Disclaimer: It's been years, and sarcastic disclaimers have lost their charm. But the requirement is still ridiculous.
Apparent and Presumptive
A Game of Heirs
What I am about to ask of Your Majesty is as much a personal plea as an official one. Please bear that in mind, consider my state, and be discrete, because I am in no condition to deal with a scandal.
You think you are helping her, but you are not.
It is unseemly of me be traveling anywhere so soon after this kind of tragedy, and it is impractical to leave Asturia naked of all royalty. I believe she trusted that would keep me away, because she does not seem to grasp how important –I have exhausted all my resources in Pallas, and even here, there is little I can do by myself. I would not impose on Your Majesty and his palace at this ungodly hour if I had any other choice. But she has put me in an impossible position.
Left me alone, and in an impossible position.
If I may, I would like to tell Your Majesty –if this will at all help make my point…
I knew your brother.
Not the Crown Prince of Fanelia, who was thought dead before I was deemed old enough to even step outside the capital; Your Majesty, I knew Folken Strategos. In the period of his life most obscure to Your Majesty, I knew him inside and out.
We were the same machine.
While Pallas diplomats entertained themselves holding court away from Court, and Zaibach's military devoured its children and sprouted foundries like mold, he and I spent the mornings and evenings of forty five days in his dark, portentous study, sitting across each other at his dark, portentous desk, drafting dark, portentous texts.
It was he and I who were responsible for the Pact of Non-Aggression and the Treaty of Combined Retaliation that constituted Asturia's alliance with Zaibach, an agreement that I had hoped would keep my people safe.
I found him remarkably intelligent. That has given me reason to blame him and pretext to forgive him for absolutely anything. He was admirable and he was threatening, and it was a challenge and a pleasure to play with and against him like I did in that room.
The close quarters of that game made me understand him. I knew that he was like me. That he had a sword in a bound hand –power, but no control–, and that he was throwing every bit of his skill and talent into fulfilling the wishes of someone he didn't entirely agree with, but could not in good conscience really renounce.
We understood the State, and we understood power. We understood what they required of us.
What we wrote and signed did not, in the end, keep anyone safe, and I understand exactly why. I know because I knew your brother better than anyone. Because we worked the same way, because we were the same machine.
I feel I must tell Your Majesty something I know Strategos would have wanted to pass on. Something I trust Your Majesty has realized anyway, but needs to be said if we are to make responsible decisions tonight.
One cannot acquire power without losing freedom. Since only a madman would willingly give up his freedom, peace begs that power fall on unwilling hands.
My sister needs to come home.
The throne is empty, the people are restless, and I am not my father. I have no authority, in name or in fact, and I cannot... Forgive me. I cannot do things the way he did. So I need your help.
She is my only remaining family. If it were merely a matter of my wishes, I would let nothing stop her from being happy. But I am no more free to give her that than she is to have it.
I know that you endured hell and raided heaven with her, with Schezar, with the Seer. I know that war has made him your brother as much as blood makes her my sister. I know you fought him, and beside him, and I know what kind of bonds, what kind of trust and loyalty that can create. I know that you trust her, too. With your life, with others even more precious. And I know she returns that trust without hesitation, which is why they came to you for sanctuary.
I ask you to own up to that trust and stop enabling her capriciousness. It does not sadden me that she is choosing not to be queen, so much as it saddens me that she is choosing not to be an adult. I do not want History to remember her as the cause of the fall of a great Nation.
I need, at the very least, to get an abdication form the Crown Princess. But mostly I need to talk to my sister.
I need Your Majesty to tell me where she is.
Metatext:
It really has been years. But the endless possibilities of Eries plus international politics are still so attractive…