
---
in solis 488
Apparently I'd lived in Falena, specifically the castle district of Stormfist, for three seasons in my extreme youth. This was Ambassador Valya's explanation for welcoming me "home", when he did so some thirty-five years later. There he stood on Estrise's docks with a fairly sizable honor guard, all of them women browner than the planks, and he spread his arms and welcomed me "home", then sauntered forward like no man of nearly seventy has the right to do and kissed me on both cheeks.
Yuber was at least amused.
I knew a fair amount about Ambassador Valya, but a rather insufficient one compared to what I am accustomed to. In the case of a given dignitary, that I know more about him than any other man actually makes some kind of difference. Ambassador Valya hid his secrets in his outward extravagances, diluted his devious mind with intrigue. Had I not known General Oppenheimer I would not have met another of Valya's kind. Perhaps I had not--Oppenheimer is a thing unto himself, as Valya--but even so, the bold strokes and easy laughter of this man, though I knew to inspect them, still had me on guard.
To the point: in Valya's reputedly capable hands, my…return to Falena, I suppose, was not to be without peril. It stands to reason that the first inference I made was to compare him to the most dangerous man of my Grandfather's time.
"So," he began, as we made for the appointed inn, "what is your purpose in this country?"
"Curiosity," I said.
When he breathed so deeply, the jewels on his chest chattered with one another. "Ah, the briefest answer, and the most true. Her Majesty will be pleased."
I was to meet the Queen in question after a relatively long journey upriver. "So her Majesty is not one for words?"
"Her Majesty is not one for opportunists," Valya clarified, "and their commanderships do not get on well with traitors." He said this under the sun, in a common-toned voice, loud enough that the phalanx of people around us could snicker and mask it with footfalls and coughs.
Commanderships, the plural. This I knew the source of. Apparently as early as I had been here, before the Queen was of marriageable age, her brother had been given the title conservatively meant for the prince-consort. Not to dispense with tradition, the Queen had conferred the title on her husband as well, without divesting her brother of it. Prince Freyjadour was the Tir McDohl of his day; Commander Richard, the Ferid Egan of ours.
"And what is your purpose in this country, Ambassador Valya?"
His laugh--a true one, I reason--was the type to slow and stop our procession. He covered his mouth when he did it, like a woman. Very like a woman, in fact; his face, though no few wrinkles had stamped their presence into it, was clean-shaven and shapely, and his hair was long and a rather delicate-looking lavender. "My, the brief and true answer is 'Hope', I suppose, but all those have been fulfilled. I suppose that 'Habit' suffices. All of my things are here."
As if on cue, the lady guards joined in his laughter, leaving me to conjure a smile and Yuber to scoff.
"You are prince, in your land, or something akin to it," I said, as capable of audacity as he, when called for.
"Falena is my land, as yours," he corrected, raising a finger as if to shush me. "Surely a man of your worldliness knows that not all are welcomed home at the river's end."
I took advantage of a passing shadow to smile. "I will take the honor in the spirit it is given, but the river herself cast me adrift."
"Then you had best ask her forgiveness for your insult," he said, tapping his finger twice against the air, "or it will be a very hard journey tomorrow."
--
"You've met your match, Silverberg." Yuber favored windows, these days, and was at mine when he said this, staring out at Estrise as a seaborne fog swallowed it. Someone was going to die tonight.
I sighed.
"You knew we'd meet him, coming here," Yuber went on. In addition to his favor of windows, he'd developed a propensity to look at me with only one of his mismatched eyes at a time. The silver one, he'd found, was the more effective of the two at keeping mine.
"The trouble with people like that is the extent to which they downplay their prowess and past accomplishments. Knowing he existed is insufficient." I set down my pen. "You can't know how powerful a man like him is through mere hearsay, Yuber. His combative faculties have always been mediocre. His rank, sufficiently low. His exploits dwarfed by those of the people he dedicated himself to. He's not like me, not like Grandfather. Not even like Caesar." It occurs to me. "He's like you."
"This I have to hear," the Demon said, and turned from his window.
I had to look at him with both eyes, but the effect was much the same. "Are you even remembered in the Republic?"
He scoffed.
"All the 'maggots' who would are already dead, perhaps? Confined to a mention in some military annals that cite you served my Grandfather as commander of some company? Perhaps rumors of the Black Leviathan have spread so far?"
By this time it had gotten easier for Yuber to infer of me. "And what's his deal, the Desert Rose?"
"Apt," I said, "but no. I wouldn't be surprised. All the renown of his most active period has been diverted into the more public heroes--the current Commander, for one, Belcoot in Stormfist, Dinn of Sable, Admiral Raja," and of course Merces, but damned if I would mention that name again. "Most of these are less able, but more noteworthy, and so likely to be attributed with the actions of those supporting them. I knew Valya was one of those."
"Kill him."
"Probably not."
Someone else was going to die tonight. "What's your excuse this time."
"For one, self-preservation. He's not in my way. He'll never be on my side, but he's not in my way, and he's useful, neutral." Come to think of it, "Very useful, neutral." But. Damn. "He knows I'm thinking this."
"Kill him." Such a simple creature, Yuber. And yet.
--
Valya did not know Ritapon, and insisted that a man of his age had a mind of lead, worn to smoothness where most often used but apt to chip when pressed too hard. I humored him, and instead we played at Chin-Chin-Rorin. The game is relatively innocuous, if no one is cheating.
"You remind me of a friend I had long ago," he said after the second time he won. "Certainly not in your appearance--he was ahead of his time in fashion, ah yes, much like my sister--but in the manner in which you analyze me."
Now this is the aspect of his demeanor that frustrated me so. In that one pass, thrown off so gently but not carelessly, he admitted to several things. He has or had a sister--I did not know that--he meant to equate me with someone he favored, and he knew I was testing him. It was as if to offer multiple forks in a path, 'where would you have this conversation go?', and from there, the analysis is in his court and he strips me of power.
He would also discern many things from my answer. Did I wish to know more about him and his family? The friend with which he'd equate me (and I did not quite shudder to think he meant Oppenheimer, though I would not put it past Valya to have been intimate with the old bastard)? Did I wish to continue this volley of audacious deflection, and admit to analyzing him and all he said? To do the last is like letting slip your glove enough to bare the Rune upon your hand.
"And to think," I said, batting the dice into their cup, "I compared you to the same man when first we met." It is a game for two.
--
It was not as if anyone else could see it; Yuber stalked the waters that night. Valya's riverfare, the Nifsara, was powered by Flowing Rune, not the Kamandol fans that my Precipice ran on. As such, because I knew what to listen for, I knew the nature of the shrieking reptilian chaos in her wake. Blood does not run upstream, and for this, I was somewhat thankful.
I found the lack of overt attention paid to Yuber, in general, somewhat disturbing. Granted, he had always been something of the mantor in the room, and to acknowledge his existence was tantamount to inviting his blades to your neck, or worse. But for all he'd been given a cabin of his own, Valya's women averted their eyes whenever they passed. Perhaps they actually could not see him, and he had picked up some new glamour; perhaps it was a custom of Armes, as it was decidedly not one of Falena. I never asked.
I spent most of that night off starboard and astern, appraising Sol-Falena. The river would bend up to the city the next day but for now we seemed to retreat from it. It was, as I expected, a tactically secure city, though not so much as what I recalled of Stormfist, and reminded me of what the island of Nirva was fast becoming. In its glow, I listened to the distant patter of Yuber at play. Ask forgiveness for your insult, I recalled Valya implying.
One does not acquire the services of a Demon without a modicum of spirituality. One does not revere posterity without acknowledging the presence of arbiters. One does not strive for godhead--a mortal variant thereof or otherwise--without reverence for those who have already attained it.
"Home," I recall murmuring, at some point.
--
Contrary to his warning, and obviously enough, the river did not swallow us, and we were greeted at the docks--grand towering things, bone-white and bruise-blue--by an escort of two Queen's Knights, and the Prime Minister. One of the Knights was a notable, Sir Toma, the other merely named for one; and Luserina Barows, well, that is a name it is impossible not to know.
Valya did not accost her and kiss her on both cheeks, for the record.
Barows made it abundantly clear to me that she knew my circumstances, in a manner both subtler and more comprehensible than Valya's. My accommodations, temporary. My audience with the Queen, brief. My assignment of a guard, explicit, and my tour of the city accompanied thereof. She was a severe and careful person, from the creases in her dress to cast of her eyes, and all I expected. It was almost refreshing to be treated with such paranoia, after Valya's cavalier attitude toward my foreign policy, or lack thereof.
But for all her insinuations, Barows did not lead me to a cage, even a figurative one.
"We welcome you," not home, "Lord Silverberg." Framed by her brother and consort--towers not unlike those at the docks--Queen Lymsleia appeared rather small and mousy, twined in her robes and crown, her hair never silver but beginning to grey. "I trust the Ambassador has treated you with kindness through the journey?"
With her preference for brevity in mind, I answered, "Yes, your Majesty."
"This gladdens us to hear," she said, in the fashion that rendered it a plain lie. "But the heart of this matter seems to have been taken by the currents, beyond Our sight; what is your purpose in Our country?"
On her right, the Prince, bone-white ensconced in black and gold as he was; on her left, Commander Richard, tall and hale and plainly dangerous, smiling congenially. "Curiosity," I answered, loud enough that Valya, to my right, could hear it twice.
--
"I have multiple copies, of course," I told Valya, "but I can think of no other more appropriate to entrust a set to than you, upon this river." I can be as audacious as this man, I distinctly recall thinking. "The journals narrate my doings for the last three decades."
I had succeeded in rendering him speechless, at the least.
"It would be imprudent to publish them," I reminded him, "and certainly not in the original language. But I leave the choice to do so ultimately with you. Burn them, translate them, censor them; consider my life to date my offering to the Feitas." Let her mercy, authority, und so wieter. "I am to abide by her rules, when I am here."
He rolled his dice. They clattered like old bones in the lacquered bowl. "This Republican game leaves too much to chance," he said. "So; 'Ritapon', you say?"
-----------
--