mental link // S72

[servitor]

DIASPEIREIN To scatter, spread about.	MELIORISM The belief that the world gets better.
ORIFLAMME A symbol or standard that inspires confidence, devotion, or courage.	VANGUARD The troops moving at the head of an army.

( CODE BY WHAMBAM )

Comments

[somnifacient]

There's-

[No way, he wants to say. No way that the Enemy has been the Empire for all those years, and yet. He blinks at Nyx, trying not to let this theory practically blow his mind.]

Wait, you think that might actually be a thing?

[servitor]

If they found us? They had to have been following us long enough to know we're a real threat. Everything we've fought has come from the Empire, and now the Chancellor. What's to say it's not the same thing?

[somnifacient]

Nyx, that's too much for me to even wrap my head around right now. That would mean that they've been working within the Empire for years, that the Chancellor himself might've-

[He looks doubtful.]

I don't know if he was an agent of anything other than himself. That's all I'm saying.

[But as for the rest of the Empire? Who knows? And did it matter now? Niflheim was in tatters, just like there rest of the world.]

[servitor]

I'm not doubting that. [Nyx sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose.]

Drautos was the general for longer than I was in the Glaive. He defected without thinking it twice. He got people onto his side. He'd been thinking about it for years and held onto that anger for who knows how long.

[Yeah, it's too much to think about. But right now they've been tackling the Enemy as it comes.

And he thinks it's time to take the fight to them, to start dismantling them, instead of reacting.]

The Chancellor can be his own agent for all I care. We're not given answers about the Enemy but the Enemy knows about us. I'm saying there's got to be something better than just waiting for them to spring at us.

[He sighs deeply.]

That's for another time, I guess.

[somnifacient]

[He lets him speak, and only nods when he's done.]

You're right. Nothing to do be done about it, not right now. More will be revealed as we join mission after mission.

[As if they had any choice.

But the subject of Drautos comes up again, and therefore another chance at a question as he tries to parse all of this.]

...Why did he do it? [All that anger, holding onto it for years... sounds familiar, a parallel to be drawn in his own enemy, just of a different degree.]

[servitor]

He said everything had been taken from him. That we were just rats and pawns. He lost his home to the Nifs, worked for them as well as King Regis. I think he just wanted a way to hurt Lucis. He'd been let down. Why not show them how much?

[In a way, he could understand it. Not condone. Just understand. Losing so much, to join two armies, in an attempt to enact revenge?

It seems to Nyx that the history of Eos as a whole is steeped in revenge and anger.]

[somnifacient]

So then what? [He can't help the irritation that flares in his words. Nyx will know that none of it is directed at him.]

Let a whole city suffer because of that anger? A slew of innocents that had nothing to do with it? All those lives lost, I hope he was happy.

[servitor]

I don't think he wanted to be happy. I think he wanted to hurt, the same way he was hurt. People out for revenge, they're not really out to be happy. They just want the pain they've gone through to go somewhere else, to the thing that made them hurt. [He drums his fingers on the table, eyes distant, trying to make sense of how to put it all best.] He didn't care who he hurt. As long as he did the hurting.

[somnifacient]

Yeah, because that solves all of the world’s problems. Making everyone else as miserable as you.

[This rings rather familiar, with the own man he had fought and faced.]

I don’t understand that way of thinking.

[servitor]

I don't either, but I've seen it a lot. Anger makes you blind to a lot of things.