Liam didn’t care to remember the things they had seen under Outpost 14. Nor did he care to recall Jove’s existential collapse after the matter. He wanted to remember Jove as the sunny, carefree man who taught them everything. The man who opened the world to them.
James had a point—if there was any conscience in the heart of the Chevalier, surely Lucienne would protest the truth that Chrysid erased from their history books.
“You think there’s a chance that she may not know about it all?” Liam idly rolled the orb in his hand.
“She’s been Chevalier for over ten years. There’s no way in hell she wouldn’t know. Hell, they would have to ensure she knows how to pilot the Destrier—and now we know what that thing’s really for. Listen, Liam. She knows. She knows about this whole goddamn thing and she’s in on it.”
…and yet, she prompts us to remember our reasons for being here.
In Libelle, there were countless exalts across the realm at any given time. Many simply wanted to fulfil their required three years of service to Libelle and live through their Exaltation. Get to Rank 3 and be permitted back into civilian life.
Others dreamt of fighting their way to championship matches, for celebrity and prestige. The higher one’s rank at the end of Exaltation, the more money and opportunity they went home to.
There were those who fought to unseat the Chevalier and take the title for themselves. Among those, there were exalts who saw it all simply as a title and a position of power and influence.
Then, there were the fringe few who many considered anarchists. Those who spoke openly of their want to become Chevalier solely to bring an end to the Exaltation system, no matter how much the people of Libelle adored the entertainment and “safety” it brought them.
Liam had spent his years regarding those anarchists as detached from reality, conspiratorial, and without grounding in fact or logic.
It took losing Jove to change that.
It took seeing records of Chrysid’s disregard for human life or truth to change that. He would give anything to go back to the blissful ignorance on the day he reached Rank 3.
He had been so happy, so sure that he would go home to Euclid for good. No more Exaltation.
All I ever wanted was to be done with my three years or get my Rank 3 and go back home. Finish my studies. Get a job, marry a pretty girl. Settle down and leave this nightmare behind me.
But then what? How many years of comfortable denial would follow? How many years of sweeping it under the rug until my own son or daughter has to go out and run the chance of never coming home?
“You going to put the orb in the hole or are you just gonna stare at it?” James asked.
Liam eyed the indentation on the statue’s base. Lucienne’s messages echoed through his mind.
“Let’s say you go up there, you fight her, you win. You become Chevalier. What do you choose afterward? Power or change?”
Irate, James growled, “Liam… come on.”
“Answer the question.”
“You know my answer! Now’s not the time to screw around!” James grabbed for the orb.
Liam pulled back. “Remind me.”
“Change! Of course, I want change!”
“Alright. So, say you become Chevalier. The Destrier is all yours and all the power that comes with that machine. Somehow you manage to convince the Pillars to join you—”
“Why wouldn’t they? Why would I have to convince them? The Pillars all answer to the Chevalier.”
“Just hear me out.”
“No. It’s bullshit. That’s their job, Liam. The Pillars answer to the Chevalier before Chrysid because the Chevalier has the Destrier at their disposal. You’ve seen that what that thing can do, Liam. You know why nobody fucks with the person who has the keys to that mech… besides, all I’d have to do is show the world what’s really going on and nobody would question me.”
Liam swallowed hard and tried not to think about the images he saw on the monitors of Outpost 14. He only needed to see a few moments of that machine’s test run footage to understand why no Chevalier in recent history had used it—publicly, anyway.
Archival footage of Chevaliers Cuevas still haunted his mind. In that footage, the Destrier wandered the scorched remains of what was once a city in some neighboring realm.
James and even Jove had initially argued that they were seeing footage taken out of context.
“They wouldn’t send the Destrier to kill innocents in another realm,” James had argued, “…we’re probably seeing the aftermath of some fight. Chrysid probably sent the Destrier to help them fend off wasteland mobs or something.”
No wasteland mob was capable of such destruction.
Besides… if it had been a rescue effort, why hadn’t Libelle heard of contact with another realm? What reasons did Chrysid have to keep that visit a secret?
In that footage, Liam recalled that horizon near the screen’s edge. A dead, hazy sky littered with smokestacks and the silhouette of a crumbling cityscape.
The Destrier was not there to save anyone.
Instead, it tore apart several smoldering buildings and scoured the facilities at the heart of the fallen city. Layer after layer of concrete and steel hardly stopped the massive machine. Not even the thick plate of seilliancrist beneath the city stopped the Destrier from burning its way through. When the footage went blindingly bright from the reveal of the lucidium core, Cuevas’s voice broke the recording’s silence.
“Passage to the core secured. Core cleared for harvest.”
It had been all the confirmation they needed to know the truth behind Libelle’s isolation.
Liam’s gaze settled on the orb in his hand.
Fixing that orb into place and unlocking their path to the Chevalier provided only two outcomes: their deaths and the erasure of what they stumbled upon or the beginning of a war that Liam feared James would ultimately lose.
“Just listen to me,” Liam said, “…we only saw the tip of that
