One hundred and fourteen unmarked graves all stood in a row, moss and vines clutching them in mourning. What remained of the village of Aletheia started here, at the bottom of the hill where Gadiel Halcomb had surrounded and murdered Shara’s parents. Someone, titans know who, had made a grave for each of them, though Shara suspected there would be no bones underneath. After all, her skeleton was still walking around.
The long line of graves was arranged in order, from largest to smallest. Perhaps, then, the largest grave was her mother’s, the towering beast of a woman who’d shared Shara’s strength. Any of the middle-sized stones could represent her father’s, and any of the smallest few could be Shara’s own. Shara shivered, though not from the cool wind. Someone, many years ago, had crafted her a grave, laid it in the charred ruins of her old home. Someone that must have known her, and believed she was dead. There were only a few people Shara knew to fit that criteria, but she doubted any of them mourned her passing.
Darron approached and wordlessly place a hand on Shara’s shoulder. Both of them had many questions, but for once, Shara had no more desire to vocalize them than her brother. It had been a day and a half’s walk from Nuxvar to Aletheia, during which everyone had been uncharacteristically quiet. Adgito had fallen back to earth after hitting his duration limit and obtained a male, plant-like form that blended in with the grasses. He had made the most noise of the journey, trying and failing to convince Arina to stab him again. Yet even he remained respectfully silent as Shara took in the sight of her own grave.
Shara wondered why she had been an only child. Most families in the village had two or three kids by the time their first had been her age. Maybe her mom didn’t want to handle the sedentary requirements of pregnancy a second time. Maybe she never tried, and Shara was the only one to have survived her wild whims. No, that was the doubt talking. Her mother may have been a battle maniac, but she had always been loving and gentle when the situation warranted it.
Shara wondered what her father really did as the head of the tribe. She knew he had been in charge, she had been proud of that. One day, she would have been in charge of the tribe herself. But the things that meant, the day-to-day work her father put in for everyone’s sake, was something she had never thought to ask. She just assumed she’d always have time to learn later, or that he’d teach her when she was ready. Despite the brutally dangerous life her tribe lived as hunters, never once had she seriously thought there might be a day when it was too late.
The graves were a lot to take in, but they were almost a stalling tactic to let Shara avoid the town proper. One look up the hill brought back many brutal memories of that tragic night, her town engulfed in flames and riddled with corpses. The bodies had all been cleared or washed away over the past eleven years, as well as any of the weapons, armor, or other valuables that may have been scattered across the town. The foundations and half-burnt remains of the houses, however, laid partly intact, their charred frames reaching splinters towards the sky. Though dilapidated to the point of being barely recognisable, Shara still knew what each building once was, and who had lived there. The road up the hill was a literal memory lane she wasn’t quite ready to walk down. Wordlessly, she remained staring at the gravestones for nearly half an hour before finally working up the courage to move on.
The four of them entered a few of the houses as they trudged up the hill. The doorless frames offered no resistance, just as they hadn’t to the looters that no doubt scoured the town clean. Not so much as a children’s toy could be found, let alone anything of significant value. Though Yidril had been rebuilt by new people after its annihilation, there had been no reason to attempt the same with Aletheia. Compared to the rest of the plains it was built on relatively infertile ground, and the village had only initially survived through extreme hunting. With no interesting reason to visit once the looting had completed, the village had been left untouched by intelligent life ever since.
There were minds about, of course. As nature had reclaimed the area, animals made her clan’s old homes into their own. Some relatively small monsters were about too, but Shara’s sword was soaked in the blood of their brethren and they were barely smart enough to understand what that meant. After all, you didn’t last long on the northern plains unless you understood the difference between predator and prey.
One mind in particular, however, caught Shara’s attention. A familiar, fuzzy mind that defied conventions and drowned understanding. Under normal circumstances, it could be anyone. Man, woman, child, adult… Shara had felt this unreadable property in them all. Yet the further into town Shara walked, the more certain she became. Who else would it even be? Taking a sharp, silent left, she entered another dilapidated building, staring softly at the wood stove her mother used to make so many meals. It was still intact, after all these years.
“Hello, Marisol,” Shara said.
Darron and Adgito jumped in surprise as the dark-skinned woman emerged, peering down from the tattered remains of the house’s second story. The house didn’t look like it was in good enough shape to go climbing around on, as the ceiling and most of the walls had been completely destroyed by fire, gravity, and time. Yet there Marisol was, peering down lazily as if she’d been there for hours.
“Hello, Shara,” Marisol answered serenely. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I’m just here to say some proper goodbyes,” Shara growled. “You’d better have a damn good reason for waiting around in my house to interrupt that.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, it wasn’t my intention to bother you,” Marisol responded. Rather than her usual haughty demeanor, it sounded surprisingly honest. “I suppose I’m just here to say some proper hellos.”
“Cut the cryptic crap, Marisol,” Shara snapped back. “Is this a setup? How did you know I’d be here?”
“No, and I made a very good guess. Respectively.” Marisol sighed, sitting down so her legs dangled from the second-story balcony above. “I’m here to apologise.”
“Apologize??? You think you can just say sorry to all of this?” Shara splayed out her hands to indicate the ruins around her.
“Of course not, sweetheart,” Marisol replied with a frustrated pout, “I mean more recent events.” She pressed her palms together, putting each pointer finger on her lips in a thoughtful pose. “When I first saw you in Terranburg I… panicked. Your family had left me rather traumatized, you know. So, I overreacted a bit, what with the military order and all. I never really got to know you before making that call, which was unfair of me. The more I… well, the more I attempted to sabotage you, let’s be honest… the more it became apparent that you don’t really deserve it. Honestly, you’re a great person. Had I changed my approach in Terranburg, not been so aggressive, I think we could have been seeing eye-to-eye this whole time. It is a misplay I deeply regret, and would like to rectify if at all possible. Elpis could dearly use someone like you.”
It took awhile for Shara to process the sheer audacity of that proposition.
“Are you… are you asking me to join you?” Shara sputtered, “Lady, you have one seriously titanic ballsack to sit there and ask that in the ruins of the home that your people destroyed! What the hell are you expecting me to say? ‘Why yes, I’d love to join team genocide!’ I’m glad the people who wiped out everyone I knew and loved think I’m a swell girl!”
Marisol glared back down at her disappointedly.
“I chose this place because I was hoping your soireé in Nuxvar would have shed light on your misconceptions. I genuinely can’t tell whether you understand what really happened or not. So let’s make the events of eleven years ago perfectly clear: your family invaded and slaughtered my people long before we ever touched a hair on their pretty blonde heads. It was an unprovoked attack on another people’s sovereign soil. Elpis wiped your family out only because they made it perfectly clear they were not interested in any option other than war. That is why you frighten me, Shara Aletheia. Your family had a level of power the rest of the world needs entire armies to output, and when they threw it against me it was with a bloodlust that haunts me to this day. I may have made a mistake projecting that onto you, but eleven years ago? Elpis was not the villain.”
Rage boiled up in Shara as Marisol kept talking. She wasn’t going to accept slander about her clan just a few blocks away from their damn gravestones!
“My family,” she intoned, “would never do something like that. They were good people.”
“Funny,” Marisol growled back, “I recall Isabella Cornwall saying much the same thing.”
“I’m not an idiot, like Isabella Cornwall!” Shara roared back. “For crying out loud, I can read minds!”
“Do you seriously think a village of mind readers wouldn’t have developed a trick or two to keep things from each other?” Marisol countered. “You can only read surface thoughts, right? You can’t hear anything someone isn’t actively thinking about. A bit of self-control is all a person would need to overcome that.”
Shara was about ready to jump up there and punch Marisol in the face when Darron gave her shoulder a light squeeze.
“Shara was raised to be a good person,” he calmly informed her. “If her parents were as irrationally aggressive as you claim, that trait wouldn’t be manifested.”
Shara exhaled, declining to mention she had been just about to engage in some irrational aggression. Darron to the rescue, as always. Marisol seemed to be seriously pondering this.
“...You don’t have to be a good person, to teach someone to value goodness,” she eventually said. “It certainly helps, but so long as you understand your hypocrisy you can still do wrong while teaching your child right. It’s not a great idea, but Shara was very young. It is not an insult to her to claim she was fooled.”
“Naw, that’s dumb,” Adgito butted in. “You keep talking like they just killed people ‘for because,’ but a hypocrite still thinks that they’re awesome and great. If they went out and killed a buncha people they would have had a reason for it. Plus, there’s the thing where they supposedly wiped Yidril out but spared a buncha people in Nuxvar? Come on, you’re hiding something.”
Marisol frowned.
“Well, not really. I thought the pattern of murders was obvious. Everyone they killed was from Elpis. Yidril was a colony we specifically established, whereas Nuxvar was a mix of normal residents and people I had exported there.”
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“And why would my family want to attack Elpis?” Shara asked.
For the first time since they’d met, Shara thought Marisol actually looked sad.
“Ideological differences, I suppose. We were trying to peacefully assimilate the city under Elpis’ rule. No violence, no takeover, just having enough people be fond of our country to say yes. It’s a slow process, but Nuxvar is very far north and we wouldn’t want to spread ourselves too thin anyway. No one would have been hurt. Best I can tell, your family objected because we were lying about it. The people from Elpis usually didn’t introduce themselves as such; we didn’t want the sudden influx of immigrants to make people suspicious or fearful. It’s just… ugh. The fast overvalue speed, the strong overvalue strength, so leave it to a colony of mind readers to think truth is the most important virtue, hmm?”
“Maybe just, I dunno, don’t lie about it?” Shara huffed.
“If I can make the world a better place with a lie or two, I damn well will,” Marisol snapped back. “And either way, nobody should be killing me over it! Imagine, Shara, a world where everyone is hard-working, intelligent, and kind. A world where we have laws but hardly use them because everyone cares so much for one another that crime isn’t needed. A place where we have true equality of opportunity because everyone is actually smart enough to know what that means. A world where people have the freedom to do whatever they please without sacrifice to security because people simply have no demonstrable reason not to trust each other. Societies and governments of today struggle because they need to account for the assumption that everyone is evil, that everyone will simply look out for themselves and screw any other person in their path. And this is an entirely justified assumption! But what if I could remove it all, with nothing but hard work and a simple lie? Is truth really worth that much?”
“I mean, that sounds really great, Marisol,” Shara said, rubbing her temples. “But the problem is that you can’t. Even if you could hold that all up on a lie– which, again, you can’t– it would all come crashing down once people figure it out. And if they’re all as smart as you say, it will. That whole fantasy is impossible.”
Marisol smiled broadly, her legs swinging from the balcony like an excited child in a booster seat.
“It is not only possible, sweetheart, but I have done it,” she claimed. “Elpis runs as a true utopia. No tricks, no brainwashing, no regimes, just love and joy and beauty. Return with me, and I will gladly prove it. I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.”
She was… confident. So confident it was almost enticing. Shara felt like she didn’t need mind reading to know that this woman genuinely believed she could fix the whole world. As tempting as that was, it was also terrifying. People could do anything, when they knew they were right.
“Excuse me,” Arina suddenly said. “I have a question.”
“Hmm? Well, by all means ask it,” Marisol offered.
Arina didn’t look up, her blank gaze locked on the wall in front of her.
“Did you kill my master?”
“Pardon?” Marisol asked, eyebrows raising.
“Were you, in any capacity, involved in the death of Mayor Gregory Cornwall of Oinos Springs?” Arina clarified. “That is my question.”
Marisol frowned, studying Arina carefully.
“...Yes,” she eventually said. “I had no personal hand in the killing, but it was arranged as the result of my actions.”
Arina nodded.
“Then I hate you, and everything you stand for, and my involvement in this conversation is closed,” she said.
Ah, right. As interesting as this plan of Marisol’s was, it ignored the important point of her being a terrible person.
“Yeah, I think we’re done here,” Shara agreed, turning to leave. “Thanks but no thanks, Marisol. We’re going to Hydronia, and that happens to be in the other direction.”
“Really?” Marisol huffed indignantly, “I kill an objectively evil man for the good of a city, and that’s your final straw? The other three of you know Oinos is better off without him, you saw the kind of things he did.”
“You just have no comprehension of how friggin’ crazy you sound, do you?” Shara snapped, turning back. “All this ‘greater good,’ ‘ends justify the means,’ and now ‘objective evil?’ Good and evil are subjective, that’s been established by every sane person for the past hundred years! Read a book! You’re a titans-damned cliche, Marisol! A textbook nutter! How the hell did you expect me to react?”
“I expect you to stop dismissing my words because you think you’ve heard them before and think! People do have an objective morality, they just insist on overcomplicating it so they can pretend they’re never on the wrong side of the fence! Objective definitions for good and evil are the easiest things in the world: good is when your actions benefit someone else, and evil is when your actions harm someone else. That’s it! And every damn moral conundrum on this mixed-up planet is just people freaking out over how often you do both.
“Actions are almost always good and evil, because they have effects that are both helpful and harmful. Trying to sum those results as if they cancel out is misleading and incorrect. Most evil is performed by accident, through incompetence, negligence, or stupidity. We don’t like to feel responsible for consequences we didn’t intend, so our instinct is to seek justification. When we allow people to view morality subjectively, we create an escape route from something they should be learning from so that they can feel good about failure instead. They’re never looking at the bigger picture, of how that escape leaks out into a culture like kindness-seeking poison. Kindness, ultimately, is a person putting time and effort into understanding how their actions will affect others and actively attempting to bring benefit. It’s something that requires thought, requires purpose, so when you excuse people from thinking about consequences you excuse them from considering kindness.
“To maximize the good you bring to the world, you must understand the results of your actions before you attempt them. Intelligence, therefore, if rightly applied, increases goodness. Furthermore, one must be willing to see their desired actions to the end for the results to bear fruit, so a strong work ethic also breeds goodness. It is those three attributes, kind, intelligent, and hard-working, that must be nurtured in the population to create an ideal world. Are those the words of a megalomaniac? The desire to make a place where everyone is just… nice to each other? That’s all I want!
“And it is doable, it is sustainable, but not every action I take in the pursuit of a good world is going to be perfectly good itself. We’re not in a good world, yet. Isabella was heir to Gregory Cornwall’s fortune, and though she is not a smart person she at least strives to be good. I could have left her father alone, waited for him to die of natural causes, and enacted the exact same plans then I’m enacting in Oinos Springs now with just a few decade’s delay and no assassination on my hands. But how many people would he have fed alive to his pets in the meantime? What would he have done with dozens of starving, brainwashed monsters when they grew up? Evil breeds evil, I understand that better than anyone. Killing him was an evil act and there will be evil consequences. But I do not regret making that call, because good breeds good as well. The sooner I can bring it in, the faster it will grow.”
There was a pause, as Marisol looked at Shara expectantly. Oh, was she done? Shara let out an exasperated huff of air. What could she say, to something like that? What did she want to say? Maybe if Shara could read her mind, or if Marisol wasn’t being so damn vague, she parse how truthful any of this actually was and form some coherent counter. There was so much to say, so many nits to pick, that Shara could certainly continue this conversation if she chose to. She’d bring up a flaw, Marisol would have a clarification, and the dance would continue all night. Maybe Marisol was right. Maybe she had found some amazing trick she could use to rule the world in harmony.
Yet didn’t it just seem far more likely that she was a loon?
“Well, what do you think, guys?” Shara asked her friends, expertly passing the buck. “You wanna go to Elpis?”
“No thanks,” Darron immediately deadpanned. “I’ve already accepted a scholarship at another country’s institution.”
“Yeah, hard pass,” Adgito agreed. “I hope saving the world and junk works out for you, but that’s way above my head. Just try not to screw everything up in the process.”
“Requesting permission to kill and eat this woman,” Arina snapped.
“Well, you heard ‘em,” Shara said with an over-exaggerated shrug. “Looks like the team says it’s a no-go. Gonna have to decline the genocide-fueled utopia party, sweetheart. Now get the hell out of my house!”
Marisol drummed her fingers on the balcony floor, frowning.
“You… are not taking me seriously,” she intuited.
“Honestly?” Shara said, “I’m just tired of you. I’m halfway towards letting Arina loose just so you’ll stop stalking me everywhere. Keep your stupid utopia and leave me alone.”
Marisol nodded, grimacing.
“I… see. Sorry, sweetheart. That’s disappointing, but I understand that I was the one who burned the bridges I’m trying to build now. ...I take it this means you don’t plan on working against me, though?”
“...As long as you don’t give me a reason to, no.”
That was a lie, of course. Shara had every intention of finding the truth about her family’s murder, and that probably meant going through Marisol. The question is, would she call Shara’s bluff?
“Alright,” Marisol said, giving a firm nod, “I can work with that.” Standing up, she paused, as if remembering something. “If that’s the case, I should ask you to not to go to Yidril. I know I made the place seem awfully tempting, but it was just a trap to kill you in case this didn’t work out. Steer clear. Um. I suppose I’ll leave you to it.”
Grasping the edge of the balcony, Marisol pseudo-gracefully swung down and dropped to the first floor. Nervously stepping around Arina, she nodded a goodbye and exited through the door, eventually vanishing from sight.
“And now we’ll never see her again!” Adgito declared proudly. “Hooray!”
Shara couldn’t help but chuckle.
“Oh, if only,” she said. “I give it like, three days, tops.”
“Three days, huh?” Adgito pondered. “On an unrelated note, does Yidril happen to be a three day’s walk from here?”
“Yeah,” Shara confirmed. “It sure is.”
“I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” Adgito said cheerfully. “When someone says ‘trap to kill you,’ it actually just turns you on.”
“Oh, ha ha!” Shara groaned, punching him lightly on a sleeved arm. “But seriously though, that was sketchy, right?”
“She had some very interesting points,” Darron admitted, “but I certainly wouldn’t put stock in them without verification. And traveling with her to a country we’re wanted in seems like a poor way to accomplish that.”
“Yup. So, everybody all for walking into the deathtrap?” Shara asked.
“Always,” Arina confirmed.
“Yeah, well, you are a deathtrap,” Adgito countered. “But sure, what the hell. I’m almost getting used to punching monsters.”
Darron nodded. She didn’t even need to ask.
“Alright,” Shara declared. “Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
Taking one last look at old memories, Shara turned and marched out of her old house, heading north to certain doom.