Chapter Text
The rebellion is bigger than they think, and that’s all you have to console yourself with, on the long nights when the paperwork weighs heavy on your hands and heart. Bloodpusher, you think, and you count each slow beat, trying to let some of the guilt ease.
Your training teachers taught you ages and ages ago that things would happen like this, that you might feel the pain of each life lost. It is natural and normal, they would have you recite, and these lives do not matter if they are lost in service to the Empire.
(Your best teacher took you aside one day and told you that the only way to not become a monster was to let each death sink into the calm pool of your heart like a stone. To carry that weight with you, and add it up, the account of the lives you owed, the debt the Empire owed to all trolls.)
And you nodded and laughed along with your classmates, but inside, you kept count. The numbers spiraled higher and higher with each passing year, a classmate lost in a careless exercise, when the purpleblood in charge didn’t seem to care about gut wounds. A teacher that some seadweller had a grudge against. You added them to the tally, kept count, added up.
In the end, they would be the Empress’s bill.
Oh, the Condesce. She was admirable, fearsome and fierce, determined and powerful. Anything that stood in her way would soon wish it hadn’t. Some days, you wanted to be her. Others, you hated her and everything she stood for. The older you grew, the more common the second sort of days became.
So you had decided, at the ripe old age of eight sweeps, that you would become a legislacerator. You would claw and kick your way to the top, with a killer instinct and cunning moves, and with the least amount of blood on your hands as you could. You would win your place there, and you would bring her whole damn system crashing down around her stupid royal fins. If you couldn’t bring her to justice, you could get revenge.
And it worked. It worked so well. You were getting noticed, you were moving up. She had even started to pay attention to you.
But you had underestimated a highblood’s love of games. The subjuggulators set you to chasing the Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, a most notorious pirate. You were proud, she would be another checkmark in your ledger, another stone to your pool, another name to your accounting.
Someday, you would have your revenge.