02-28-2023, 10:49 AM
What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?
Perhaps she ought to be shocked as she steps through the portal and into the middle of a war she had been part of, a battle she had planned, and death she had caused. It might shock her if she didn’t relive the memory often, but she visited this battlefield in her nightmares. The faces of the dead were ingrained in her memory, and they flitted in and out of her mind every minute of every day. Standing here now, blinking slightly as her eyes adjust to the light and the ghosts that run through her, is not much different than any other day. A little more real, a little more pressing, but something she is used to by now.This battle has always haunted her. Rezza does not see herself, but she turns in the direction where she knows her younger self would be. Unlike those around her, Rezza was safe during this fight. She stayed back, giving orders and suggestions, coming only close enough to the battle to read minds (if there was anything sensible to glean, though in the middle of a war there rarely was). Her role in these battles has always troubled her, but she’d never fought against it. Kingdom first, and her duty was as the Advisor to the Queen, not as a warrior. But what right did she have to safety and guaranteed survival when thousands gave their lives for the cause, and in a way, for her?
None.
She had no right to live when they did not, she had no right to comfort and food and safety when they lay broken and bleeding on the battleground. Rezza looks around her now, at pieces of the battle she has never seen, though there are many faces that she knows. She’d comforted many of their families, brought news to many of their loved ones that they had not survived the battle. She watches one such Baltian fall now. She’d seen his broken body when they’d collected their dead and tallied their losses after it all, but she sees how he died now, watches as a Stratosian stops his heart with one strike of lightning.
The hate in her boils and rages, but in the next instant she sees a Stratosian drowned in a tidal wave around her, watching her gag for breath beneath the power of a water manipulator and Rezza’s hatred subsides. It was hard to hate the Stratosians from the middle of the battle, hard to deny now that neither side had ever been right.
Why? That is the question the sprites have brought them here to discover. It’s the question she’s never been permitted to ask. Her whole upbringing was a lesson on the supposed atrocities caused by the Stratosians, on their malicious ways and their hateful magic. Lessons she’d been taught not to question, but lessons she’d begun to question since coming to Beqanna.
She’s spent a century of her life fighting a war with no reason, and only a tiny piece of that long life seeing what peace was like. Peace - a quiet space where all the doubts and uncertainties and questions came creeping in. Peace - the place where she began to question everything she knew, where she began to realize that the Baltians were just as monstrous as the Stratosians supposedly were. Had they not played their part in this war too? Had they not started battles, allowed innocent lives to be killed for the “greater good”? They had, and she’d played her role in that all too well.
”Every war has a reason behind its annihilation,” says a mare Rezza does not know. She knows few of the horses that have come through the portal and she realizes that she’s the only Baltian or Stratosian that’s come. Did they all care so little for the land they had destroyed and the lives they had ruined? Perhaps. And if that were true, then it only solidifies to Rezza that they were all to blame for all of this. ”Do they?” she responds with a snort, derision in her voice that’s not directed at the mare but the truth of the scene around them. She speaks loud enough that any around her who cared for the history lesson would hear it. “The only reason for this battle you see is hate. Hate and eons of animosity. There was no reason, not really. Not on this day.”
In the fighting, she sees another Baltian - a mare she’d spent many of her younger days playing with - crushed beneath the weight of a boulder. Why? The question rings in her ears now as the violence rages around her, as the fear and pain on the faces of their fighters becomes so evident. Baltian warriors were fierce, but even Helice could not train away their mortality. ”Can you take us back to the first scuffle?” she asks her sprite, who has gone largely ignored and unnoticed as Rezza faced her own demons instead. ”Not a battle, necessarily. Maybe just a tiff between rulers, or something like that? It was before my life, that much I know, but I don’t know how far back we need to go beyond that.” Still, she was asking to look more than a century back into history, looking for an answer that history had purposefully buried. The task felt impossible but more important than ever. This could not happen again. There had to be an end.
REZZA