Rathum chuckled at Vanya’s adorable worrying while he gulped down the water, and at her harmless slap on his arm. “I’m sorry, Van...a piece of my brain must’ve drained inside you as well,” he cheekily grinned. He also wanted to joke,
Where we’re going, we won’t need clothes, as he intended to keep her safe inside the Lord Governor’s Mansion much of the time. But such a colorful suggestion might’ve made Vanya embarrassed, so he just kissed her cheek, let her get dressed if she so desired, spooned her strongly and went to sleep.
The next morning, they were awakened by the sound of Bymed pounding Avonlea into the floor while trying to be quiet, which instantly made Beemie blush and shrink inside his lover. After a good ribbing at Bymed’s expense and jokes about being even in the seeing-friends-naked department from all others present, however, it was time to get back to the city and get their lives under control.
Although the violence had indeed been quelled, apart from attempts by a few rogue “purity brigades” to seek out and kill or rape any remaining, hidden humans, Rathum had his hands full almost immediately.
All tourism dried up with the closure of Halanunja due to the war, causing a wave of layoffs and business closures. That and rumors of the global spread of a deadly virus called mer flu that caused those affected to eat the flesh of the living caused people to run on the Wilfarne City Bank, forcing Rathum to shut it down to try to head off a depression. But fear made everyone suffer anyway.
The city did have some farming and fishing nearby, but also relied on the outside world and in particular Caledoria’s more rural breadbasket colonies like Surabamba, Jogadunda and Teergragia for staples like
whale and
waterfoot meat, fish, corn, and rice, which were difficult to find or grow here. Rathum implemented rationing and got the City Police and the Army to distribute it as fairly as possible, but it wasn’t enough to prevent many from going hungry. The Council promised, after several long trips between Wilfarne and Fort Anankan to talk to Rathum’s secret boyfriend by poor, often tired Bymed, to bulk up internal trade and commerce with the merfolk of the Kingdom of Olsea, its only ally in this so-called Final War (especially for their key bumper crop, mermaize, which promised to be a corn substitute). But infrastructure was so weak in the Confederacy as a whole, even along its most important rivers, that what little food and other official supplies did not go to the war effort were unable to outrace the Thieves Guild and other black-market organizations and their extortionist prices from filling the void. However, at least they had stock
available. At all. Which was more than enough for people to pay whatever they wanted, even if it was in thousands of pieces of rapidly inflating scrip.
As soon as they announced their engagement and Vanya’s pregnancy (which, thankfully, did
not upset Rathum’s boyfriend) to try to boost morale and Vanya moved her things into the Mansion, Rathum fired most of the staff to save money- a move that was quietly seen as tone-deaf during a recession and barely helped anyway now that Confederate scrip was rapidly becoming hyperinflated, with 10,000 needed to buy a single flour cake. Then he had her kept inside the dimly lit, dusty castle as much as possible for security reasons, and paid her to do whatever upkeep she felt she could handle, with soldiers doing the rest in exchange for lodging in the many guest bedrooms. Finally, at night, they’d both fuck their frustrations out.
On the other hand, people were isolating at home, stuck with their children all the time, and had a lot of free time on their hands and an inability to get mechanical trinkets from Caledoria or any other nation except through the prohibitive and dangerous black market. That increased demand tenfold for clockwork creations from Avonlea’s Automata Workshop, whether as substitutes for pets that had to be abandoned or eaten, or toys to ease the anguish of children with gas in their bellies. Orders piled up so quickly that, without Vanya assisting anymore, Bymed resigned his envoy position to help Avonlea run the shop full-time (which, coincidentally, improved their sex life, especially after Avonlea declared she was
gravid as well.)
Bymed was initially hesitant about this decision due to their mother, but Rathum’s boyfriend had apparently been beseeching Rathum to let him hire full-time care for her and her scale rot for some time now. Her mind was declining rapidly, and she had six months left to live, if that, so she needed all the help she could get. However, Rathum didn’t read Vanya or Avonlea in on that because he didn’t want to worry them, and quietly agreed to his boyfriend’s proposition while only informing Bymed of the situation and swearing him to secrecy as well.
And then, on July 15th, 1893, everything got worse. Three days earlier, contingents from the Army,
Navy,
Sky Navy, and of course the formidable Angluroq (
Dragonrider) Corps stationed here, nearly 20,000 strong, had taken most of the City Police with them to march to the defense of Halanunja, the Shining Pearl of the West and the Confederation’s only warm water port. The hopes of the people to repel the Imperial invasion- to rid the land of humans once and for all- rested with them.
But on the 15th, only
a single, mortally wounded elvish soldier hobbled through the streets of the Great Cascade utilizing a branch as a walking stick. He managed to reach Rathum and Vanya as they were sharing a rare moment of quiet on one of the balconies of the castle. Then, with ragged breath, he groaned-
“Hala...nunja...is...fallennnngh...”
-and toppled over the railing to his death on the streets below.
Rathum tried to contain the news by using what was left of the Police to seize all local newspapers and arrest the journalists who ran them, but it was too late. The front was still several hundred miles away, but the citizenry knew that was practically at Wilfarne’s doorstep now, and with the Navy obliterated and the rest of the military scattered, it would be only a matter of time before the Empire’s fearsome artillery and air forces began bombarding them.
Chaos erupted, with the efforts of the City Police to contain it going nowhere. Anyone who had the means to do so fled east. Just as in the last panic at the start of the war a month earlier, businesses, farms and homes were burned and looted. But the last straw for Rathum was that a hundred humans sheltered in an underground
Moon Temple were killed by six members of an elvish supremacist terrorist organization called FDF (Final Defense Front) along with the approximately dozen elves, orcs, goblins and others burned beyond recognition who gave them sanctuary and what little food they could spare.
That same day, in a fit of rage, Rathum arrested the perpetrators and had them publicly burned alive by dragons and their charred bodies impaled on the city walls as a message to anyone who would defy the civic order or harm any innocent civilians, human or not, ever again. He also declared a curfew from 6 PM-10 AM every day, with violation of the curfew or any further unrest punishable by summary execution.
Rathum and Vanya stopped having sex after that, as he didn’t feel he could be what Vanya needed, or deserved her respect. He also quietly called off the wedding, figuring that a lavish celebration of fake love would not lift anyone’s spirits. He couldn’t even look at himself in the mirror, only left his office for food or to retreat to the bathroom each morning to wash himself for hours until his scales and wings bled, and wept in a separate bed every night for a week as the weight of his crown hung heavy.
Too heavy.
Then he learned that the Supreme Commander of Imperial Armed Forces was
Alice Guthrie and breathed a sigh of relief. On October 31st, 1886, which felt like a century ago, he had been a lone Confederate Border Defense officer patrolling at the foot of Mt. Klandethan near Surabamba, getting rained on by the perpetual storm at the top, when Alice and her ex-girlfriend Abigail had gotten stuck in a crevasse they’d fallen through on their way
climbing down the mountain. He’d melted some of the ice with his fiery breath and saved their lives, and so Alice pledged that if he ever needed a favor, he only had to write to her and ask.
So, without informing his boyfriend, he sent a messenger crow to Halanunja, hoping it would reach Alice, asking for a meeting to discuss the status of Wilfarne in this war. He did this because he saw more soldiers futilely shoring up the defenses of the city by emplacing
hundred year old cannons along even older
stone walls, which were meant to repel horses and arrows back when dragons were the only attack possible from the skies, and had no chance of withstanding even the smallest caliber Imperial shell. As gunfire, the roars of dragons and planes, and explosions rumbled ever closer every passing day like that eternal storm that had rained on him, Rathum knew any battle would be futile. They’d get maybe an hour to prepare once a series of
warning beacons stretching from the nearby northern Wilfa Mountains to the Great Cascade’s gates were lit...
But only prepare to die, horribly, and for what? An inept, weak government that couldn’t even provide food to its own people? His distant boyfriend’s urging to fight at all costs? Better to sue for a separate peace and be secure under the Empire than lie awake at night with an axe constantly hanging over him.
A day later, July 26th, Alice replied and accepted the meeting. Over the next few days, he worked with Bymed and Avonlea to, without telling Vanya, work out the logistics for this secret meeting. He did this because Alice had RSVP’d with a plus one on her outing deep behind enemy lines, and Rathum wanted it to be a surprise. Perhaps, he hoped, it would be a way to start to make up for how poorly he’d treated Vanya...
*****
Tuesday, July 31st, 1893
Midnight
“Are you sure you’re alright with me flying you in, Commander?” Daniel wondered as the sheets wrapped around the propeller of his plane concealed their approach to the empty runway, which was once so bustling at his last visit. To say it was eerie seeing Wilfarne dark and abandoned like this, aside from the fires of the encampment of enemy soldiers to the north that hopefully would not see them in kind, was an understatement.
“Please, Daniel, you’ve been in Javelin Squadron for weeks now. It’s Alice,” Alice
smiled with light in her soft sea green eyes. “Besides, you were my very capable backup flight instructor when Octavia”- meaning
Octavia Richards, another member of Javelin Squadron, and the inventer of the airplane in 1886- “was taking care of John. More importantly, I don’t trust anyone else to help me navigate to the workshop you mentioned.”
John was the best friend of her husband,
Jareth Williams, and he was currently aboard the Supreme Commander’s airship, the
Sun Cutter, the both of them recovering from mer flu. Benefited by their mer physiology to begin with, they were the first ever patients to do so, finally giving hope to the world for a vaccine, perhaps even a cure from a disease that had killed hundreds of thousands in just over a month and was projected to infect millions more by the end of the year.
She insisted that Jareth get some rest and look after him too despite his declaration that he would go with her at all costs. To try to ease his mind, she gave him the authority to order the other Squadron members-
Kate Gordon-Hawkins and
Koqee- to rescue Alice if she didn’t report back by sunrise, or if he suspected something was amiss. Plus, the gunship was parked nearby, concealed from the military encampment by the waterfall from the dam, and cloaked from the city by the dense trees near the clearing it rested on that Daniel had taken Vanya to. It had enough firepower to level the entire city if need be, though Alice hoped it would not come to that. Despite his wife’s best efforts, he still worried, which was sweet. But she knew she had to hear out Rathum to repay her life debt to him, and reunite Daniel with his beloved to ease his anguish, if only for one night.
Once they landed, Daniel put on his
cloak and wondered in hushed tones, “These are very nice disguises, but there are police officers and soldiers everywhere. How are we going to get past them?”
Alice emerged from the passenger seat in her own
pilot's outfit and
cloak, concealed her trusty old
Sperling-Watson Model 1867 revolver inside one of Jareth’s spare canes, took off her goggles, and darkly said, “That’s for me to know and you to never find out.” With that, she turned around and said, “Now, take my hand, take a deep breath and keep your eyes shut.”
Daniel hesitated for a moment, but trusted his squadron leader enough to do as she said. He had to admit, she could get a little...
intense sometimes; but he supposed one didn’t get to be a world-renowned private detective or the Emperor’s right-hand woman, leading the largest standing army in history, without some secrets. Or an edge.
Moments later, Daniel felt, strangely, like he was underwater and being towed by a boat despite them being on terra firma moments earlier, before the location of the shop became clear in his minds’ eye, almost as if it was...speaking? This was fucking
weird. Then he blinked, saw
something out of his nightmares appear in front of him, and squeezed his eyes tighter to keep from going mad.
Daniel panted now, dizzy and wobbly on his feet as they arrived outside Avonlea’s Automata Workshop in an impossible amount of time, while Alice calmly knocked on the door in the agreed upon 3-2-1 pattern to let Avonlea know that they’d arrived as instructed.
“I wish you hadn’t seen that, but now you understand that the shadows are my ally, Daniel,” Alice grumbled. “You would do well to find a way to forget what you saw if you wish to sleep well tonight.”
Daniel just nodded wordlessly. But cheer was restored to his face when Bymed answered the door and said, “Lea will be just a min...Daniel?!”
“Shh!” Daniel said before Bymed, now remembering the clandestine nature of their meeting, nodded and let the two of them in.
Daniel then hugged Bymed in excitement until the poor young dragonling said, “Can’t...breathe...” and Alice admired the automatons lining the walls while she waited for Avonlea.
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