Digression 4: Bitter Memories

38th Day of Ope in the Third Month of Snow's Fall

4633 A.G.G. (Present Day)

Castle Įcħor-Nåbįlå, North of the Yavan Mountains

The Continent of Kazakoto

3:26 P.S.R. (Pre Suns' Rising)

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Aoleon

Aoleon leaned back on the couch behind her father’s desk, allowing herself to sink into its plush leather. She’d been digging into the first few chapters of Samahdemn’s mémoirs and the further she read, the more that questions tunneled into her head.

She was starting to understand why the Afua Maisha had been disturbed. She couldn’t believe that he’d been doing all of this work without her knowledge. There was so much in his system that she’d never seen; a completely independent server aside from the one that ran the estate. It was a veritable font of information concerning her family that she never knew existed. It was dizzying.

She often struggled to see Samahdemn as only her father and this was not helping that situation. This was a man who once led her into battle. She’d served side by side with him during the Dįvonësë War onboard the MFV Valkyrie. And she continued to serve both him and their kingdom to the best of her ability in her capacity as one of his most trusted advisors and the high princess. This was a man that she should’ve known everything about.

Should have.

How could he have possibly-

“Yeah. I know. I can see it written all over your face.” he signed. He must have noted her growing concern.

“It’s just that…well, I don’t know. How could you not have talked to me about this before?” She shook her head. “I should’ve known all this long before now dad. I should’ve known all of this.”

“Possibly.” he relented.

“You’d think that you could have told your children-”

“Within reason Aoleon. Within reason. We’re still recovering right now from a decade of open war. A war I’d been focusing all of my energy on trying to prevent long before the world even started hearing whispers of hints of rumors of conflict. And that was just the shit I knew about. I can only fight on so many fronts.”

It was truth. And she couldn’t deny it.

“Too much on my mind. Too much going on. I could never seem to find the right time. Besides, I’m writing about it now. Right? I’m trying to tell you now.”

“Yeah. I suppose.”

“Well then, there you go. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” Spinning back to the red ethereal keyboard, he typed furiously for several long moments, and then turned back to look at Aoleon. “You now have unrestricted access.”

She couldn’t hide the fact that she was gladdened. Yet at this point she figured that it was going to be coming eventually. Rarely these days did he do anything spur of the moment.

“You’ve been planning to do that for a while?”

He nodded. “For you, your mom and your siblings.”

"Well…thank you. I feel as though our relationship just grew there.”

“Yep. It did.” He held his thumb and forefinger to within an inch of each other. “About this much.”

The duo shared a snigger.

“So,” she asked, “when are you going to tell me what this whole mémoir business is really about?”

“Come again?”

She widened an eye. “There’s more to this than just wanting to share with us or the common folk. Do you really care this much about what people think?”

Samahdemn’s aspect became inquisitive. “You think me that heartless?”

Aoleon’s face took a turn for the serious. “Mom’s spoke to me more than once about your…bygone life.”

“Hmm.”

Aoleon gazed at her father sternly with eyes that questioned every facet of what he’d just said. “Truth be told, well…no. I don’t think you’re completely heartless. But you were teaching me at one time… I mean, you were grooming me to be... Well, regardless, I remember what you did after...”

She kept loosing her words as the thought of what she was trying to say forced her to stop. She looked at her metal appendages sadly. Bad feelings flooding her mind. Half images of ghost memories. Part of her struggled to remember; wondering why she couldn’t. Another part of her didn’t want to remember.

“Not that any of it was wrong given the circumstances.” she struggled to continue. “I mean-”

“It’s okay Love. I get it.”

Sam apparently couldn’t stifle the smile that threatened to creep across his face in spite of the situation. “You’re intuitive. Always have been. But in this, you’re wrong. Which is a rarity indeed. This new life? The war? It’s changed me. The Goddess changed me. My family has changed me. I don’t think I’m as…caustic, toward people as I once was.”

Looking down suddenly, Samahdemn shrugged his shoulders at Ayashe.

Aoleon may not have had the ability to speak with the leopardess that her father did, but if cats could mimic human mannerisms, Aoleon would’ve sworn that Ayashe had dragged her paw over her face in discouragement at whatever was being shared between the two.

The king reached down and scratched the space in between Ayashe’s ears. To which she closed her eyes and chuffed in happiness.

“I miss anything important?”

“No.” Samahdemn responded. “Nothing important. But Ayashe does feel that, well…” The king looked down as his words trailed. “I should, well…”

“Well what?” Aoleon found herself anxious for the answer.

The castle lord was known for being evasive with most people. But he had never been that way with her, or the leopardess, or his wife and children. He was usually very honest and open with those closest to him.

“You’ve got me wrong. I genuinely care. No one should forget what happened Aoleon. Especially us. Peace can dull you in that way. It can make you forget your struggles when you become content. I don’t want us to forget those who died for us by falling into complacency. I don’t want their sacrifices to be forgotten.”

The albino princess slowly nodded her agreement as she accepted the answer. “The memorial building.” She whispered to herself in a thoughtful and somber tone.

Samahdemn simply nodded conformation to his daughter’s statement.

Great expense was being lent to reconstruct the inner walls within the deeply dug western building beyond the Silver Courtyard. They’d been redone in solid onyx and they’d soon be engraved with the name and race of all those who gave their lives in the Dįvonësë War. The western tower cradled by it was also undergoing a similar change and would reflect all of those who were still presumed missing.

Monument. Shrine. Museum. Seat-of-government. Home. The castle had found itself serving many purposes in recent years.

“I’ve never liked killing, you know.” he stated.

“I know.”

“But it’s nonetheless been a part of my life, following me from one place to another.”

“That’s not your fault. You know that.”

Samahdemn anxiously massaged the bullet wound in his hand in contemplation. “Maybe. But regardless of the outside forces that press against me, my actions are still my own. And regardless of who forgives me, I still know that I’ve got a lot of blood on my hands. And I must hold myself accountable for it.”

He looked down, seemingly searching his soul for more. And Aoleon’s heart ached for him.

“Your mother suffered because of my choices. You’ve suffered because of my choices.” Samahdemn gently took one of his daughter’s cybernetic limbs; studying it in quiet sorrow. “You’ve felt pain like none of your other siblings because of me. From birth.”

“Now wait a minute. None of-”

“Aoleon, no. I have to put my life into some type of perspective. For them, for myself and for you. I want our people to understand. Am I making any sense?”

“Yes. You are.” she relented.

He smiled. “That’s good. That’s very good. I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes.”

“Maybe. Just a little. But it can be forgiven.”

She smiled and it seemed to her that it warmed him up inside a little. “I love you Aoleon. I love all of you.” The phrase seemed to just suddenly bubble up from nowhere; heartfelt as it was.

Aoleon’s smile widened from the mild shock of having that thrown at her. Rarely was her father quite this vulnerable.

“I…we love you too daddy.” It was an earnest response. Regardless of how long she lived, she knew she’d ever be his little girl. “And I’ll tell you again, it’s not your fault. None of it is.”

“I know.”

“Do you though?”

“It’s just that, there are so many reasons that I shouldn’t be here. There are so many instances where I should’ve died. Maybe I even deserved to die. But instead, others died in my place. Good men and women who deserved better. And I feel the weight of their spirits. I’ve seen them. And I want to give them answers.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“But enough of all of that. Let’s focus on this.”

“Okay.” She signed as she nodded in concert. She reluctantly shifted her attention back to the stack of papers and continued to comb through its pages. “Yes…let’s focus.” She repeated the phrase absentmindedly after the air had hung silent for a few moments. And almost immediately realized that there was more concern there than she intended.

“I’m okay Aoleon. You made your point.”

“It’s not that.”

“Oh. Then what is it?”

“Well, I was just wondering… I was wondering if you’d be willing to tell me your feelings about…”

“Yes? My feelings about what? You might as well ask whatever’s on your mind.”

“Well, I haven’t seen anything yet in here about what changed. I mean, you’d been part of the flesh-for-coin trade for a while before you stopped. And I was wondering how you realized-”

“Go on.”

“What was it that woke you up? You’d done dirt for so long. What made you suddenly want redemption?” She couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye when she asked. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve nothing to apologize for. That’s the whole reason I asked you to be here. But you’ll be disappointed with my answer. Truth is that little happened in the moment that my outlook on life was changed…and yet, at the same time, everything happened. People are always keen to allow themselves to see only what they want to see in life or to only be influenced by the consequences of their actions when it directly affects them. It wasn’t any different for me. Maybe even worse.

“Looking back on it all, maybe I should have realized sooner that there was something essential to being human that was missing or underdeveloped in me. I was always angry. Always slightly depressed. And I hated it. I hated that I needed to force that self-loathing on others.

“But that didn’t stop me.

“Maybe that’s why I was such a good slaver. I’d used the vocation I’d stumbled into as a means of focusing that sadness. That hate. Channeling that darkness, blindly. Not feeling much of anything until the day I couldn’t live like that any longer. Until I met Brigid. She saw something in me and helped me in ways that only a Magi could. She got me out of the trade. She helped me learn to focus; she brought me into the fold and taught me. Trained me.

“To this day, I don’t know why she took to me or believed in me the way that she did. But if there’s any good in me, she’s the one who fostered those seeds. And in the end, I was the one who let her down and destroyed that friendship.”

That was a hard pill for Aoleon to swallow, and it showed on her face.

“I’ve regretted, and still do regret, a great many things from my past. It’s the cruel state of my being.” he professed. “As I left The Link behind me and followed the path of The Way down the path of Knighthood, killing followed and I found everything that Brigid nurtured in me being slowly unraveled. And the more I did it, the easier it became. It was almost natural. The Order gave me a cause. An excuse to vent my barely restrained anger. It was all justified. I finally had an outlet for the twistedness that raged inside me.

“Then I learned that I was being used. Suddenly the faces of all those I’d wronged and killed started rushing at me in my sleep. Night after night until I finally broke.

“Something had to be done. I had to do, something to make it right; to make it all right. All I saw was red. And I thought this was my chance to atone. But, instead of righting a wrong, I caused the Grand Spire Incident.

“…I was so stupid. So lost.”

Aoleon shook her head. “It’s…it’s ok. I shouldn’t have pried.”

“I’d already caused so much suffering.” he continued absentmindedly.

Aoleon could hear sadness and anger bleeding through his thick alien accent as his speech slowed down. And she realized that somewhere along the way, he’d started slipping into living memory.

“Taking away people’s freedom, destroying their humanity, all the while lying to myself that it was the natural order of things…”

“Dad, it’s ok.”

“Dark skinned buyers diving into a sea of dirty pale faces; roughly pulling open gump mouths like horses to see their teeth...” The king’s hand-speak started to falter as he unwillingly found himself being dragged through his own memories.

“Dad?”

“Wet. It just finished raining. The smells and sounds of the Yaklow River are all around me.” he said in an almost uncontrolled manner. “A small town. Inconsequential. I hate it here.”

Aoleon realized that he was no longer there, but somewhere else. Sometime else. He’d lapsed into an abnormal involuntary reverie. She’d seen this happen to him before. She’d be lying if she said she understood it, but she knew what it was. And as his hands went limp, it was all that she could do to keep up with the movements of his lips and tongue.

“People walking slaves up and down the stables. Completely naked; making them stoop and bend and show themselves off like things with no humanity. Men begging to be bought with their families. Ma’Jong cubs crying from fear; no understanding for why their mothers were allowing their tails to be lifted and their genitalia peered at as their faces were slapped away.”

She had always known his past to be appalling, but never had she seen him slip into a memory of the auctions; or any memory from his time in the trade for that matter. He was always so careful about it. And to have him ramble on about it now, it seemed almost surreal.

“The smell of freshly lit cigars and loud cologne mingling with the smell of nervous sweat and dread. The auctioneer yelling ‘Sold!’ as a man is being pulled from the auction block. The sound of heavy irons being clasped around his neck, ankles and wrists as he’s led away. Men laughing and cracking wise about all the deviant fun they were about to have with their new gumps as they buy woman after woman.”

Aoleon didn’t want this to continue. She was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but she found herself unable to speak. She was unable to cover her ears to it.

He in turn seemed to struggle with each word as they flew from his lips with a life of their own; seemingly spurred on by the ghosts of his victims seeking penance. The king closed his eyes against it. But it was a futile effort.

Both the king and the princess were altogether as helpless as the slaves whose sad moments he was transcribing. Aoleon wanted to pull them away from there; these unknown people. She wanted to save them from their fates. But it was a moment of the past, long since gone by. It wasn’t something that she could affect. There was nothing here that she could steer towards a happier denouement.

“Another face. Another woman.” he continued. “A dingy dress of white; her blonde hair laying limply against her face. Her body so small and svelte that she couldn’t yet be a woman; twelve maybe. Or thirteen. Her father begging for them to take him instead. Three men dragging him away. His fingers dig so hard into the ground that they bleed. Two men beside me want to buy her. Bragging about the last one they raped and beat over months. I do nothing as they talk. I say nothing. Fucking animals!” he confessed as he continued to spiral. “Why didn’t I do something? Say something? Why couldn’t I...”

King Samahdemn grew increasingly angry as he relived the memory. Sweat accumulated on his brow. He shook with the effort of stopping. Aoleon got on her knees before him, putting her hands on him. She tried to ground him. To bring him back from the abyss. She tried to let him know she was what was real.

“She nearly drops to her knees as she’s sold. A mulatto slave grabs her; the auctioneer’s ‘helper’. She’ll never get the chance to grow up. Never see her family again. Will she even understand what’s going to be done to her? A light extinguished.

“It didn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop. Please…stop.” He whispered to himself; to the vision. Aoleon could do nothing but listen in horror to the induced confession.

“The next one is even younger. No older than eight. Tears running down her face-”

“Dad!”

Samahdemn snapped back to reality from the reminiscence from Aoleon yelling into his ear as she dug the “nails” of her metal appendages into his arms to jolt him from his trauma.

The castle lord looked around himself as if awakened from a deep and restless sleep. He embarrassingly wiped away tears that he hadn’t realized he’d shed; fresh and wet on his cheeks.

The albino princess was filled with fear, shock and sadness as she slowly pulled her nails from his skin.

“You huh…you must hate me. You’re right to. I can see it in your face. You still think I’m not a monster?” he said shakily as he forced himself to reinstitute talking with his hands.

Aoleon wanted to say no, but all language escaped her. She felt frozen with indecision. All she could do was force herself to shake her head.

“If my own daughter, the person who knows me best, can’t stomach me, how can I expect anyone else to forgive me? I…I’m sorry Love.”

The affectionate apology fell flat on the albino’s ears. And for a moment, she began to think that all of the bad that had befallen him in life; all of his personal pain…all of her family’s pain, was deserved. It was his karma visited upon them all.

She suddenly felt regretful and a bit stupid that she’d asked the question in the first place.

“The auctions were a nasty bit of business Aoleon. Business I endeavored to steer clear of; subconsciously I never wanted to see the consequences of my actions, I suppose.” Samahdemn said as he greedily reached for his bottle and sucked down an undiluted shot in an effort to calm and explain himself. “When I did experience it all for the first time, I realized that despite how much I hid it from myself, I was a Dæmön making an ungoddessly amount of money destroying people.”

“And the horrors inflicted on the slaves by the people that you sold them to never bothered you before?” Aoleon asked. “You had to know that people who bought other people weren’t good people.”

“Like I said, folks will only ever see what they want to see. I knew what the business was when I became a part of it. But it filled a desire. A need. It was all very…I don’t know. These people’s suffering was far removed from me. I never really saw it until then. The aftermath was all about me, true enough. Bodies left to hang for days after long done lynchings; the humiliation in the cast down eyes of slaves who dared not look at their masters; the dehumanized parents offering up their children to save themselves.

“But never before going there had it ever been so…in my face. So exposed. So directly linked to me. And, at some level, I guess I kept myself away because I was afraid that, if I did see it, that I might not have minded it all that much. I was afraid of that part of myself.

“It’s a frustrating thing to try to explain. Like an adzæ attempting to explain how it feels to indulge the blood-thirst. Impossible to do it properly. No matter what I say to excuse it, it’s inevitably the wrong thing to say.

“I could make up excuses for myself, blame it on my blood, but it would be insufficient and unwanted. Many are the shames that I have to live with; that I have to atone for.” He wiped new tears from his face and took up the absinthe again. This time, the entire bottle. And married his lips to it.

“At least you didn’t care for it once you saw it. You didn’t allow yourself to stay blind to it. That’s what matters.” Aoleon stated; finally finding her voice in the matter.

“Maybe.” he answered. “Regardless, that was it.”

Did mom know about all of this? Aoleon wondered. Standing from her knees and feeling a little drained, she returned to her seat. “How old were you?”

“I must have been somewhere about my thirtieth year. Regardless, I was still young by Swalii standards. I had so much unnecessary hate and misery in me. And I rarely had it under control in those years before my travels to the Link with Brigid and she saved my life. I was an evil person, and that evil still lives within me. Yet the Goddess still forgave me with Her gaze and blessed me by silencing most of the madness with Her kiss; a blessing that I didn’t rightly deserve. But She did it anyway. Now I live to help and serve others. To free slaves, not tie them down. To save lives, not take them.”

“And Lady Brigid changed you that much before you met Åmbrosįå?”

“Her weaves of heka were impeccable. And they helped me a great deal in keeping my disquieted nature in check. It was a relief. After being bound of my own cognizance, I was able to think clearer. I could process my anger better. For a while.”

Samahdemn pulled some calming smoke into his lungs and vacated it. Chasing it with another swallow of the green færię.

Aoleon thought carefully for a moment on the ramifications of her father’s inner thoughts, and forced out the question- “So, did you ever wonder if you were any different from Tįlåtħ, Dåÿviåd, Så’Ħdënåħ or even Lumå’įl Himself?”

Samahdemn was a little shocked by that; a fact that Aoleon could have been blind and still seen in his body language. But it was a fair question in her mind. And she couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry for asking it.

“That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

“It may end up being the only one that matters.”

A puff and a swig later he answered- “Well, yes. The thought had crossed my mind. In point-of-fact I came to realize by the eve of the war that there may have been no real difference between me and them at all. I don’t know Aoleon. All I know is that I was fortunate enough to have the right people in my life when I needed them the most. Not to mention the gifts of the Goddess Herself. Without them, I most certainly would be another Tįlåtħ or Dåÿvįåd.”

“And where would we all be then?”

“Nowhere.” he said quickly and with absolute certainty in his voice. “We’d all be nowhere but with our loved ones in the hereafter; whatever that would’ve been under His rule. Ëmpÿrë would have never again been what it once was. The Ǻngëls would be all dead, or turned. Drågons would be all but extinct, and this world would be burned for spite and left to die a slow silent death.

“And the universe wouldn’t even notice.”

The high princess swallowed hard to moisten her dried mouth. Stunned beyond expression. And not a further word passed between them on the subject.

“Continue to read Aoleon.” King Samahdemn commanded. “Understanding me fully may not be possible, but there needs to be a clear understanding of the type of people Lumå’įl and Tįlåtħ were. You should understand what type of hate and anger can fester and grow in the hearts of the misguided. You need to understand what type of man it took to stand against them. And everyone needs to know how close Mundus came to dying.”