Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


I’m not sure if he’s mocking me or agreeing, or if it’s a different emotion all together that makes that bark of a laugh so tense. Regardless, he doesn’t reply with anything particularly notable, and doesn’t leave or start shouting, either, so I figure its all going okay, no matter what the guffaw was. Maybe he’s just losing his mind a little bit, like people said lots of folks did, as they got older, from too many knocks on the head or something (I’m not a doctor, okay).

He claims to not know the Laurelin, which I guess is true. There is no point in lying about it, not really. My lips upturn at his proclamation that he’d simply arrived and no one had chased him out, and I’m about to chuckle a little bit at the thought of Deimos scowling at the elder’s presence from afar, wondering if it was honorable or at all necessary to kill someone who was liable to drop dead at any moment anyway. “Wasn’t anyone around,” though, has a cut to it that stills my amused laughter, and lessens the degree of tilt to my smirk.

Was that really why? Somehow I felt it was more to do with my Uncle’s demented sense of what was just, which had truly found a place in his son, who was every ounce of Knightly that his sire had striven to be, through murderous means. I denied that it could be anything else what so ever when I presented myself with an ulterior truth: he’d punished me for taking from the weak, as I’d been taught to do as a boy, but had let an infiltrator do as he’d pleased.

"Emptiness happens to failed empires," I tell him, a cold truth that resonates throughout history; those who seek to conquer the world often find themselves all alone in its vastness, in the end, when the winding of fate and their crafty wiles failed to deliver their desired prizes to their hooves, "those who once lived there alongside him in the old era are dead, or banished, or worse – they turned their backs upon him, as if he was not still there."

Like my entire family, I think, and it hurts like hell to do so.

I stare at the strawberries at my hooves, and think of my bitch mother, and of my father, following Torleik to the mists, back to the land he had once watched fall to the Qian. I think of Beowulf, d’Artagnan, Hotaru, Krieger, Sialia, Thranduil: all of the men and women who’d stood tall in my youth, who’d left and not returned, and my stomach clenches with anger at their faithlessness, and is sick with self blame that I can count myself among them.

"Its the price to be paid for failure," I tell the old man with hard gold eyes, hiding all these things I feel behind the cold indifference I had been taught made you a man, "or for choosing too dark a path, or shit friends to walk it with. I am not certain which the folly was yet."