under the knife
But...why?
Children never care to fight in the wars of their parents- rather, of their forebears, because there is a crucial element of responsibility dangling its missingness abhorrently tauntingly before their eyes that the commanders, noble as they might really wish to be, cannot hope to ever provide.
They do perpetuate the war. It is true. Their commands, their persistence, their steady steps and roaring whispers dictate the rhythm of the day to day to day to day. But they are not the ones calling the shots, ordering the marches and the laying of the swords.
That's the Consuls' job. Everyone knows that.
(Everyone knows of them. No one really knows them.)
No one thinks it's odd, actually, that mysterious figures in blood-red armor stand at the heads of the Ferronis, watching and waiting but not commiserating, not in the least. Like they're above it all. Eunie could have sworn only the queen - queens, come to think of it - were above that.
...SOME OF YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
She never wants to be one. She can't imagine how anyone could be persuaded to take such a rotten job like that. Because that's all it is. Unless it's worse, of course. It could definitely be worse, even if it already is the bloody worst. That's all she thinks it is, anyway.
(No one thinks much at all. Actually.)
But what doesn't everyone know? What are they missing? They can't exactly grasp it with their own tattooed, tattered, knuckle-bloodied hands.
...MARTYRS, OF COURSE
They've got no idea, not the faintest blinking, sparking fetal conception, what a person - a real, human, flesh and blood person, and Machina are included in that, for all Lanz cares, for all how distant he's been cut from his own supposed lineage - looks like past the age of about ten, twenty, thirty. Whichever one actually applies, when you aren't born with any real growing to do.
Thousands of years, they lived! Each one, and here he is stronger than all of them with nothing to show for it. Nothing but his life, and that one's a sparking waste. Why?
Why Isurd has eyebags, and Taion only has the grut of his padless frames, insignia-emblazoned, as pressed into his broad nosebridge for eight terms, clad over his eyes like a mask even though they're supposed to help him see clearer, sharper, cleaner.
Supposed to. You know.
Terms. We don't call them years. Why should we? We don't care.
Children don't care. Children don't have to care.
A knife's point is the blade's reason to be. Noah hasn't felt half so lucky in...ages, he'd say, if he were even alive that long. Maybe not for seven terms. Seven unlucky years. Maybe he'd had one good birthday, then. Laughter, for certain and for reality. Before...
The flute mourns, and mourns, and mourns. It isn't even the player's breath the embouchure so primly steals, cast along a perforated, punctured channel. So simple, like a child's treasured recorder.
Children shouldn't have to care. That's the rub.
(That's the cut. Mondo wheels into Isurd's face and rips him open along the ether lines, all weak promises and withering glance. Taion jams his eyes shut before he can see which color the bastard bleeds. He's not sure if it'd be better or worse if it was red, red, red, since he already pretends such a pristine electric blue. Running like water...the blood's so thin.)
Mio doesn't know enough to think that in a world that actually looked at all like what Nia might have wished it to be when it was her in the precipitous place, her thoughts about achievements would have concerned the end of secondary school and the beginning of secondary education, instead of the end of her life.
Sena's sisterhood, her tenable earnestness and her unshackled ambition, might have meant something, instead of just being a stopgap in the interim. A shoulder to lean on when you're thirsty, but we all have to drink our fill soon enough.
Yeah. It doesn't really matter. We all see our own mirages, in the end.
Who's to say it didn't, though? Really?
!WAKE UP, WORLD
It did. Didn't it?
.WE ARE ONLY WANTING FREEDOM
Right?
(It did. It does. It will. And then, someday, it'll be what it was. Like a zephyr, like the ineffectual passing of the wind. The ogre grinds its rage, and its enemies, straight into the ground. Not strong enough. Never strong enough. You can't be.)
No one can say. No one knows. Obviously the truth isn't so plain, if Guernica's got to make them go all the way to Swordmarch to find out.
Scores of them. Who's winning?
The den screams a din; no longer can the vulnerable, the protected, but not the cherished, hide in false complicity. Their time, so to speak, is up.
They have to fight. Not for their leaders, but for their followers. For all the lives to follow theirs, because their lives will not end.
(.For their own war - you know we've got to say it)
Someday, yes. But not today. Not for a good long while, yet.