by K. Eason
That pronoun was slippery, as a collective, able to refer to two, or three. Or two of three, in particular contexts. But you didn’t include Rory, and Thorsdottir realized with something like pain that it might not ever again.
And looking at Jaed, with Jaed looking back, she thought that might be all right.
EPILOGUE
History remembers Rory Thorne as a great leader, whose powers of negotiation continued what her mentor, the Vizier, had begun in creating the inter-species alliance, which eventually adopted the name of its most influential member’s home association, the Confederation, and stood alone, and somewhat battered, against the Protectorate’s brutal Expansion.
Popular historical accounts focus on the legend Rory Thorne, former princess, then interim president of the Confederation Alliance Council, then founding member of the Synod and first Prime of the Aegis, as a human woman whose decisions, if not saved the multiverse, at least enabled its survival past the first savage wave of vakari Expansion. These popular accounts ascribe to Rory a sort of prescience (which this chronicler hopes to have definitively disproven): relating the events as if her actions were always aimed at the result which she achieved. These accounts also overlook Rory’s role in the breakdown of the multiverse in the first place: her responsibility in the sundering of the Free Worlds of Tadesh first, and later, her part in earning the Protectorate’s ire. They prefer instead to relate events as if she had always planned on success, as if the risks were accounted acceptable. As if we should not, in hindsight, examine those choices, and judge them.
Such accounts make a better story, by some metric, because they are cleaner and neater than what we have recounted here: that Rory was a woman who made choices that mattered to her, personal choices, bound up in her loves and her fears, and that these choices were sometimes mistakes.
The lesson here is that accuracy, however uncomfortable or unsatisfying, is necessary to the chronicles of history, because when a story is particularly compelling—when its lessons are more than this is how our ancestors did something, how quaint!—it may transmute into legend, and its actors into heroes. Legends and heroes can be inspirational, certainly, and culturally important—but they are not truth.
It is the fervent hope of this chronicler that the reader comes away from this version of the story with a greater understanding of that truth: that the principals in this tale—because Rory would not have succeeded at all without Thorsdottir, Jaed Moss, and Zhang, even Rose—did not set out to be heroes or legends. They were too busy trying to survive, and the decisions they made that changed the course of history were made with the primary goal of helping each other.
That is the truth so often lost, amid debates about effects, ramifications, and motives; and, in this chronicler’s opinion, the only truth that matters.
About the Author
K. Eason is a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, where she and her composition students tackle important topics such as the zombie apocalypse, the humanity of cyborgs, and whether or not Beowulf is a good guy. Her previous publications include the On the Bones of Gods fantasy series with 47North, and she has had short fiction published in Cabinet-des-Fées, Jabberwocky 4, Crossed Genres, and Kaleidotrope.
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