Aubrey Domergue

[Blue41]

Aubrey,

Your words stayed with me last night. Those shared privately rather than publicly, that is. What a wretched life you Balladeers must lead, to be forced to play the part of diligent support to the murderers in your home. What a curse to have to make public declarations, rousing speeches, witty comments about a cause you do not wholeheartedly support. I suppose orders are to blame for your lot in life, direct from the Grandmaster. We all have someone to please, after all.

I don't think I can forgive it anymore. I don't think I have to. I realized last night that what I accused Argyris of could also apply to you. The politician's fatal flaw-- a lack of commitment, coupled with the ability to tell whoever they're speaking to exactly what they want to hear.

I faced Grimes last night and gave him his final orders. There is no one single person to blame for that. In the end we all followed our nature. I have the work, and so Laurentis had to be charged, to be found guilty. You have your role, and so you must deny it, decry it, support her. The Legate their own-- to bend to the Rose, as they have in the past and will in the future. We cannot change our nature. But I am a spiteful, bitter man. I can hate.

I called you friend, once, even as I have also said that no one betrays you quite like a friend. We are friends no longer. If that were enough to ensure that we need no longer speak nor interact with each other, that would be something, but we don't have that luxury. You have this gift from me, then-- there is no longer a need to pretend, to perform, with me. We know where we stand. Know that this stands between us.

Colmes

[Pandip]

Friend,

What a terrible thing to have to commit to paper. What a miserable lot to live, to not have the tenacity to say this in person.

Mayhap I am naive in the belief, but methinks two people suffering under the weight of the same obligations - from opposite sides of a conflict - would be able to find a measure of camaraderie from one another. That this shared hardship would incline us to a degree of empathy.

I do not hate you, Rennik. I admire that you have not allowed these burdens to annihilate you wholly. I pity you. In sooth, I pity you mayhap because I do not have the capacity to pity myself - in spite of knowing all too well the force of the pressure we weather on a daily basis.

The Banda Rossa had to be appeased. Similarly, the Fourth Legion could not be cowed. Two competing but necessary truths. Two realities that must be brought to fruition to ensure that Ephia's Well and its People are not permanently carved from this Disc.

I am not happy with the outcome. But I acknowledge that it could have been much worse. I lament the coarse truth - that I am so embroiled in the battle to guarantee the sureness of our futures that I must repeatedly sacrifice a piece of myself to safeguard that charge.

I do not even know if there will be enough of me left to witness this future I fight for. I suspect there will not.

And yet this Disc will not be blessed with a verdant Bel-Ishun if there are not a surfeit of people willing to plant seeds they will never see bloom.

So if you are resolved to your hatred, I will weather it. But I would mourn the loss of one of the scant remaining friends who I can have the dignity of sincerity with.


    -- Aubrey