>>5629739Ekaterine take a deep breath, and shakes her head with a rueful, sad laugh.
“It sometimes seems as if people just move in circles, doesn’t it?” she asks. “I… I mean, it sounds arrogant, and I don’t pretend to be a GENIUS, but I sometimes wonder if everyone sees it? Or… is it because I don’t really live in the world, that I’m… Somehow privy to the patterns, because I can be dispassionate about it?”
You regard her cute frown, her flushed cheeks, and chuckle inwardly. You wouldn’t describe this female as ‘dispassionate’ by any means. She’s skeptical, almost cynical at times, about the rise and fall of nations, the firmly-held truths of her society, JUST like you are… But her idealistic insistence is always that it should be fixed, mended in some way.
“If people could just SEE the shape of these, these… ECHOES… maybe we could finally stop squabbling, jockeying for power, trying to separate everything into ‘our side’ and ‘their side’, and work TOGETHER,” she often says, in one way or another.
“You mussst remember that these booksss are written by the victorsss… No, the victorss’ hissstorianss,” you remind her. “Thingss might sseem to repeat becaussse the writerss are TRYING to communicate a ccertain theme.”
It IS difficult to miss the similarities to the repetitive (and, you’ve learned, not entirely unbiased) sermons of the Serpent Priesthood During your youth. It’s to Eka’s credit, maybe, that she spotted the holes in things on her own, locked in her ‘gilded cage’ with only her books, her brothers, and her servants for company. You learned the truth of the world much later, and it was not always an easy lesson.
“Well, what of you, then, Mister Long?” she asks.
You blink. Wait, what?
“Me?”
“Yes,” she presses, scooting a bit closer to you upon your long, plush bench—close enough that one of the guards nudges the other, and both begin to watch you more closely. “You haven’t just READ of the world, you’ve LIVED in it—really fought for it, been a PART of it.”
“I ssuppose,” you grant her, feeling a bit wary under her sudden intense appraisal.
“Lately, I’ve…” she pauses, and blushes a little. “I’ve been having… Thoughts. Strange notions, I suppose, when I dream.”
“Oh?” you ask, raising an eyebrow as you fondly recall some of those same dreams.
“Yes, well, the IMPORTANT thing,” she hastily pushes forward, “is that I’ve begun to wonder… Maybe, human, so-called ‘demihuman’, non-human… Maybe we’re all bound up in that same sort of, of, of PATTERN… Almost like we’re playthings of fate. But… Like we don’t HAVE to be. Like there’s another way, a way to break free!”
She pauses, and sighs, gripping her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry, these dreams… I haven’t, um, been sleeping as RESTFULLY as I normally do. I fear I must sound positively deranged... Delusional!”
