>>6108668Having said this, Kalthos looks so grim and fearful that you feel compelled to change the subject. “You mentioned a redhead,” you say tactfully, “You mean Juno, don't you? The Triumph of the Tomoe... how do you know about her?”
“I have my sources,” Kalthos answers with a secretive wink, “A fine girl, no? And the Triumph, well, that story was old even when I was young. A little bit of foolishness for the young to latch onto. It's easier to bear a life of constant strife and suffering if you have a great shining hope to look forwards to, is it not? Whether that hope ever arrives or not, well, that's another question!”
He lets out a nasty laugh, then an explosive cough.
“There is an inherent paradox present in House Tomoe – you spend your entire life struggling to upend the very same system that allows you to exist. I realised the ultimate futility of it all, and I left. The girl is on the cusp of realising it too,” Kalthos muses, “I wonder what she'll do when she does...”
Lapsing into silence here, Kalthos stares off into space as he thinks to himself. His eyes grow dull, a faint confusion seeping into his features. Turning away from you, he shuffles away into the Demesne. You hesitate, watching as he ambles away around a corner and vanishes.
You let him leave.
-
Kalthos' words still ring through your head as you wander through the Demesne, heading for the Sovereignty seal to see what awaits you within. Passing through, a smirk forms on your lips as you study the scene laid out before you – an ornate stone plinth topped with a plush pillow of faded red velvet. Sitting upon all that grandeur is a tiny sliver of metal – a single bullet.
Picking up the bullet, you recall one of your lessons on military history from Coral House. In the space of a single generation, men went from marching into battle with swords and longbows to using modern military rifles – all thanks to the rapid development carried out by the brilliant minds of House Phalaris. Since then, since their disappearance, that progress has slowed to a crawl.
Maybe it's for the best. Who knows what kind of war machines the Phalaris would have created, if they were still around today?
-
Descending to the third layer of the Demesne, you're immediately struck by the sheer size of the hall you enter into. Human hands have never built a hall as vast and grand as this, so grand in scale that you can barely see the far end. Worse than the size, somehow, is how blank it all is – the hall is almost entirely featureless, save for the white stone columns placed through the hall in regular intervals. You stand in the entrance for a long time, struggling to decide exactly what it is about the hall that so unnerves you.
It's how inhuman the whole thing is – men couldn't built something as large as this, and if they could they would never leave it so empty and unused.
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