'ᴡᴇ ꜱʜᴀʀᴇ ᴀ ꜱᴇɴᴛɪᴍᴇɴᴛ. ɪ ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ʙᴏᴜɢʜᴛ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ʀᴇᴠᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ.'
Only one month has passed in Daliah Viper's life trying to reintegrate at court and follow the uneasy trails her eyes have /
One month filled with blood, tribulations, and lies. With new responsibilities and split loyalty between her family and the new hands clutching reign tightly as desperately comes a new opportunity, a new uneasy rule over her own /
And since Samson has his very own ideas of taking over, the alliance formed with her husband still stands shakier than anything...
mala fides- bad faith; intent to deceive.
concentrate
-to bring or direct toward a common center or objective
-to gather into one body, mass, or force
-to accumulate (a toxic substance) in bodily tissues
We shake strapped in seats, and the only sounds penetrating the inside of the convoy is the fine rattling of metal or the shuffling of feet. The rustling of uniforms. The static shifting of a signal incoming on a radio.
Right next to me, Hector Viper sifts his fingers into his belt and smooths over it while he talks.
I barely listen with one ear, eyes glancing around, taking in the silent forms. The hardened faces. I barked general commands in Archeon. Now I have to leave the choice of positions and vantage points to people that are in the position to demand them.
I have as little power over anything that happens here as I had strapped to a wall in manacles, spitting and biting in a cell. It rubs me off the wrong way and tingles on my nerves. I feel incompetent. I don't like feeling incompetent. But such is the nature of soldiers in an army. We are disposable.
We are disposable as the creatures we breed and the alliances we make.
War makes widows. War makes corpses. War makes an army. War makes fighters.
This is the very machinery of war. I would consider this the drumbeat of it.
My vision rocks, staring out of the armored window into the world, a sky filled with dazzling clouds of smoke.
Ruins.
A city made of something broken but still standing longer than any bone could withstand turning to dust. A place that should be filled with something very much fouler than any smog or polluting light in Archeon.
Radiation isn't a joke. It was a warning graced on the search party in the tunnels. It was written on maps and mouths on how it twists and cripples. This city is flawless and void of it.
Seemingly empty. But not yet. Not really.
It seems almost ironic now that the force drips down over ruins after swiping the rebels under the carpet of propaganda and then simply adjusting to the internal set of lies to use them. And with the sliver of something unforeseeable and perhaps a hint of incompetence and a spark of too many emotions, everything has turned foul now.
I would laugh. If I felt like it.
Instead, I see myself, pushed back hair, scars fresh on my mouth and cheek.
One more, to the right, over my eye, and in the dim reflection without color, I could vaguely resemble a woman that spoke my name as her last breath.
A fist curls in my stomach, hot anger pulsing tightly.
She didn't see me fit for duty at a front.
She wouldn't let everyone make decisions about her people's life without her.
She is gone. Gone, gone, gone.
But she was a precise woman of war.
I never was. I'm feeling too old in my skeleton. But the truth is, I am painfully inexperienced in fights that go over the capacity of a few dozen.
My dislike about it has brought me this far. But in a delicate situation of strategic input, it is useless, asinine, and the worst thing, just as Samson always told me: It can be exhaustingly repetitive.
Not that he would have any clue what to do. No, the bastard has sat his bony sharp ass inside my chair and will just hide in the distance until he can garner some remains and play his upper hands.
My palms around the rifle cramp and clutch tightly, as if the metal can save me from some foul trickery in my skull.
My dislike can't take anything from me now. All personal feelings have a place to be erased, hidden until enacted in savory blood and a nice price.
But I'll cut him into tiny strips no healer can mend if he ever comes too close to it again.
"Lady Viper," Hector's head to my right, moving into my personal space. I snap back. Swallow the chunk that is suffocating me down. Then I simply clutch my rifle again. "I was just informed you're not going to stay with us."
I don't get to answer. The wheels stop turning abruptly and we halt.
If war has a smell, I can suck it into my nostrils and rub it on my skin now through the cracks in the door opens.
It's the fluttering distant smell that rises from the impact of missiles, rubbles, an impact in the silence breaking only with the sounds the wheels make as they scrape over the uneven path.
My brain connects imagery from earlier days in my life, mixes them with later ones. The flapping of the jets above, the hurling, lingering sounds of impact. The feet and the rubble.
The smell of bodies surrounding you. The smell of a gun before a shot is let loose. A finger lingering close to a trigger. The smell of water, earth, and death.
We all smell that, sooner or later. We all get a taste of the scent.
"You'll inform me about any changes," I tell him, arching my back, posture straight. "I want to know where you were. What you did. And who told you to do it."
Hector isn't one for smiling. Neither am I. But only for a second, we share some convenient nod.
Then, like a good underling and member of my House, he turns to shout commands in my namesake at the black flood of bodies, rifles, and the occasional addition of a creature that has teeth, wings, or another helpful feat. I left the dogs with my father. But they're not war trained anyway, even if they're close to it. They have cushions behind a bird cage now.
I have had bare contact with the black, sleek dog sitting beside one of the figures my dear relative just shouted at.
Hector's hardened hands point at people, orchestrating them like I am so used to orchestrate insects.
He points over to his son and to few figures silently standing to attention. I need a moment to recognize one is Loren, because he is neither miserable not terribly smug. He looks only concentrated right now, eyes narrow, keeping himself together. Somehow, I know, he doesn't want to be here, just the same as me. We both have our war stories. His made him spoiled, bratty, overcompensating and entitled. But that is another thought to keep for another day. I can't think about it now. He keeps it together, he keeps his worth. I will forever remember the fist crashing his nose fondly. Whatever his deeds.
"Stay with Lady Viper, take the escort her east, keep the communication open. You-with Provos. The rest of you with me." He motions over the hill of broken stone ahead.
As much as the smell and the nervous tingling tickles my scalp. Feeling bodies swarming around you that finally are under the restrictions of command and respect towards you and would have to shield you in case of an attack has some invigorating.
I let a hawk loose in the breath of this world.
It rises from my gloved fist when I thrust upwards, disappears.
A tail feather fighting against gushes of waves as a silvery shadow with rotor blades drifts and sizzles overhead faster than the bird could ever be.
From the perspective of a drifting body in a cloud, the destruction is more visible with a schematic of tactic. Of making sure to encircle and capture as well as ruin what is left. Somewhere in the distance is the ocean.
With something akin to curiosity I realize this is the closest, I have ever been to it.
I can see where Hector and the other Vipers flank, and I see the mass of flooding bodies that get into positions.
The impacts of the missiles haven't stopped. We make way through empty streets. If there have been more people hiding, they are either burrowing deeper or have gone already. The ruins of this city are big. But silver soldiers are relentless.
The more I watch, the more I see the machinery working.
Some parts of the machinery aren't even soldiers. Just chained up bodies.
They're meat. Meat shields. Basically. Make a red rebel shoot a silver, they'll be happy. Make them shoot their own, make them shoot what they proclaim to want to save. If I hadn't killed my own kind and even extended family, I may be tempted to say this is a very decent psychological weapon.
I suppose you could only make it more infecting and cruel if you stood exclusively children in the first row.
"They're flooding the tunnels," Loren notes, a crooked shadow falling over him from the wall of the much smaller ride we take.
I blink, still half bird. Eyes sliding and adjusting down. Dripping sounds overcome the silence, the eruptions and the sounds of speeding vehicles.
"Of course they flood the tunnels," I answer, more matter of fact than anything. Just to speak and be right, perhaps. We proceed without slowing down at the edges of the water taking back the underground. "The last times have proven that red rats like to hide there."
The sleek black dog is silent next to my other, far more removed Viper cousin.
I tilt my head slightly.
"Anything new?"
"One more minute," Is the answer, and his unnerving smart eyes look over the scars on my face back to the window. "There was commotion east. We are on the right trail. The dogs picked something up. But the contact on that side has been cut. We lost at least a few men."
"One more minute," Is my response, sinking into my seat, controlling my rifle. I see something else, something I didn't anticipate, but probably should have.
We have abandoned the vehicle for the last, cautious reach of the way.
The sizzling of constant updates from the other side of the buildings getting waltzed over and bending keeps me a little reassured. Magnetrons waltz below the metal and make a way. Of course.
And where there are metal benders, there's family I tend to look after.
And a family I owe for carrying me out of a hole filled with mud and not simply letting me bleed out.
The hawk soars down towards the mass of the machinery.
A moment, it blinks, not quite standing in the air but close enough, slow enough for a breath of time passing.
In the blackness of the uniforms and with a glimmer of silver hair, there's a very familiar frame.
The hawk flashes down, drifting in circles over their heads.
I lead the patrol and the escort follows me. I walk as tall as I can now.
I'm expected. All of this has happened in the heap of minutes. Like everything rushing by, it feels too far away, too long drawn out, and still too hectic.
Even if I try to stand tall, I sink into being very small next to my Samos cousin. I am forced to oogle up, and I remember how I had to leap basically to hug him.
Now, of course, we don't hug. He grazes me once, we share one boiling look.
It's good to know I am at least not the only person that turns everything into something angry in a second like this. And anger is better than fear.
"It seems I am your reinforcement again," I tell Ptolemus, holding my rifle ready for execution. This time though, I will not miss the chance to aim right and true. I won't fall into an abyss.