[Alexandros Skouriá]

The entrance to the Royal Museum was always as impressive as the oddities and artefacts housed within its walls. A long and broad stairway signalled the start of a prospective journey into history, set before two great doors and a series of tall pillars in the style of an ancient temple. It was a beautiful building almost as old as the city itself, and one the most iconic treasures of the Cloud District; locals and travellers alike were drawn to the Royal Museum in great numbers, and with great frequency, pulled in by the mystique of the countless curated treasures proudly on display. Alexandros climbed each step slowly, gaze fixed on the towering open doorway to the stories of the past. It was a rather pleasant way to spend the rest of the afternoon, he thought, after the great disarray caused by the drafting for classes only a few hours earlier.

Not a particularly busy day. Busy, but not busy busy. The museum would largely be empty; no problem there, of course, for it would be all the better to appreciate the exhibit.

For this month and the next, the Royal Museum was showcasing a great collection of the arms and armour -- and other assorted kit -- of the four kingdoms of the world from the Great War. From the beginning all the way to the last hours and declaration of peace, a host of items and equipment would be proudly shown off for all to see. War, for all its sorrows, was of great and obvious interest to Alexandros, who viewed the ten-year period through a lens of limitless fascination. For every soldier that served there were surely a dozen stories; one could spend a life researching and understanding the battles throughout the decade and still know very little, and the young Skouriá was the sort to dedicate at least some of his free time to the endeavour.

He had the time, so here he was.

Doors open and ready, Alex entered the Royal Museum, and set off aimlessly to wander and explore and absorb as much as he could from the displays. To one with an interest in military history it was a wonderland of unimaginable scope, filled to bursting with battle dress and weaponry and small keepsakes of long-forgotten champions. There was a sense of sadness around all of it, of course, but the sadness was not without purpose or a silver lining. Nobody would disagree that the Great War had been a terrible thing, but the relative harmony between the kingdoms of Remnant which surfaced in its wake was perhaps well worth the prices paid in blood and heartbreak.

The boy set his sights upon an arranged assortment of uniforms worn by the soldiers of Mistral, pacing toward it and standing close to the glass case and the treasures contained therein. A brief look at the label nearby on the wall said all there was to say: 'Sample of standard tunics, dated 8 BV' it read. Turning to head off toward another glass case and the tangible history within, Alexandros spotted a tall and dark-haired youth. With a slight cock of the head, his mind was scanning and searching through its own curated collection of thoughts, trying to pinpoint exactly why the character seemed so damn familiar. He had spent the better part of the morning looking over available files and dossiers of Haven trainees to better grasp who would potentially be a classmate for the next few years, and was desperately making an effort to summon up the information. He's from the academy, Alex decided as he slowly strolled over, that guy from Atlas.
"Solomon?" the boy wondered aloud, tone of voice carrying just a hint of confusion through otherwise unnecessary surprise at the presence of a fellow student. "Solomon Moon, right? I'm Alexandros; we're going to be in the same class at Haven."

As if struck by sudden and overwhelming realization, the young Skouriá thrust out a hand suitable for shaking, awaiting a matching greeting from the noble. Golden eyes met for a moment with the other's which cut through dark hair like a great beacon of light, fixating for a moment on the eyepatch obscured by his long hair. While it wasn't easy to see from any sort of distance, it was plainly visible when close and getting a proper look at the fellow trainee from the academy. Well, perhaps not plainly visible... but all-too-easy to see for a boy rather familiar with the sight. Further realization sounded like an alarm in Alex's mind as his own outstretched right hand twitched for a brief moment, unsure if it was somehow insensitive to be looking so intently at where an eye used to be underneath it all; his father, too, had suffered the loss of an eye during one of countless battles, and carried with this scar, and his others, a withdrawn and highly introspective quality. While Leo was of course close and personable when in the company of family, the boy was starting to realize he had never really seen the same thing when with others. Reluctant social compliance, perhaps, but never a desire to draw attention to the patch worn almost every hour of every day, or to the phantom limb even harder to conceal. With a flicking deflection of his gaze over to nothing in particular, Alexandros sputtered out a tiny 'sorry' and cleared his throat.

Well, Solomon's reaction would say it all. People had their differences -- maybe he just simply wouldn't care.
Then again, maybe he would.

"You must be a history buff, too," Alexandros continued quietly, "if you're here on what little time-off we seem to be given."

--

WC 951/951

[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

The Haven Royal Museum was a beautiful building. Like most all of the buildings in Haven, it was built in the Mistralan pagoda style of a ricepaper walls drawn across a wooden frame, ringed by balconies and capped by terracotta roofing tiles in grand swooping spans. Unlike the more modern buildings in Haven, which were modern recreations of the ancient style using modern materials such as concretes, polymers, and plastics to maintain the aesthetic while producing a more durable product, the museum was entirely authentic in its construction, though not in it's age. The building had been commissioned by the Haven Historical Society shortly following the Great War, and had been built from scratch using period authentic tools, techniques and materials, in every stage of it's construction, with only a few modifications, mostly around the foundations, to meet modern building codes. It was a frankly spectacular achievement that the building had been done on time. The price of construction alone must have been breathtaking, because not only did it require specialist permits from the city itself, but the HHS had imported talent from the Mistralan periphery where the ancient techniques were kept alive by less developed settlements. However, for how grand the cost must have been, the cost of maintenance since had dwarfed it for decades now. It was not a simple matter to maintain the building, as it required special care and products in order to simply clean the old rice-paper walls, and frequent refits were required to replace the wooden super structure as it wore out. Then there was the matter of the more modern systems integrated into the archaic design, which required a full-time team of specialists to run and troubleshoot. Finally, the detail for which Sol was most appreciative, the staff that maintained, cleaned, and administrated the museum all wore attire and uniforms accurate to the period which the building emulated. It was like stepping back in time, and no detail was spared in maintaining the illusion, to the degree that even a cynic like Sol felt a bit of nostalgia for a time that he’d never actually experienced firsthand. That experience alone would have made the Museum worth the visit, and since his arrival in Haven, Sol had been a frequent visitor to simply drink in the atmosphere, and to admire the traditional elements of a culture to which he was a stranger despite having been born to a family of Mistralan low nobility.

Sol had grown up an army brat, and as such had never spent much genuine time in historic Mistral. Travelling with his father’s private army, had given him far more exposure to the barbarian tribes of the wilderness in the north of Atlas and between Mistral and Solitas, and of the desert nomads that populated the eastern coast where culture had been influenced by a proximity to Menagerie. The northern tribes favored squat blocky buildings, long halls of wood and thatch, and low blocky fortifications of mortared stone and wood, all purpose built for surviving the harsh Atlesian winters, and the nearly constant feuding between the clans respectively. In eastern Mistral, where the land was arid and wood was expensive to import, buildings were made of mortar and concrete over a skeleton of metal. In the west towards Vacuo where the land was swampy and densely forested, buildings were constructed almost exclusively of wood. Sol had grown so accustomed to these styles of construction that the traditional Mistralan style made him a little anxious, as if he were exposed even when under a roof and indoors. If the Atlesian style was a suit of armor designed to keep out danger and the elements, then the Haven style was a suit of delicate lace and silks. He struggled to feel secure in just about any building in Haven, even with his back pressed into a corner and all the exits easily visible.

The museum was hosting a special exhibit, inspired by the upcoming Vytal festival. In honor of the anniversary of the Vytal Treaty which had ended the bloodiest war that the kingdoms had ever seen, the Royal Museum had opened a massive exhibit to display artifacts of that gruesome conflict. It was a melancholy display, a tragic monument to the modern age, a treatise on the mechanization of warfare and the cold-blooded efficiency with which man could exterminate his neighbor.

Naturally, Sol’s first destination upon arrival had been the decommissioned large bore artillery pieces that had survived the conflict. They were great hulking machines, purpose-built engines of war, little more than a chamber feed, a mechanism of gears and cranks to input a firing solution, and a massive bore barrel that was nearly a dozen strides long. These guns were so powerful that stranding near one when it discharged could inflict mortal injury just from the sound alone, it could hit targets several kiliks away, and the huge caliber red dust rounds that it fired could obliterate an entire squad of aura-trained combatants down to a cloud of vapor. These hulking monstrosities had single-handedly put a bloody end to the use of fortifications as a means of warfare. Seige warfare had died a sudden and bloody death at the exact moment that an artillery barrage from beyond the visible horizon could dismantle a fortification that had stood for a hundred years in less than a day. Strategy had to pivot towards keeping the fighting as far from population centers as possible. This in turn had moved the fighting into the open field. Formerly vacant plains of little strategic value had become the new battlefields, walls giving way to trenches as soldiers dug into the mud to escape the killing barrage of enemy’s cannons. Battles stretched on for weeks and months at a time, the dead piling up between the lines of fire until they had to be shelled to clear enough of a path to send the next wave of martyrs in. Lives sacrificed in the thousands and with no advantage made on either side. The end had come, not when the death toll ran too high, but when one side had run out of ammunition.

He’d been unable to tolerate standing in the shadows of those giant steel murderers for long. Sol was keenly aware of how far the science of warfare had come since then and had seen first person the kind of misery that the modern descendants of those big guns could inflict. It was hard to recognize the two artillery pieces on display as being related to the burgeoning Atlesian drone program, which was quickly removing human involvement from the activity of slaughter and handing the ability to decide life and death off entirely to machines. Those great guns were as far from his own right arm, hidden safely beneath the navy blue sleeve of his dress uniform, and a white parade glove, as an amoeba was from calculus, but the idea was still the same, “Make them dead, before they can do the same for you.”. Eventually he’d been unable to endure it any longer and had moved inside to inspect the period uniforms instead.

Standing there now, looking through the glass at a mannequin in the stiff canvas of a standard issue infantry uniform, Sol gained the sense of himself being a descendant of that empty uniform the same way his arm could trace it’s lineage back to the great guns in the yard. His uniform was navy blue, while the one in the display was a muddy brown, faded by the years and rough use. The infantry katana on the hip was a crude, cheaply produced, simple to maintain version of the custom made kriegmesser on Sol’s own. But there was a familiar thread that ran through both, like the hint of the father’s features seen in the face of the son. If Sol stood up straight, and put himself across from the uniform, lining up his reflection with the display, he could almost imagine himself wearing that old jacket and pants. His sad golden eye fell to find the trench shovel grasped in the mannequin’s fist. It would have been a crime not to include a piece of gear so emblematic of the conflict. Standard issue, a shovel had been an essential survival tool, and likely saw far more use than any single weapon during the bloody affair. Sol imagined those countless masses, living for months at a time in the mud, eating, drinking, fighting, and dying on the same few feet of torn up earth, in the wind and the rain and the snow. There was a tragic logic to it, every man a murderer, every man an executioner, a gravedigger, a corpse…

Sol felt a rising hardness in his throat, an itch in his single golden eye. He thought of his father, and of himself, both scarred by war. Sol missed him very much standing here in this place felt too much like standing in his mausoleum, too much like a tin soldier standing beneath a monument to a war hero.
“Solomon Moon, Right?” A voice came from nearby in Sol’s blind spot, startling him out of his reverie. A spasm of twitching crawled up the right side of Sol’s ruined face, squirming through the long pink streak that connected hairline to chin through where his right eye had once been, and the former mercenary reached up with his left hand to smear something away from his left eye, hidden from sight to his classmate by the blank side of his face.

Sol turned to face the other student, regarding the youth with an eye of molten gold, slightly puffy and ringed beneath with a dark bag that suggested a long time since he’d had a restful night of sleep. His gaze fixed to Alexandros’ face, flat as polished glass, as empty as the gaze of a marble statue. Sol was bigger than him, though he tended to have a more powerful frame than most, clearly not relying upon the enhancement of his aura when it came to brute strength and stood nearly a head taller. He took in the features of the other boy at a glance. Dark hair nearly the same deep tone of black as Sol’s own, and the eyes were a slightly warmer hue of the same gold that made up Sol’s gaze, except Alex had two, and Sol had one. They might have been brothers, the resemblance was uncanny, though Alex’s features were softer and more boyish, with more flesh around his bones, whereas Sol’s were hard, lean, and aged like he’d been left out to dry too long. Sol had much more of a resemblance to the hollow eyed stare of the pictured soldiers around them than Alex did, and the similarity did not make him more pleasant to look at.

That golden eye slid down towards the offered hand, providing no hint of expression but that initial spasm through the dead flesh on the right side of his face and the vacant, distant solitude in his golden eye. Sol’s right arm hung motionless at his side for a long, uncomfortable moment, as he considered returning the greeting, but as his gilded gaze climbed back up towards the boy’s own, expression unchanged, arm unmoved, it became clear that no reciprocation was forthcoming.

Sol swiveled back to look at the display of uniforms, casting Alex in the blind shadow of the right side of his face. It seemed he’d left the hair long and loose on the right side of his fringe, veiling the scarred side of his face enough to conceal the deformity at a distance. Up close there was no mistake that some horrible accident had befallen him at some point.
His posture had not altered by a micron through the duration of the entire exchange, from him standing there, settled into his heels, shoulders back, chest out, left hand returning to clasp his right wrist behind his back, stature as impeccable as the example in a chiropractor textbook. It was a pose that could be seen mirrored in pictures of soldiers throughout the museum, the “at ease” stance that was drilled into every fresh recruit until it was second nature, as it had become for Sol.

“There will be a ceremony later to honor the fallen.” He replied to the other boy’s observations, as if he hadn’t noticed the offered hand at all, “I was planning to attend, and decided I would come here while I waited.”

He had an unpleasant, grinding growl of a voice, like the broken pieces of a clay pot being rubbed together, like he’d shouted himself hoarse so many times that the rasp had simply stuck. It was a low, resonant voice, like the rumble of an engine, or the murmuring of distant thunder. With a voice like that it was no wonder that he didn’t say much, words bitten off nearly contemptuously through his teeth.

“My father fought for Atlas during the war.” He added, a bit of emotion visible in his eye from Alex’s perspective through the reflection in the glass, though it might easily have been a trick of the light. His tone certainly didn’t betray any sentiment, and he might have just as easily been commenting on an inalienable law of reality, such as water being wet, or the ground being down, in fact it was almost disturbingly vacant of any evident emotion, as if he were a stone golem brought to life and commenting on the weather.

@tag

2254/2254 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Alexandros Skouriá]

His hand gone unshaken in the relative quiet of the museum's halls, and it was quite clear that it would stay that way. Solomon had turned away from the boy to look once more at the exhibitions, and it was this which Alexandros took as his cue not to press further. With nothing better to do, the young Skouriá pulled back and first crossed his arms, then quickly shifted to stand with aforementioned hand on hip. It was a much more relaxed posture when compared to the noble; where the shorter of the two of them was as aimless and uncertain as ever, the other planted himself tall and sturdy and attentive in a way that was obviously second-nature. Much more huntsman-like, he thought for a moment, shifting his focus from that which lay behind the glass to that which was reflecting off it.

"There will be a ceremony later," Solomon began, still facing the glass as he spoke. It was all so very matter-of-fact, and dry, and delivered through a tone and timbre suggesting a young man who was, more than anything else, tired. His voice was hoarse and weary, little more than the low growling grumble of heavy machinery. Each word came out, pointed and precise, finely enunciated through a gravelly filter. Rough and refined in equal parts, the boy mused, nodding his head as Solomon spoke. While not quite quiet, there was a quiet quality to it all; the young Moon was well-spoken, but equally rather terse and to-the-point, saying that which he felt was worthwhile and simply nothing more.
That was, until, an addition: "My father fought for Atlas during the war."
"I see," Alex responded after a brief moment, readjusting the hand at his hip. "Mine fought for Mistral; ten years, and he was lucky enough to make it home when it was over."

Behind the words, impossible to miss, was the implication that Leo Skouriá was only lucky to have survived a decade-long conflict -- an implication that, as with so many veterans, skill had ultimately played less of a part than simply being in the right places at the right times. His services and skills offered to the kingdom quickly pulled him away from much of the chaos of the front lines, firstly as a dragoon and then again as sniper support for teams down on the ground in the thick of the madness. Alexandros had often assumed he inherited his aptitude for marksmanship from his father, and with it just a pinch of fate's good fortune; the boy knew guns, and he knew them well, and it seemed that no firearm could pose enough of a challenge to stop the young brawler from learning it inside-out. But that didn't matter. This wasn't about him, it was about history, and about Leo, and about all the suffering and sacrifice that so many decent people had to endure for the sake of the world. Soldiers both lesser and far, far greater had died pointless deaths out on the battlefields of Remnant, with every moment of every day being little more than a gamble with one's life as their wager. Those who were skilled enough had their talents put to good use, bringing so many people -- but still never enough -- away from the immediate dangers of the Great War.
He was lucky, the boy thought, staring at the uniforms behind their glass case, and then he wasn't.

"Well, what do you want to see?" Alexandros asked, turning again to look at Solomon. "You'll have to pass the time somehow; there's plenty of stuff to check out, so we might as well get a good look at everything."

--

WC 614/1565

[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Sol had to admit he was somewhat surprised by the continued presence of the younger boy. The kid was persistent, the lordling had to admit. The list of people with the patience to tolerate Sol and his eccentricities (That is his apparent thoughtlessness), was a short one indeed. In part it served to remind the cyclops of just how bereft of simple social contact his life had become since... and in spite of himself Sol was beginning to warm to the idea of having someone to talk to. It helped that this was by far the most successful social encounter he'd had since arriving at Haven. It was positively shocking just how little simple decency he'd encountered at the academy. On average his first impressions of other students, and even faculty, had been poor. Several of his fellow students treated their peers, Sol included with open contempt, demonstrated poor social skills, acted without consideration and with abundant arrogance, and showed not a shred of politesse. Other students had the misfortune of encounter Sol during one of his more "unfortunate" episodes, and had come away from the experience with a justifiably abysmal opinion of him, while others had tried earnestly to do him harm for reasons that spanned the entire spectrum between reason and chaos.

The boy... Alexandros, Sol endeavored to remind himself was the youth's name, was quite possibly the first decent seeming person that Sol had encountered at Haven, and while it was hardly a remarkable trait, it was so far removed from his recent experience that Sol couldn't help but develop an immediately positive attitude towards him. It was refreshing to actually have something in common with someone, to actually be treated like a person, and to be given a respectable distance within which to reciprocate the social contract.

Both of their fathers had been soldiers in the Great War, and that could inform a great deal of their childhoods. It was hardly an accident that they were both training to be huntsmen, and though multitude reasons existed for the pursuit, Sol guessed that under examination, Alexandros and himself would have had very similar reasons, and responded to very similar pressures that brought them to where they were. Having a parent who had served in the war hardly made either of them unique, but a ship would seek any port in a storm, and Sol had been adrift at sea for a good long while by now.

Though he did not seem to be paying the boy any mind, seemingly too focused on his own thoughts, Sol was paying careful attention to what Alexandros said and how. The peculiar detail of how he described his father as "lucky" did not fail to land, as the sentiment had its own significance for Solomon himself. War was a senseless business. Through his travels Sol had learned of the savage tribes of hill-men that populated the Atlesian wilderness, prized as close combatants and scouts by the Moon forces. One of the cultural details that had stuck with Sol from encounters with these tribesmen was a common euphemism they had for death. "The Great Leveler" they called it. In what was a surprisingly prescient notion to come out of the snow smothered backwater of the Atlesian wilderness, the term had several interpretations. The one that came to mind at the mention of Alex's "Lucky" father, was how in the chaos of battle death could find a mighty warrior just as easily as a weak one. The Great Leveler saw no difference between king and peasant, weak and strong, and once he'd done his work, all were equal. Sol felt the fingers of his right hand sliding shut involuntarily.

He swallowed, frowning somewhat. Yes, he knew exactly what Alexandros meant.

Alexandros surprised Sol again by inquiring after what the one eyed soldier wanted to look at. Was that an honest to goodness attempt at pursuing conversation? Sol had to wonder what circumstances could lead someone to trying to drag a conversation out of the likes of himself. Was Alexandros just as starved for social prospects as Sol? IT seemed unlikely, as the former mercenary had the market cornered on self-loathing and isolation, there was scarcely enough to spare for Alexandros to be just as desperate for the engagement.

Sol glanced at the boy through the reflection in the glass, considering. His inquiry seemed earnest. How surprising it was. When was the last time someone just talked to Sol. He could hardly remember.

The taller student considered briefly, his jaw working as he seemed to chew on the question until he'd decided just what he thought of the taste.

"Dragoons then?" He said finally.

@tag

780/3034 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Alexandros Skouriá]

"Dragoons it is," Alexandros affirmed with a nod and a subdued thumbs-up, taking a last look at the uniforms on the other side of the glass before motioning with a flick of the head for Solomon to follow along.
Navigating the layout of the halls and spacious display areas was an effortless affair, due in part to the relative quiet of the Royal Museum and to the familiarity the young Skouriá had with the building. While Alex tended to spend much of his time either at the academy or back home in the middle levels of the layered capital of Mistral, this particular slice of the Cloud District was no stranger to him. Its traditional architectural stylings afforded a certain modular or customizable quality to the internals of the structure, and it was this functionality which allowed almost all of its large-scale exhibitions to have a unique identity or 'flow' to the presentation of history it offered. Rather appropriately, its current offerings concerning the Great War were sectioned off into a series of primary groups indicative of the kingdoms of Remnant; for Mistral, the details concerned the early days of the war, and the finer points to the daily lives and operations of all soldiers which were almost lost to the grandeur of larger and longer campaigns which so keenly came to define the decade of bloodshed; for Atlas, the Royal Museum placed an emphasis on weapons and technological developments, alongside the strategic value they offered to all four of the world's armies; for Vacuo, the middle years and the tremendous unknown future they were fought for, matched only by the vast desert they took place in, serving as a poignant reminder to the most bleak point in the ten years of violence; for Vale, quite rightfully, the final years, but also the greatest successes of both sides peppered throughout which ultimately brought every player of this game of war -- every individual piece of Remnant's most important puzzle -- to stand before the Hero-King himself, and to see peace delivered with little more than a sword. It was here, in the Royal Museum's representation of Vale, that the cavalry and lancers and dragoons were on-show as saviours atop mighty steeds, thundering in over the horizon to tip the scales.

The centrepiece of this portion of the exhibit, as anybody familiar with the history of the Great War would surely guess, was a large print of an iconic photograph showing a charge of Valean cavalry cresting a hill with the enormous tattered remains of a battle standard flying behind in the wind; it was a dramatic -- and, just as equally, romantic -- image from the later stage of the middle of the conflict, showing so elegantly and so wordlessly the courage of those who threw themselves into the arms of death. The boy stared at the picture in all of its titanic greyscale glory, soaking in each and every detail and letting a faint 'wow' escape at the sight of it.
"'The Horsemen Ride', if my memory serves," he said, looking over toward Solomon. "Pretty sure that's what they called it in the newspapers. The Valean 5th, supported by soldiers from Vacuo, drove our troops right out of the heart of Sanus and back toward the coastlines... of course, it wasn't much of a victory for them, considering that it was only a few months later that Mistralan dragoons and shock-troopers came back through in greater numbers, and pushed those arbitrary lines all the way to where they started. That was one of the battles my father fought in, actually; it was one of his last as any sort of mounted fighter, too, since it was only a week or two later that he got his arm hacked open and lopped off in a really bad skirmish."

Alex turned away from the photograph toward a placard on a nearby wall, skimming it over briefly and looking up and over his shoulder to the young noble. "Not to mention, your guys -- the Atlesians -- pressed in from the North just as relentlessly. Though, I suppose that goes without saying, right? It's not like people weren't giving everything in all of that fighting. Anything less than relentless would have probably been suicide."

"That was one of the battles my father fought in; it was one of his last as any sort of mounted fighter, too, since it was only a week or two later that he got his left arm hacked open and lopped off in a really bad skirmish. He ended up with an early type of Dust-powered prosthetic since he was such a damn good rider -- and an even better shot -- that I think the military wanted to keep him on horseback, though he just couldn't settle into it again. The old man had all sorts of stories, and the scars that came with them," Alexandros said after a brief moment, scanning up and down the length of the giant placard which explained the role played by mounted units during the war, "some from the early days -- and a lot more from later on, of course."

Wandering further in, more toward what they had agreed to see, the Skouriá boy gave quick glances to the historical showcases along the way; more arms and armour, of course, with an emphasis on the long sabres and spears used by those on the backs of horses, and on the carbines and small handguns which supplemented them.
"So," Alexandros asked, with a hush, "what about your father? I- well, y- I did some... let's just say 'light reading' this morning, ahead of that class draft. Your surname looks like it was connected to some elite battalion, or something like that. He was no ordinary infantryman, I'd imagine."

--

WC 968/2533

[Solomon Moon]

Solomon

Once when Sol had been much younger, and had still been in possession of all the pieces he was born with, much much younger, as that memory seemed to belong to someone else, his father had taken him to visit the north coast of Vacuo, where the water was warm enough to swim in. It had been well before Sol first picked up a sword, and long before he would ever swing one in anger, or take a wound. He'd been young and fresh, and his skin hadn't a single scar to speak of. Very long ago. Sol could barely remember what it had been like to be so innocent. He remembered spending much of that day looking for sea shells. He'd grown up in the Atlesian snows, and sea shells had been novel and fascinating to him, possessed of that peculiar nautical beauty. Among the shells he'd found a what at first appeared to a be a formless chunk of two pieces of metal fused together, one a dull grey, and the other a muted amber color. Intrigued by the discovery, Sol had taken the strange find to his father, to ask what it was. Sol could still remember how his father's face fell when his gaze fell upon that lump of metal, worn smooth as glass on every side by the combination of sand and tide.

"It's part of a sword..." He said sadly in that voice, that weary quiet voice from which all the meager wisdom Sol possessed had sprung, "It's an old Kriegmesser. Like mine." And Terrel had reached down to the sword he always wore on one hip, and drawn out about six inches of steel to glint in the afternoon sun. He'd shown his son the blade, and he'd shown him the trigger on the scabbard that would ignite the dust round that would eject the sword from it's sheath, and where the hilt was reinforced to tolerate the force of the draw charge. It had been true, the gunmetal grey of the lump was the same color as the blade, albeit with all it's shine worn off, heavily pitted in spots, and the amber metal was the remains of the hilt and guard. There was still the suggestion of where the guard had been reinforced to tolerate the draw forces.

Even at that young age, Sol had understood the special relationship between warriors and their weapons, and he been perplexed by the revelation. Wouldn't the warrior need his sword? What was it doing in the sea? Sol hadn't yet been old enough to understand the likely fate of warriors, the fates that would leave their swords shattered in the surf, but his father had, and that was why he'd looked so sad.

"What's happened to it? Why is it so smooth?" Sol had asked his father, and he'd seen that sad smile that was so often the answer to his questions.

"The water has done it. The water and the sand." Terrel had said.

"But swords are so much stronger than water, and sand." Sol had replied, and his father had ruffled his hair, a hardness in his brown eyes that was did not seem to match his gentle expression.

"Why do you think that a sword becomes dull? That sword has rested here, for a long time, and every time a wave washed over it, some sand rubbed against it, and rubbed away just a little bit of the steel, so little that you wouldn't even notice." He explained, as he turned the lump over in Sol's hands, "With time, with hundreds and hundreds of waves, with storms, and the churning of the tide, it starts to show. With years and years, soon you can't even recognize it without great difficulty."

Looking back on that conversation, Sol half supposed that his father had meant more than had been said. Terrel had been no longer a young man by that point. He'd lead men in battle, had stormed cities, had fought in pitched battles. He had been hard, hard as the tempered metal of his sword, kept sharp by meticulous maintenance. All the same, he had the first starts of grey around his temples, pale seeds that would turn his sideburns and the stubble on his cheeks white by the time he died. He had the first suggestions of deep lines around his eyes, and the corner of his mouth, and the deep oaken brown of his eyes was starting to lose it's color. How many hundreds of waves had crashed upon that craggy shore? How many hundreds of storms had that resolute facade weathered, each leaving it's mark, some too small to see. Over how many long years had it turned a strong, mighty man, sure and brave, into the sad graying remnant that was the only version of the man that his son had ever known?

As Sol wandered through the museum behind Alexandros, he imagined the men, immortalized in print and pose and paint around them as they passed, imagining countless broken swords thrown into the surf. A generation of refuse, of wreckage, of revenants. He did not suspect himself, tumbling through the surf beside them, and did not suspect their blades worn down to specks of sand surrounding him, each caress leaving its mark. He did not suspect the forces that had taken that wide eyed youth standing on the shore looking for seashells and turned him into the wretched husk that he was now. He did not suspect it, but deep down inside him, somewhere that he had no name for, he felt it, and he knew, and it made him very, very sad.

They came upon the display for the Dragoons of the great war. The painting of their glory rose up over them, and Sol felt once more like that tin soldier huddled in the shadow of a hero's monument. He looked over to Alex and wondered if he felt it too, but the expression on the younger man's face was one of open awe, of respect. Perhaps you needed two eyes to see it the way Alex did, because what Sol saw only made him feel small, and sad, and his entire life, and every wound he'd ever taken seem like a pale parody by comparison. He had no right to stand in the presence of such giants, of such men, he did not even have the right to stand in their memory.

Alexandros spoke about his father, and tried to imagine a man that looked like an older harder version of Alexandros, charging bravely into the breach, storming back across a battlefield that had grown old between the first shot and the last, thundering through mud churned into slurry by shells and hooves, stuffed to bursting with the remains of the dead. Sol imagined Alex taking a wound, his arm ruined, and all of a sudden it was Sol's face on that rider. The tall dark man winced, a painful tingling crawling through his missing arm beneath the concealing sleeve of his jacket.

"It's not like people weren't giving everything in all of that fighting. Anything less than relentless would have probably been suicide." Alex said, and Sol nearly choked on his urge to scoff at it. Giving everything IS Suicide. If you aren't dead after, you didn't give it everything you had to give. How many millions had died for that ideal? How many men had Sol himself sent to die with the same?

The northern barbarians had another saying that occurred to Sol at that moment. "Only the dead do not fear." That thought made Sol feel like a coward.

Alex admitted to having done some research on Sol. Sol wasn't offended. Anyone with access to a scroll could bring up a hundred dirty secrets of his with the flick of a finger. It actually made him respect the boy a little more. He had a keen mind, and forethought to have gone out of his way to know who he'd be sharing a unit with. He can't have dug too deeply though, because anyone who had would not be able to stand so near him and make pleasant conversation, not unless they were an accomplished actor, or a black-hearted villain.

Sol nodded at the inquiry.

"My father..." The word caught in his throat and he coughed to clear it, casting Alex in the shade of the wreckage of the right side of his face as he spoke, concealing his true expression behind dead flesh, "He was the Lord Commander of The Celestial Legion, a private military company. They fought for Atlas, and Mistral, throughout the war, mostly in northern Vacuo. He spent very little time on the front lines, mostly rear guard actions, or garrison duty."

It was a bold faced lie. While the Legion had been attached to the national forces and supplemented their numbers, by protecting captured settlements, or tailing the main force to proved a stable fall back position, the majority of the Legion's activities were insurgent actions. Operating deep behind enemy lines, the Moon forces had destabilized hostile settlements, had performed sabotage, and operated mostly in secret, taking the blackest jobs that the military powers had to offer. After the war, there had been talk of war-crimes, of entire settlements wiped out, mass and unexplained civilian casualties, but nothing could ever be proved. It was a tradition that Sol himself had perpetuated when command had fallen into his lap after the death of his father.

"He didn't like to talk about those years. I presume it was a... difficult experience." Sol said, allowing some of his sadness to leech into his voice, "After the war, he lead his forces back into Mistal and Atlas, trying to bring order back to the regions most disrupted by the war. I grew up mostly in Atlas, where a few tribes declared sovereignty from Solitas, and then there was terrorist cells along the border between Vacuo and Mistral, and faunus rebels on the Mistallan coast towards Menagerie. All had their roots in the Great War. "The seeds planted in the past bear fruit in the present" my father would say. For my family, the war never ended."

@tag

1706/4740 words

notes

Velvet of WW

[Alexandros Skouriá]

Much like before, Alexandros found himself nodding along silently as the other spoke. It was almost certainly some sort of subconscious reaction from the young brawler, who often did little more than nod whenever others were speaking. It was a basic little thing that kept him grounded in any given moment, and so deeply automatic that to try and actively stop would likely divide his attention unnecessarily. So, listening to the scarce few words the noble offered, the black-haired brawler simply nodded.

"Quite a bit more exciting, I'd imagine," Alexandros said in response, "if you'll forgive how crude that must sound."

Internally, and almost instantly, in the aftermath of that one, the boy's mind was on fire in embarrassment. Well, embarrassment and just a hint of a soul-crushing need to apologize, more accurately; while he had meant nothing by it, there was an immediate sense that the comment could be very easily misconstrued to imply that Alex found the Moon family never breaking away from the sadness of war 'exciting' or perhaps even somehow enviable, and thus a feeling to correct something which had gone wrong thundered and thrashed around within his mind. For a moment, the boy broke his gaze right away from where Solomon, looking out over his shoulder to find anything else to focus on -- only a moment, of course, for as quickly as he had done it the young Skouriá flicked his attention back to where he started. Reflexively, like the nervous habit it so obviously was, Alex ran a hand through his hair and let it rake all the way back to his neck, eventually curling and clasping around to slowly scratch away at some non-existent itch behind his ear. It was only a matter of a few seconds, but the whole exchange felt like it had dragged on for an eternity. I have to say something, he told himself, turning just a touch more pale.

"Oh, I-I didn't- the- not the war never ending part," he hastily added after a sharp exhale, regret flashing up behind his eyes, "the PMC thing; I'm sure that that's even more interesting from a historical or political perspective than the regular armies and navies ever were."
Truthfully, he was rather sure of it. The actions which happened during the Great War were fascinating, certainly, but the circumstances which surrounded them were just as worthy of an intense examination and the thorough research it would produce. Mercenary bands and impartial factions simply fighting for funds had played a rather large -- though not necessarily critical -- part throughout the decade, with the frequency of their involvement seeming to fluctuate almost as wildly as the battlefields they fought on. Solomon Moon's Celestial Legion was not so different from the sound of it, and under the leadership of his father could have very well battled the longest and most earnestly of the sellswords out in the field. To an outsider, or somebody only vaguely familiar with the subject matter, the prospect of it all would almost assuredly seem as romantic as the enormous photograph hanging high overhead within the Royal Museum, but to anybody who knew better -- the son of a soldier, for instance -- it would be fully known that it simply wasn't the case. Alexandros had heard a great many stories from his father about some of Mistral's more transient allies, and the hardships that came in cooperating with them.

That was the thing about war stories, of course; they were captivating, but they weren't often happy.

Either way, it didn't matter. There was always the possibility his apology had only made things worse.
"I'll let you lead the way to another exhibit, if you want," Alex said with a sheepish smile. "We've still got time."

--

WC 629/3162

[Jay]

XP Distribution:

Solomon Moon: 47 XP
613 + 47 = 660

Alexandros Skouriá: 31 XP
159 + 31 = 190