Betrayal. Failure. The shadows remain. The shadow of the Empire yet falls upon itself.
The Shadows Fall - The Bloody Fist Rises
Trust. The word had been surfacing in her thoughts occasionally for most of the day. It bemused her. Confounded her, even. Leaning back in her booth in Down Below, resting her head on the bulkhead as her eyes unseeingly stared at the grate ceiling shining with condensation, she tried to focus on the word. She knew what it meant. Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person or thing. To her slight dismay, she realized she knew what it meant but couldn't really understand it. Such an unbelievably silly concept, when examined. Out of habit, her ocular implants scanned the locale, tagging all newcomers, locating known and unknown faces and confirming each entrance and exit as the mental map of the surroundings updated itself. Her aural processors tuning down the metal music blasting from the speakers at the stage, preparing to alert her to anything that might require attention. Heh, trust. Trust no one. Not even yourself.
Some people truly boggled her mind in that regard. The common Gallente tendency to extend friendships so casually to everyone that didn't greet them with blatant hostility. Even people from the other cultures did the same, occasionally. Friendships declared long before they could come to know each other. A self-contradiction. A definition of friendship so shallow and casual it'd barely qualify as a casual acquaintance to her. Implied in that word; trust. Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of that person.
She thought back through her life, pushing her hardware to the limit to process the vast amount of memories, trying to think of how many people she'd ever counted as friends or people worthy of trust. Parents. Even the Holder at the time. The Holder's son, because surely he was as "good" as his father. Then no one. For a long time, no one. An arm taken as punishment for the crime of obeying the Holder's young son, pushing him into sin. Her ability to ever be a mother lost along with her faith. Her leg, left behind as the final price of freedom. No. Trust was hard earned after that.
Of course, that was as it should with the Gripdjur. In that her pure blood sang strong. To begin with she'd thought it was distrust of the adopted. The Amarr-born and raised foreigner. After a year and a half had gone by and one home-born young man her age solemnly proclaimed they were now friends, she'd realized it was simply the way of the cold north. Friendship and trust was earned. Putting enough trust into someone to call them friend was an investment and a vulnerability. If someone you relied on failed you, the consequences in places like this were dire. It could lead to your own failure, which in turn would harm or even kill those who relied and trusted in you. As she'd awkwardly clasped forearms with him, her cheap but reliable prosthetic bruising him slightly, she'd realized the depth of understanding and closeness it took to form a friendship. That there was an investment in mutual aid without question when need be.
To later see how cheaply the word was thrown around between strangers almost insulted her. Friendship and trust. Rendered nearly worthless by the ease with which it was applied, disregarded and broken by most people. No wonder so many who came north to the Gripdjur and many other northerners thought they were cold and distant. She wondered if other foreigners ever spent enough time with the northern Sebiestor and realized how strong bonds of friendship and trust they really cultivated there. How cheap and shallow their own had been. She wondered if she herself did, today.
Scan locale. Eight new faces. Four old disappeared. One exit partially blocked. Music now harder than before. No immediate threats.
She glanced down on the datapad, picking it up and letting it project the documents through her ocular implants, augmented reality hovering several documents and intelligence reports in her field of vision. No new messages. The public profile of Enkhil "Havohej" listing him as a Scope Works member as of twelve hours ago. Hadn't shown his face in here for a while either.
Trust. Friendship.
She pulled up other documents on the datapad, letting them remain transparent in her field of view so the AR didn't block her view of the room. Two less old faces. No new ones. All exits available. The profiles of other women came into focus. Heavily tattooed Sebiestor. Khanid looking younger than her position would indicate. The slaver's fangs burned on her cheeks looking at the latter. Trust enough to carve names into a mountainside. Closer than friends.
Trust. More than friendship.
Worthless, every time. A mother and father throwing their child to the wolves for their blind faith. A Holder and his son using and discarding a young woman, then punishing her for their own actions. Other freed showing their true zealot faces as they try to detonate poorly made explosives in a station underbelly, succeeding only in boiling her eyes in their sockets for their voracious Amarrian God. Lovers betraying her and themselves. A wife betraying every word and moment they'd ever shared. She herself betraying her clan by having trusted such an enemy to it, and being marked as such. Failing the Gripdjur who had eventually come to trust and befriend her. Enkhil turning out to be worth even less than a Thukker's word.
She prepared to squash the rising rage at them all, herself included, before she realized it wasn't coming. There wasn't any left. Rage at betrayal, cowardice and failure needed you to believe in the trust and friendship betrayed in the first place. She didn't. Stunned, she barely noticed her habitual scan of the surroundings (three new people, two left, one exit entirely blocked by crowd, two visible but holstered weapons, music gone generic and bland) as she considered this discovery for a few minutes. Not making much headway with it, she mentally filed it away for further perusal of it when she next meditated for insight.
She fairly coldly calculated the isk she'd spent on the Sarz'namarr project, including the Vargur and Cynabal she'd lent Enkhil and didn't expect to see returned from the liar and thief. Striking off a few assets of the list and seeing the number exceeding her early projections, including the two license extensions, she decided the goal had been worth the attempt. One man's cowardice and failure to hold to his words was enough to topple it, and gain a permanent Kill On Sight mark, but it didn't truly matter. Her unbelievably wealthy backer didn't question the money spent. The cause had been worth it. The enemy remained. What did not remain was trust. How could it? Nothing proved worthy of it, no matter how much time spent getting to know it. No matter the shared convictions and principles. Trust was only ever rewarded with betrayal.
She felt bone weary. Electus Matari was dead. Scattered to the winds. The few names she'd encountered since her days there either going to the various enemies, or cowering in the Republic. No one left. The cause was worth it. The enemy a threat that could never be allowed to go unimpeded or uncontested through New Eden. The task is truly impossible. One woman against the greatest Empire mankind had ever seen. Impossible, yet needed without a doubt. On the way to another scan of the room (no one had left or entered. All exits available. Four new weapons visible but safely holstered. Music... tolerable.) her eyes fell on the untouched glass of whiskey. Gently grasping it in the prosthetic hand, she swirled the rich, peaty liquid around and let the aromas tease her nose for a moment. The burning need for it almost matched the imagined taste down her throat as her attention was drawn deeper into the hint of a whorl at the center of the glass. Trust no one. Not even you can be trusted.
On the brink of surrendering years of willpower the datapad made the subtle sound indicating an incoming message. Grimacing at the effort she had to spend shifting her focus from the glass, a wave of her other hand drew up the AR projection of a newscast. Frowning at the words, she absentmindedly put the glass back down and read it more thoroughly. "In forty days a storm shall strike from the East."
She put down the datapad and let the prosthetic hand play in the projection, the Bloody Fist overlaid on her metal fist. One woman against an Empire. Unbroken yet strained will in an immortal body. The oldest alliance in New Eden against the Empire. Ten years of strained yet unbroken will against impossible odds. She curled up the corner of her mouth as she let a finger flick through the contacts list and snapped a jack from the comms port on the table and plugging it into a port on her neck. Trust. Friendship. Worthless. Sarz'namarr had fallen. What hadn't died, even through the most dire of betrayals, thievery and war, was something entirely different. Unity.
"Hey DeT, you busy? I hear there's one hell of an anniversary party planned."
The Empire remained. The threat remained. Her people were still in the shadow of the Empire. You don't need trust or friendship to recognize these things and you don't need them to fight it. What she hadn't felt as she did the recounting of her past or the recent betrayal rose slowly but surely in her chest, her hand curling into a fist glowing dark red in the emergency lighting of her booth. It doesn't matter if it's all that is left. It's enough.
Rage will carry you through anything, until you stand upon a mountain of your enemy's corpses. Unbroken will. Immortal mind. Unity.
Not even an Empire can stand against that, forever.
"I'm in."
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Topic: The shadows yet fall. (Read 2508 times)