“Sometimes life can indeed look very miserable to outside observers. It’s not all bad, though.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.
“Why would people do that?” asked Kino as the army column marched past the rows of impaled bodies. By coincidence they happened to ride past the one high-ranked officer Aideen personally caught, who still seemed to be hanging on to life even on the stake. Kino looked somewhat disturbed at the sight before she looked away. “Why hurt others so much and invite hatred to yourself like this?”
Aideen quietly noted that Kino had not asked why the people being impaled were punished so cruelly. The girl was practical enough to understand that the Antemeian survivors needed an outlet for their anger and grief, it seemed, and thus hadn’t debated the need for some more… excessive methods of execution to take care of that need.
“If you truly want to get all the way down to the source, then arguably all this suffering you see, both the ones they inflicted upon the people here, and what said people returned to them in spades, began with a lie,” said Aideen honestly. “I am not certain myself whether the lie started with just one person, or whether a group fabricated it to serve their purpose, but I suppose it matters little by now.”
“It started over two centuries or so ago, but someone in the former Junoran lands, which back then had recently become part of the Kingdom of Vitalica, where I came from, apparently really disliked the undead,” said Aideen as she continued the tale. “Mind you, they had good reasons to dislike their previous rulers, who were primarily necromancers, but we thought we treated them well enough, until they rose up against us.”
“What was the reason they did that?” queried Kino with curiosity.
“Allegedly, it’s because we ‘joined hands’ with the ‘evil’ necromancers who perverted the natural order and all that. Said necromancers being the people of the Lichdom, of course,” explained Aideen. “For what it was worth, while it was not common knowledge, Vitalica itself wouldn’t have gained its independence if it were not for help and support from the Lichdom.”
“One way or another, that rumor spread covertly amongst the former Junorans, and even some of our own people turned against us. Whether it was a play for power, or they truly felt outraged over the rumors, we had no idea,” she continued. “At that time Vitalica itself was rather unstable, as my father had recently passed away, while his heir, my niece Maebh, was still a youth at the time.”
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“So you left and sought help from… the Bone Lord?” asked Kino. She had seen how Aideen acted around the Bone Lord and affectionately called him her Grandfather, so she always felt somewhat curious about that. Everyone else treated the Bone Lord with far more respect.
“Well, it was the only place we could seek succor from, so there wasn’t much of a choice, but yeah,” affirmed Aideen. “When the coup happened, we took the people who were loyal to us and sought refuge from Grandpa. We only returned and took back our former home years later, after the Antemeians attacked and conquered the region.”
“After we took it back from Antemeia, Grandpa also made it clear that we have his support, so nobody was foolish enough to mess with us from then on,” she added. “Maebh lived most of the rest of her life in Vitalica and ruled as governor there for many of those years, though Èirynn’s family and I chose to instead live in Ptolodecca. It helped that Grandpa took Èirynn in as one of his disciples as well, and that she married another of his disciples, I guess.”
“La Fiachna was where you all used to live, right?” asked Kino.
“Yes, you should still remember our visit there.” said Aideen with a nod.
While she was taking Kino as well as Mimia and Èirynn’s children around on trips, Aideen had naturally taken them to La Fiachna too, where one of Maebh’s descendants still served as governor. Kino had been quite taken by the city, which housed one of the largest populations of Vitalis worshipers in the Lichdom, and how they lived so peacefully together with the others.
“Why couldn’t the ones… who claimed the name Vitalica live in peace with others like their namesake people did even now?” asked the girl eventually as she pondered the difference she had seen for herself.
“It’s what you get when you poison the younger generation with hatred and made-up offenses for generations on end,” replied Aideen with a wistful sigh as she herself felt not a little bit of regret at the situation. “They would grow up knowing only hate and vitriol, their vision blinded by the stories they had been told repeatedly since young. Some could eventually break through the falsehoods they had been fed all their lives, but most failed to do so.”
“In a way, it could be interpreted as if the older generations were rearing the younger generation as puppets to carry their twisted beliefs and perform their loathsome biddings,” she added with some obvious vehemence in her voice. “It is a most disgusting practice, though from what we learned from the captives, the practice seemed the most prevalent amongst those who were better off.”
The Vitalican captives that the Antemeians agreed to spare were not let off that lightly, as they would be made to do hard labor – mostly focused on rebuilding what they had destroyed and damaged – for the next decade or so. Afterwards though, it remained to be seen how they would react should they be given their freedoms back.
After a decade, the Bone Lord would likely have sent quite a few methods to improve the standard of living in the Antemeian lands, simply by providing what the Ptolodeccans already took for granted. Since most of the captive Antemeians came from poor backgrounds, one couldn’t help but wonder whether they would even still want to return after they witnessed a much better way of life.
Assuming they were even allowed to return home by their own people, that was. Aideen could see all too easily how the more fanatical Vitalicans might have considered the captives to be “tainted” or some such should they return after a decade of living in Antemeia.