After Arum left, Callida went home to prepare herself for the dreaded moment before her. She changed into a fresh, striking uniform and visited Tonsor, her estate beautician, to touch up her hair and makeup. Terrified or not, she was going to present herself as the Lion General to the fullest degree. She looked in the mirror at the dramatically painted face she was wearing. Dark, neutral makeup enhanced deep-set brown eyes, and the carefully emphasized, white scar through her left eyebrow and cheek added a severity to her look that was strengthened by the slicked back, tight knot of hair at the nape of her neck, and a blood red lip stain — the only pop of color on her body that wasn’t neutral or gold. If the goal was to scare the Primordialist zealots off, which it was, then it was worth it to put in the effort to look intimidating. “Tonsor, if you’d never met me before, what would your first impression of me be?”
Tonsor grinned. “I’d think you looked very well put together and a little unapproachable.”
“Darn. I was going for scary or intimidating.”
“In that case, you need to look less pretty,” he cheesed and she snorted reactively.
“I’m not pretty.”
“Not with that attitude. But seriously, General, you don’t need to worry. You don’t need makeup to make you look intimidating. You just are.”
“Gee. That makes me feel a whole lot better.”
“You’re welcome,” Tonsor said with a cheeky grin that Callida caught through the mirror. She took one last look at her reflection, set her jaw, and dropped her gaze to glare up at herself through her eyebrows, steeling herself mentally for anything. “See what I mean? You don’t need makeup to be intimidating,” Tonsor said softly from behind her. “I can see it from here: the way your eyes burn. ”
Callida nodded and thanked Tonsor on her way to the door, and then she spent the walk to the front palace gates reviewing her sword forms in her head. It was a relaxing mental exercise that helped to distract her from what she was facing ahead.
But it was hard to stay focused as the shouting at the gate grew nearer. The crowd had spotted her commanders assembling in neat rows with their pared down armies — someone had had the wisdom and foresight to equip all of the soldiers with shields — and the miserable masses were yelling at them, taunting them, demanding to know if this was the moment they’d be forcibly chased away or slaughtered. To their credit, her men would not be baited. They remained stoic as they stood at attention, calmly facing their hecklers unflinchingly. Callida drew strength from their poise. This was why she’d called upon them in the first place. She willed herself to match their quiet confidence. Inhale… exhale.
“ATTENTION!” she shouted, and her six commanders and their six battalions synchronously swiveled to form a path at the center of their ranks for her to walk through them. Gravis fell into step behind her as she marched down the middle.
And the crowd beyond the gates went eerily still.
“Rapax, report!”
“We are all accounted for, General!” Rapax barked back, never straying from his attentive stance.
“As you were!” Callida turned to the haggard palace guards and ordered the gates opened. “Forward march!”
“IT’S HER!!!” someone shouted.
The crowd started screaming… not from fear. They were cheering. It was the most chaotic fanfare she’d ever witnessed. All around them, people were reacting to her presence so extremely, it felt violent. And it was so absurd, Callida could hardly process any of it. The unfortunate soldiers on the perimeter of their formation were instantly contending with all sorts of nonsense. A mother tried to force her way into the middle of the army with a wailing child in her arms to beg for Callida to “bless my child”. A large group of teenage boys attempted to rough her men up, urging her to run while they were there to protect her escape. A knot of Guardians in temple robes refused to move to the side in favor of prostrating themselves on the snowy ground in front of them — in front of her. Another mass of people began a show of praying loudly to her and the Primordials and about her to the Primordials. She maintained her position at the center of her men, sticking close to Gravis as the army barely managed to all get through the gates for the insistence of the swarm.
“FORM RANKS!”
Obediently and competently, her men fanned out, using their shields to push the shrieking zealots steadily back so they could create tight rows arching in a semicircle around her position near the gate.
“HOLD!” Shields still up, her men stopped advancing. “SILENCE!” she shouted the last command, but the crowd only sort of settled, so Callida began the very intentional process of staring people down, one at a time intimidating the Primordialists into silence… or at least stillness. They in turn rebuked their neighbors, and after a few minutes, her burning glare achieved the desired effect. The volume dimmed to a low hum.
Now came the hard part.
“I know why you all are here: you believe me to be the Mother of Prophecy. I’m sorry to have to tell you that you’ve been lied to. Go home!”
Uproar. Callida couldn’t distinguish one voice from the other, but the emotions she read from the crowd ranged from anger and despair to delusional optimism and insistence.
“BE QUIET!”
“WE WANT PROOF!” someone screamed, egging the crowd on. All efforts to regain order after that failed; the impassioned and increasingly desperate fanatics only screamed louder to be heard as time ticked by unproductively. Callida glanced helplessly up at Gravis as her austere façade began to crumble under the relentless pressure.
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Recognizing her distress, Gravis removed the shield strapped to his back and drew his sword, banging them together and temporarily startling the crowds into hushing.
“GENERAL, PERMISSION TO SPEAK?” Rapax surprised her a moment later.
“Granted.”
Rapax nodded and stepped out of formation to address the crowds. “You all are a bunch of dumbasses, you know that?! You come here demanding answers and then yell so loud you couldn’t hear one if it arrived on a bolt of thunder! Now SHUT UP!”
Callida gave him a grateful smile as he returned to his position behind his men with the crowd effectively quieted for the moment. “If you will listen, I will speak. I am Lion General Callida Animo Yudha. I am a soldier, born from a long line of humble soldiers going back many generations. A soldier. Just a soldier, and I intend to continue serving as a soldier for the rest of my life. I’m not religious at all; I never have been. I don’t believe in the prophecy, and I don’t understand this ‘Mother of Prophecy’ title you are trying to assign me. Furthermore, I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with your Spiritualism or Primordialism, prophecy, interpretations, Primordial spirits, temples, or Guardians! I want to be left alone! I want to live peacefully and quietly, serving in the occupation I’ve chosen for myself. I am not the ‘Mother of Prophecy’, nor will I ever be. Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, go home before the winter kills you all, and stop wasting your time waiting for a miracle that doesn’t exist!”
“What about your husband’s ancestry?” one of the men in temple robes — a Guardian — asked, stepping forward to present himself on the other side of her soldiers’ shields. The crowd muttered but remained respectfully hushed.
“Who are you?” Callida demanded.
“I am Sudlakh. I was sent by the Order of Embers from the First Temple to the Red Phoenix to investigate the rumors that signs of the prophecy have manifested.”
“I’m sorry to waste your time.”
“On the contrary,” Sudlakh asserted before she could completely shut him down. “I’ve done my homework. Is it true that your husband is Qiandge Yudha, sole surviving child of Chikitsak Yudha and Shouzi Lang, and host to a rogue Alpha wolf?” When Callida didn’t immediately respond, the Guardian pulled a scroll out of his robes and unfurled it over the shoulders of the soldiers in front of him. “Is this not his family crest and genealogy?”
Morbid curiosity pulled her forward. “Let him through.”
Sudlakh bowed graciously as the soldiers in front of him parted, closing again as soon as he’d crossed into the semi-circle. The Guardian then lifted the chart in his hand for her inspection. A large family crest of a serpentine dragon had been watermarked across the entire scroll. Miniscule writing had been inked meticulously over the crest, detailing a long ancestral line that branched in five places, going back to five names written in bold lettering across the top of the page with various symbols further highlighting their importance. “What does this have to do with anything?” she breathed, barely above a whisper, a sudden flashback to the Griffin Tribe temple leaving her off-balance and not fully present. There’d been a genealogical chart similar to this one in that office, though this one was much more recently crafted.
“It has to do with everything,” Sudlakh said. “Is this your husband?” He was pointing to the name nearest to the bottom of the chart: Qiangde Yichan Yudha.
“That’s… personal information.”
“I’m only asking you for the identity of your husband. Is this, or is this not, your husband?”
“... Yes,” she gasped out. It felt like she was choking. Callida staggered back in a subconscious retreat and bumped into the faithful Gravis who put a hand out to steady her.
Meanwhile, Sudlakh’s eyes had lit up, a carefully tempered smile tugging the corners of his lips. “Isn’t your husband a remarkable healer?”
“H-how do you know about that?”
“And is it true that your children have been identified as hosts to animal spirits from the Lost Tribes?”
“That’s… that’s none of your business!” Feeling desperate not to give anything away, Callida looked to the side, almost certainly revealing her hand anyway.
“Oh, but it is. See, you insist that you are only a soldier and that you don’t believe in the prophecy, but all the markers are there: the merged bloodlines of the Last Primordials, the restoration of the Lost Tribes, the sacred union of two people who are equal opposites and balanced in what they bring to the world… a world that was at war until they married.”
“That’s a coincidence.”
“Is it though? Are you not the Lion General who discovered and exposed the conspiracy of the late Lion King?”
“So what if I am?!” she snarled as a way to hide that she was fighting tears.
“Is it true that your husband was a member of the Resistance and your enemy during the Great War?”
“Stop it!”
“Isn’t it possible that the reason you could see through the conspiracy was because of the perspective you gained through your courtship with your now husband.”
“Stop talking!”
“And isn’t it true that you married each other during the final campaign that brought peace to the world after decades of bloodshed?”
“Gravis…” Callida groped blindly behind her back, seeking his arm.
“A union of equals, of opposites, bringing peace and balance to the world with their union, merging the bloodlines of the Last Primordials, bearing children who have restored the Lost Tribes,” he repeated these points loudly, ensuring the crowd could hear him to renewed cheers.
“That’s enough!” As Callida blundered into Gravis, Arum broke ranks to grab the Guardian by his arm and the back of his cloak to frogmarch him out, giving him an earful about the logical fallacies and inaccuracies of his statements. “... and, finally, the General’s children aren’t members of the Lost Tribes! And I should know! One of her sons is my parum amico, for the Primordials’ sakes! Now back off!”
The crowd booed Arum’s indignant expulsion of Guardian Sudlakh, and Callida took the moment out of the spotlight to regroup her wits. But Sudlakh wasn’t finished and shouted over his shoulder as he was forced back through the wall of shieldbearers. “You’re a great leader, General! Your men are most loyal and obedient, and as an Alpha wolf, I’m sure your husband also commands with great authority!”
“OUT!” Arum roared with a final shove. “If you’re so determined that she is your Mother of Prophecy, shouldn’t you be obedient to her commands?! She ordered you to go home! Now get lost!”
“Gravis….” Callida was riding the razor’s edge of panic, so she was grateful for Gravis’s hand against her back as it steered her towards and then through the palace gates as the disappointed mob shouted after them. It was all she could do to get out of sight before she fell off that precarious razor’s edge.