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| The Lowest Common Denominator; ...or: "How People Actually Live in AP" | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 30 2015, 03:09 AM (186 Views) | |
| Mastropa | Jul 30 2015, 03:09 AM Post #1 |
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Zinovios Mesolongias, Epistatis
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Ilisia sighed as she considered the paper in front of her. It was only nine in the evening on a Saturday, and she had absolutely nothing scheduled for the following day other than her daily appearance at the campus temple, but the stratigis couldn’t bring herself to set this work aside and go out for the evening. This was one of the most important papers of her educational career, after all; it would justify her decision to avoid a career in the Cult or the military after her compulsory service had ended, a decision that her parents had allowed only with a great deal of reluctance. It was extremely unusual for any relative of the anax, the mortal promise of Makaria’s divine protection, to avoid those careers that dealt especially with Makaria or with the Noverran equivalent of her Shield. But Ilisia was interested in a private, profitable career, leaving her aborted political life behind… and for the daughter of the anax, many, many companies were happy to solicit her interest in their higher training programs, almost none of which would have been offered to anyone else who had not already become an officer in the Achaian military. Ilisia had been quick to take advantage of the offer from Tydevs Shipping and Export, a prominent shipping firm out of Megara, which had guaranteed her a position as a contract negotiator working with foreign companies upon the completion of her education. It was a better opportunity than any other non-officer could dream of, and Ilisia hadn’t hesitated to take advantage of it. As a negotiator, the stratigis would be expected to know or to find out the backgrounds and the goals of the companies and representatives she would be meeting with. As a result, Ilisia’s schoolwork often involved modern history, current events, and international politics—many of the very fields she had thought she’d rejected when turning her attention toward a corporate career. Ilisia found herself enjoying these lessons, however, and even as she imagined herself reveling in a life of business and private wealth, she couldn’t help but wonder if she might turn her attention back to politics once she had made her fortune with Tydevs. Her interest in international affairs only grew as her father’s policies began to establish the Achaian people among the notable nations of Noverra, still somewhat insulated from the rest of the world, but still capable of participating on the international stage. The Makarian Expeditionary Forces, whose establishment generations ago had laid the groundwork for any international influence the current anax could claim, had even been contracted to deploy into the heart of Victorium itself, the continent often considered the origin of modern civilization, but which had begun to turn against itself as a response to outside pressures from those foreign nations that had long since surpassed it. Ilisia found herself fascinated by the plight of modern Victorium, its strength wasted in its desperate attempts to guard against a largely-uninterested Izalith, its future prospects now dictated by Gilead on the one side and Zaliviya on the other… By the time that the stratigis had realized that she had chosen a paper topic that was far beyond the scope of her assignment, she was already well on her way to writing her book. Publishing it had been reasonably easy, given Ilisia’s family connections. Tydevs, of course, had no interest in publishing works related to international war and diplomacy; Ilisia’s professors, who nonetheless encouraged her work, had no advice to give her on how to turn her work into something that a shipping company would find interesting or useful, and suggested instead that she find another school or even a private publisher to print it. Anax Kerameikos himself had forwarded the manuscript of Ilisia’s work to the chancellor of the University of the Shield in Kerkyra, which had unsurprisingly accepted it for publication almost immediately after receiving it. Ilisia found herself celebrating her status as a published author while still in school, an accomplishment matched by no one else in Tydevs (whose interests, after all, lay elsewhere), or even by her brothers. Ilisia’s celebrations, sadly, failed to stop the influx of additional schoolwork. Her professors were proud of her, or so they said, but they were nonetheless intent on her completing her actual assignments, regardless of her other accomplishments. So here she was on a Saturday evening, confined to her apartment by her own stubbornness as she contemplated the negotiations required for a hypothetical corporate takeover of the Kensoan Orochi Lines. It was one of Tydevs’s usual impossible scenarios: Orochi was, after all, part of an all-encompassing zaibatsu in which the Kensoan government held a controlling interest, and it would take a disaster of unimaginable magnitude to force Kenso to give it up to a foreign corporation. Ilisia had had previous ‘success’ in work like this, particularly with a paper in which her hypothetical negotiations established a contract of mutual benefit between Tydevs and a Gileadan conglomerate that had, according to the scenario, nearly cut it off from every market in the western hemisphere. But the current scenario was too far removed from Ilisia’s previous work—to say nothing of being too ludicrous to contemplate—for the stratigis to gain any useful benefit from thinking back on it. A knock on her door interrupted her. “My lady, Sotiria is here to speak with you—” A shout from downstairs interrupted the stratigis’s guard. “Ilisia, you have ten minutes to get dressed! We’re going out on the town!” The stratigis sighed. “Thank you, Captain,” she said to the guard at her door. “I’ll be down in a moment.” The officer allowed herself to smile as she saluted, before shutting the door again to give her charge privacy. Ilisia gave her undone work one regretful glance, before shaking her head and getting to her feet. Sotiria was a good friend, but when it came to having fun, she could be more trouble than she was worth… and from the sounds of it, this weekend would be one of those times. Oh, well, the impossible problem would still be there tomorrow. |
![]() MAKARIA to the Achaian People: Be as Many as the Stars | |
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| Mastropa | Aug 6 2015, 04:42 AM Post #2 |
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Zinovios Mesolongias, Epistatis
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Stavros closed his eyes and sighed in relief as the buzzer went off, echoing throughout the entire factory floor like swarm of demented bees. Second shift was finally over, and a babble of voices immediately erupted as the workers along the assembly lines started walking away from their stations toward the break room or the doors to the parking lot. Stavros was one of the latter; he had no interest in loitering at the job site any longer than he was required to, and beyond that, he had stops to make and things to do before he could actually go home. Joining the stream of people flowing through the doors, Stavros took a deep breath of the cooler evening air as soon as he left the confines of the factory building. The only thing he enjoyed about the job was the feeling of release upon being freed for the night, but even that was just another reminder of the frustration he would feel throughout the rest of the day to get to that point. Stavros hadn’t thought much of it when he had first started work at Atalanti Mechanical, believing that he would eventually get used to the life of an unskilled laborer with menial pay and little respect. After eight years, though, Stavros had long since begun to wonder where it all went wrong. He knew the root of the problem, of course. As a youth, Stavros had simply detested school, and he had sworn to himself upon his graduation and the beginning of his five-year conscription that he would never subject himself to a school environment again. The military had proved to be better for him, but only in relative terms. Like so many others, Stavros had found the experience to be grueling as well as disturbing, and his single tour of combat as a member of the Makarian Expeditionary Forces had only encouraged his decision to leave the military as quickly as he could. He found work at Atalanti almost immediately after his discharge and counted himself lucky, given that his older brother Panagiotis had been forced to move to Megara to find work as a dockhand handling foreign shipping—and dealing directly with foreign crews. The amount of scrutiny focused on Panagiotis, like all such dockworkers, by the Office of Internal Observation was enough to make Stavros sick just thinking about it, especially when he received letters from his brother that included government notices reading, “The contents of this letter have been altered or redacted in the interest of Achaian security.” Atalanti, by contrast, produced farm equipment and machinery for domestic and tribal consumers, and left international markets to its larger competitors, Peloponnesian or otherwise. Compared to Panagiotis’s work in Megara, Stavros’s job was practically a sinecure. That was before his younger brother Theofylaktos became an officer, though. Theofylaktos had never been content with the family’s modest means when he had been growing up, and had poured his energy into his schooling in the desperate hope that it would stand him in good stead in his later career. His intelligence stood out in his military years, and when the time came for his discharge he asked instead to return to school as an officer cadet; given his school records, his superiors had no reason to deny his request. At the same time that Stavros was learning to despise factory work in general and farm machinery in particular, Theofylaktos was receiving his first commission, only to be promoted twice more in short order based on both his service and his obvious intelligence. Only a few weeks before, Stavros had learned from their father that Theofylaktos was due to receive yet another promotion for service in the MEF, this time in the misguided Legantian campaign that nonetheless provided Achaian arms with two impressive victories. Additional schooling was apparently also in Theofylaktos’s future, so that he could enter the corporate world in a high-level management position at Achillefs Motors; Stavros was led to believe that his brother would represent the company on the government council of a locality whose largest employer was an Achillefs factory. Stavros had been sure to make plenty of noises of appreciation to his father, but not a day had gone by since that conversation that Stavros had not begged Makaria to show his brother the meaning of humility. Stavros let out another sigh as he reached his car and opened the door. The two-seat Achillefs (and that was an irony in and of itself) was several years old already, but it remained a dependable car for day-to-day driving, and it hardly stood out among the crowd of cheap, economic vehicles in the Atalanti employee lot. Unfortunately, it was a great deal more unusual to see such a low-class car in the neighborhood where Stavros had lived for the last two years. When he’d first moved into the high-end suburb, Stavros had celebrated his good fortune, but it had only taken a few months before the distrust and disdain of his wealthy, important, and in large part commissioned neighbors had persuaded him to view his new residence as a different kind of humiliation. Now he dreaded going home as much as he loathed going to work, hating the stares and snickers and the ever-present knowledge that he just didn’t belong… …and hating too the grimace on his own wife’s face when she would see him pull into the driveway. Turning his telephone on, Stavros hesitated for a moment before dialing his home number. It rang three times. “Hello, Stavros.” The man frowned at the barely-hidden annoyance in his wife’s voice, but he refused to bring it up. “I’ll be late tonight, Eleni,” he said instead. “I have questions for the presvyteros, so I don’t expect to leave the temple until nine.” “Be sure to pray for me.” Eleni, of course, frequented the temple in their neighborhood, but Stavros continued to worship at the working-class temple he had attended since leaving the military, joining his coworkers from Atalanti in prayer rather than suffering the judgment of his neighbors even in a place of contemplation. Those same neighbors had a habit of favoring his wife with pitying glances, and Stavros had no doubt that Eleni spent her devotional time gossiping over his faults and habits with a long list of sympathetic friends. She, after all, was no outsider to that culture; she lamented accepting Stavros’s proposal no less than Stavros regretted offering it, which was perhaps the one thing they could agree on without a conscious effort. “I will,” Stavros answered. “And I will need to stop at the armory. My rifle is coming due.” “I thought you turned in our rifles last week.” Eleni’s voice was frosty with suspicion. “I’d forgotten mine that day,” Stavros replied, trying not to snap—or to stammer guiltily, for that matter, since he’d used the delay as an excuse to spend some time in the smoke shop for a little escape. “I turned yours in and made a note to come back with mine. It won’t take long.” Just long enough to get another hit, of course, but Stavros knew better than to press his luck. The delay at the temple would mean that he wouldn’t get home until very late as it stood, and Eleni would hardly need an excuse to rain fire on his head. Based on her tone, he was already close to overstepping. “Try to be home before eleven, please,” she told him. “I’ll be there,” he promised. When it was evident that Eleni had nothing more to say, Stavros said, “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you soon.” “Good-bye, then.” Stavros gritted his teeth at the click of a disconnecting line, and flipped his phone closed and pocketed it before he gave in to the urge to throw it. Yet again he cursed his brother’s name; Theofylaktos’s influence ‘on Stavros’s behalf’ had been the only attraction Eleni had needed to marry him, but when it became clear that the brothers lived in completely different circles, her ardor had faded fast. Sadly, by that time the marriage had already been finalized, and Stavros had already given up his working-class home for Eleni’s impressive residence, where he had spent two days imagining himself to be an officer or a corporate lord before the dream of his marriage began to fall apart. How much better it would have been to keep comparing himself to his unfortunate older brother, where he could always come out on top, than to try to share in the bounty of his younger brother’s shining accomplishments. How much better, indeed, if he had no need to compare himself, or have himself compared, to Theofylaktos’s career, or to Eleni’s potential, simply by sharing family with the one and a house with the other. Glancing over at the passenger seat, Stavros thanked Makaria and the foresight of the Megaron for issuing the citizens’ rifles encased in the kind of security equipment one would expect to find guarding the combined assets of the anax and all of his logothetai. He knew that if he had had access to the firearm guarded by that case, he would almost certainly have used it already. It was only a matter of time, he thought, before he decided on an alternative weapon and did something he probably wouldn’t live long enough to regret, unless he found a proper escape—and soon. Stavros turned his eyes back to the windshield as he buckled his seat belt and cranked the engine, reminding himself of just what kind of questions he intended to ask the presvyteros that night. The matter of divorce, or at least separation, was a given; Makaria’s views on the matter were barely related in any of the literature, and Stavros was especially curious about what she would have to say about dissolving a couple whose marriage was entirely unproductive because the wife insisted on remaining childless for as long as it took to advance to the top of the corporate ladder. But Stavros also wondered if the presvyteros would advise him to continue with the other decision he’d made the previous evening, and present himself to the Office of Military Affairs as a recruit once again. He’d hated the military, and he’d hated his time there, but Stavros knew one thing above all: Those in the uniform never suffered the scoffs of their neighbors. And Stavros, it had to be said, had had enough of scoffs for a lifetime. |
![]() MAKARIA to the Achaian People: Be as Many as the Stars | |
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| Mastropa | Aug 20 2015, 08:36 PM Post #3 |
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Zinovios Mesolongias, Epistatis
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Evripidis had mixed feelings about nighttime. The silence in the dark room was broken only by the ticking of a clock and the soft breathing of the young woman lying beside him. After their first night together, she had never had much trouble falling asleep; he assumed that she had realized that sleep was an easy escape from reality, which she took with gusto as soon as he let her. For Evripidis, though, his life’s problems wouldn’t let him go. It was times like this, late at night in bed with a grudging mistress, that Evripidis found himself thinking most seriously about his wife. He had married Pelagia seven years before, immediately after they had finished their compulsory years of military service. Both of them had proven themselves during those years, with several recommendations to their credit and career paths that beckoned them toward dizzying heights. Evripidis had decided early that he would become an officer in the navy, but continued service hadn’t appealed to Pelagia as much as a quick entry into the corporate world. Both had enrolled in the appropriate schools, while making a life for themselves in Aigina, settling into their new home immediately after their marriage. Their schooling prevented them from starting a family right away, but both had looked forward to having the opportunity once their careers had been firmly established. And there was no question of their future success in that regard. Then came Evripidis’s deployments. He had expected them, and even looked forward to them as the next step on his path to high command. But neither he nor Pelagia had realized what kind of a strain his long-term absences would have on their relationship. Soon enough, Pelagia’s enthusiastic reception when he’d returned from his first tour as an officer had become a lukewarm hug after his return from his fifth, and by the end of his eighth deployment she had stopped coming out to greet him at all, choosing instead to wait for him at home. For his part, Evripidis loved her no less than he had before, but her steady withdrawal worried and annoyed him. Still, even as her excitement and enthusiasm dwindled, she continued to show him affection, just as he showed it to her. So he had maintained hope that her cooling passions were simply a result of the newness of their marriage wearing off. Then, almost a year before, Evripidis had returned home from duty to find another man sitting in his living room, watching his television, with an arm around his wife. And neither Pelagia nor her lover batted an eye when he’d made his presence known; rather, his own wife reacted to his accusations of infidelity with a scoff. “There is nothing for me to be faithful to, except a notion that was never real.” As Evripidis had stood gaping in shock, his wife declared their marriage to be a sham put on to impress the rest of society, and a brief comfort that had ended all too quickly. “You’re no husband to me when you’re hundreds of miles away, when you leave me alone for weeks and months. If I can’t be your wife, why shouldn’t I be someone else’s?” To which Evripidis had naturally responded, “If you want to be someone else’s wife, then you can forget about being mine.” Ignoring her second scoff of the evening, he demanded a divorce on the spot. Pelagia had only shaken her head pityingly, as though she were dealing with a particularly dense child. “On what grounds? Infidelity? An inferiority complex on your part? Why should the recorders care? If anything, they should be happy for me! I’m finally fulfilling my wifely duties, with an actual chance of bearing children, something you’re never around to produce—” “Children that should be mine!” “Listen to yourself!” By this point, Pelagia’s amusement had apparently worn thin. “Who do you think you are, the anax? Who will care who the father of my children will be? Just what foreign habits have you been picking up on those deployments, anyway? Next you’ll want to stick your children with two or three or five names at once, just to advertise who their father is! No”—at this point she had preempted Evripidis’s next complaint—“I don’t want to hear it! Rather than whining that my children may not be yours, you should be glad that I have a chance to bear any at all! Makaria knows, everyone else will be happy about it!” Evripidis had stared for a long moment before he could recover his bearings. But regardless of Pelagia’s arguments, he still had had no intention of remaining tied to an adulteress, and he’d eventually made that clear. “Then by all means, go,” had been Pelagia’s reply. “Tell the recorder to strike your name from the marriage lists, and all that entails. Tell him you’re no longer living with me, here in this house… Tell him to alert the banks that our accounts must be separated… Tell him that your foolish pride has caused him three days’ work, and then ask him if a commander’s salary is enough to purchase a new home somewhere outside of the slums. I can guarantee that the answer will be no.” The message could not have been clearer, but Pelagia had restated it for her husband’s benefit anyway: “Are you really so quick to give all of this up?” No. No, of course he hadn’t been, nor was he yet, even after eleven months of sharing his wife with a stranger. But swallowing his pride had never been easy for Evripidis, and Pelagia only encouraged his anger and self-disgust whenever she ‘graciously’ offered to sleep in his bed, once or twice a week—a humiliating offer that stung all the worse because Evripidis simply couldn’t refuse it. Only the intervention of Makaria, in the form of the Melzaean War, had prevented the young officer from snapping, and gave him a proper outlet for his frustrations in the form of foreign enemies and hard work. The frantic pace of Evripidis’s duties had eased, but never abated, after the war’s conclusion. In addition to the sliver of mainland Melzae now called New Peloponnese, the Achaian military had acquired the entire chain of islands that linked the two pieces of Peloponnesian land, and even as the war had waged, the navy had been busy transforming several of them into bases capable of guarding the entire southern edge of the Astolan Sea, and every approach into it from the Cathay. All of this work had provided a temporary distraction for the young officer, but it was never quite enough. As if to make up for that, Makaria intervened yet again, providing Evripidis with another worry entirely: the high probability of global war. With the swift return to war readiness had come a wave of new deployments from the Peloponnese. More soldiers of every rank, from high command to conscripted trainee, had flooded into the new Astolan bases. One in particular caught Evripidis’s attention almost immediately. Kyveli was a fifth-year conscript who had a record of mistakes and had once been briefly imprisoned for attempting to desert—though the ‘attempt’ in question, it seemed, had been little more than failing to notice who was listening as she wistfully pondered if she could manage it. Her service record would certainly prevent her from attending school, and her employment prospects were laughable. But she was pretty, and as frustrated as Evripidis was with his home life, that was all he really cared about. Within a week, the commander had had Kyveli assigned to his direct command, at which point he offered her the life of an officer’s mistress, or that of a half-sherd prostitute in Megara. She chose grudgingly, but regardless of her service record, Evripidis knew that she wasn’t a fool. Which led, of course, to his current contemplation. Noverra’s crisis was beginning to abate; the additional support staff and superfluous officers and men were slowly being sent home, starting with the higher ranks. Evripidis had a feeling that he’d remain on station for at least a few more months—certainly long enough to remain in Kyveli’s company until her conscription ended. After that, her prospects would be entirely in his hands. And by the time he was finally released from this latest tour, he would have already made the arrangements to bring his companion home with him. As disgusting as he felt to admit it, Evripidis knew that Pelagia had been right: Divorcing her would be more trouble than he could bear. But, he thought to himself with a small smile, that would not prevent him from marrying someone else regardless. He wondered if Pelagia would enjoy sharing the house with his new woman as much as he had enjoyed sharing space with her man. |
![]() MAKARIA to the Achaian People: Be as Many as the Stars | |
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| Mastropa | Nov 11 2015, 08:53 PM Post #4 |
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Zinovios Mesolongias, Epistatis
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Gerasimos returned every second month to this place, bearing his gifts for the dead. The town of Vergina in the northeastern Peloponnese was not large by any means, but even a small place with enough history could fill the Megaron with the bones of the ancestors. There was proof enough of that in the ossuary that Gerasimos approached now, a massive hall of centuries-old stone and mortar rising up from the peak of a low hill to look out over the waves of the Astolan, proclaiming the direst warning that the Achaians of old could imagine to any would-be invader: ‘Even our dead guard against you.’ Makaria’s banner still flapped away above the place, proclaiming this to be one of the goddess’s beloved and sacred sites. Gerasimos considered that flag until the bulk of the ossuary itself blotted out his view of it; afterward, he turned his eyes to the inscriptions over the door, the images of battle interspersed with Makaria’s intercession in the Achaians’ defense causing the usual mix of pride and awe in the accomplishments of the old man’s ancestors and the favor that had been bestowed upon them. This time around, however, those feelings were joined by a third impression: fear, and not a little of it, that Makaria was turning her back on her people at long last. Gerasimos rested at the crest of the hill, catching his breath after his climb. Once upon a time he hadn’t even noticed the incline, but that was decades ago. The old man’s knees were much harder used these days, now that his younger years’ transgressions were piling up on him. He tended to catch himself reminiscing more often now that he no longer had work to distract him, remembering his earliest years as a citizen, in uniform and out of it. He remembered the friends he had known, many of whom awaited him in the ossuary in front of him, and the relatives who had watched him grow into a man. He remembered making every one of them proud, looking forward to a future where they would rule the world together, even if their ‘world’ consisted of nothing but Vergina’s hills and coastline. He remembered praying to Makaria, day after day, and glorying in the proofs of her love for him and all the Achaian people. He found himself wondering if anyone after him would grow up and remember the same things. The Achaian people were changing before Gerasimos’s eyes. The old man could barely remember that the anax wasn’t still old Peiraias, yet almost in the blink of an eye the young sprout Gerasimos still considered ‘Stratigos’ Kerameikos had already been removed. Baby Kamatero, a few years over thirty, was now the master of the Achaian people, and not a few of those people were not entirely pleased about it. Gerasimos had heard plenty of muttering, some of it from his own lips, in Vergina alone. But it never got above any real volume, even in such a small place, when every citizen with a brain could remember their service in the Achaian military, and remember as well the too-impressive intelligence that came out of the Office of Internal Observation and the Office of Observation and Communication. No matter what the papers said about Kamatero systematically tearing the Megaron apart, Gerasimos would never believe that any thinking man would purposely throw away such an impressive resource as the spies that had kept his ancestors alive and in power for centuries. The new anax had yet to punish anyone, at least publicly, for standing against him—well, other than those two vasileis, but they never really mattered as far as local policies were concerned, and in Gerasimos’s mind the only good vasilefs was a dead one anyway. But there was no telling when the inevitable paranoia which came with the office would fully take hold. One day soon, the old man pondered, there might be a spark that could bring the Megaron’s wrath fully down upon the people standing beneath it, as the new anax tried to cement his position over a distrustful population. It was almost inevitable, and Gerasimos had no intention of finding himself a target of that kind of purge: He hadn’t lived more than eighty years without seeing a few internal purges. Even Kerameikos had begun straying down that path toward the end, he’d heard. Kamatero hadn’t been too bloody yet, with the obvious exception of his rise to power; it was all but impossible to hide explosions in the heart of the capital, and the claims that the logothetai had somehow turned against one another before the new anax had even arrived on the scene were completely ludicrous. Perhaps, though, Kamatero’s deadlier instincts had been tamed for the moment by the sudden violence of his rise to power. Gerasimos certainly hoped that was the case, but at the same time he also grew more nervous as the new anax’s other serious focus seemed to become more intense and more potentially destructive to the Achaian cause. The old man stepped back again in order to take another look at the Makarian banner flying above the ossuary. Throughout Gerasimos’s life, Makaria’s symbolism had been inescapable throughout the Peloponnese, but Kamatero’s opinion of it seemed to differ from that of almost every other anax, and every other Achaian, that had ever been born in the Peloponnese. The Cult found itself locked out of the Megaron for the first time since its foundation. Makaria’s Shield no longer graced the Peloponnesian banner. The Temple in Kerkyra was apparently still in crisis after the loss of so many of its presvyteroi in Kamatero’s rise to power, weeks after the fact; any other anax would have gone out of his way to fill the Cult’s foremost ranks with his supporters, but Kamatero, the son of the protopresvytera, was content to let the Temple panic on its own… and seemed prepared to cause even more panic if he did not like the Cult’s choice of replacements. The people’s murmurs seemed less important to the new anax than the marginalization of the Cult of Makaria, an unpredictable shock to almost everyone in the Peloponnese, and a source of great consternation to everyone who looked up in the sky and saw the Shield of Makaria being slowly but surely drawn away. Gerasimos sighed and walked up to the great doors of the ossuary, opening the place once again to the outside air. Bones were laid like a carpet across the expanse of the hall, stacked against each interior column, and mounted as lining along the walls from floor to ceiling. Every one of those bones had been painstakingly cleaned time and time again by generations of Vergina’s presvyteroi, and every new arrival was arranged as respectfully as possible among the legions of the dead. Down the center of the hall, an aisle was left clear, so that visitors could pray at the altar and leave their devotional gifts; Gerasimos followed this path as he had done countless times since his return from military service, holding his sacrifices in his arms as he looked around and considered how this place had changed in all those years. Of course there were more bones, and more covered spaces, but even since his last visit it seemed that the dead were aware of the changes happening around them. These men and women had died in the service of their goddess, and in support of her Shield. Gerasimos had no doubt that they were as displeased with the sacrilege going on outside these walls as those who were forced to live through it. He arrived at the altar and bowed his head, considering the image of Makaria and Vyronas and the leather-bound book that had graced this table for decades. He prayed, of course: for his own health and future, for the safety of his family and friends, and for Vergina and the Peloponnese. But his prayers no longer focused only on the ever-present dangers of foreign aggression. Gerasimos prayed for the future of the Achaian people, lost in a dangerous time of change; he prayed that Anax Kamatero recovered his sense before he threw away Makaria’s favor entirely, or else that Anax Kerameikos returned to recover the Megaron and lead the Peloponnese back to safety. And he prayed for Makaria not to abandon her people, regardless of the follies and failures of one man, for the rest of the Achaians continued to love her as they always had, knowing that she was the Shield that protected them from all others. Finally, Gerasimos laid down his burden on the altar, where the presvyteros would find it the next morning and store it safely away. “I could have brought a dud or an antique,” he said to the dead, “as I normally do. I know that your spirits are attuned to the meaning of the act, rather than the physical reality of it. But it won’t be long now before I join you. Things are changing so quickly… There’s nothing left here for me to wait for. What good will this do in the closet of a dead man?” Gerasimos scoffed. “What good does it do in the hands of an old one?” he asked. He paused, hoping to hear an answer—perhaps even a command from the dead, demanding that he keep his gift, admonishing him to use it to the best of his ability—but he heard only silence, and took that as affirmation that he had chosen the right course. “When I join you, then,” he finished, “I know that this will be waiting for me, just as you will.” The old man turned away, and left his safe-encased rifle behind. |
![]() MAKARIA to the Achaian People: Be as Many as the Stars | |
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7:50 AM Jul 11