It is not uncommon for people to hit a breaking point, beyond which one can simply no longer tolerate the situation. One may be struggling with multiple problems when someone makes a joke that isn’t remotely funny, or comes to you with an utterly unreasonable request, or openly asks you to do something illegal or does something - anything - that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no point in even pretending to take them seriously. And once that happens, your first impulse is to either put as much distance between you and then as possible or to resort to violence. If you can’t do either, you start choking on your own anger, which eventually starts to curdle. I have a theory that many of the problems plaguing us today stem from the simple fact we are not allowed to challenge orthodox thinking and, the longer this continues, the angrier we become.
Void is not stupid. He knows there’s no such thing as a perfect solution - and that one solution can easily lead to new problems. For example, the United States backed freedom fighters in Afghanistan against the USSR, which was a great success - it gave the Soviets a taste of their own medicine, the foreign-backed war of liberation - but it also empowered the Taliban and led, directly and indirectly, to 9/11 and the US war in Afghanistan and Iraq, an outcome the US would consider undesirable. Void would not be so foolish as to argue the US should not have supported the freedom fighters. There was no reason to think they would eventually become terrorists, let alone a threat to the US mainland, while there were plenty of reasons to think giving the USSR a free hand in Afghanistan would have very bad results indeed, perhaps encouraging the Russians to make a move into Pakistan or Iran (the latter, in particular, a curious example of a move the US would need to counter and yet find very difficult because of US public opinion, which wouldn’t object to Iran getting a thrashing from the USSR).
On the other hand, refusing to do anything because it would be politically inconvenient is an entirely different matter. And while one can argue that Void was wrong to oppose doing nothing, I think it’s reasonable for him to feel the White Council had more than enough grounds to intervene and very few monarchs would dare publicly oppose it. In fact, if the secret got out, the uproar would shatter what remained of the council’s authority and cripple the war effort - and back then, a hundred years before Emily, the war wasn’t so clearly on the brink of being lost.
And so I chose to show the moment Void decided the council had to go.
I am still considering turning this in a full-scale novel, perhaps by expanding the story or simply adding two more sections ... perhaps a ending where Void has to make a choice between abandoning his planned coup or doing something utterly ruthless to keep the plan underway, perhaps something that will trigger Master Lucknow’s eventual suspicions. Or I may tell the story of how two of his three brothers died, or how his sole surviving brother eventually took control of Whitehall and turned the school around.
What do you want to see? Let me know?
And now you’ve read this far, I have a request to make.
It’s growing harder to make a living through self-published writing these days. If you liked this book, please leave a review where you found it, share the link, let your friends know (etc, etc). Every little helps (particularly reviews).
Thank you.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Edinburgh, 2021
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