She carried a bouquet of flowers, like she had always done. The woman would snatch them off the local market in the morning—today it had been roses, last week lilies, before that some other colour fresh off the gardens for the taking.
The flowers held no purpose, no meaning. She didn't bother giving any to this pitiful ritual of hers. Was there ever a point to any of this anyway? To the fighting and the suffering, to the history taught parent to child, to the last breath of the dying men crawling atop the mud, grasping for the banners they could no longer glimpse?
Why come here, to the marble and the metal that would never hear the words she so wanted to say?
Maybe because the silence would provide her something so scarce these days—that serenity and peace that the nightmares had replaced, the loop of the tournament recording playing on repeat on the TV.
Symbols were born to serve the dead, yet they'd only arise to charm the living.
She wasn't one for the glory of the past despite her blood, but her family oh so wanted her to be. Since she had been a child, every day of her life had been a tale or a photograph, a ceremony to teach the back-then-young-her of the history coursing through her veins. They didn't notice that the woman had grown weary of the posturing and the empty gestures, longing for a future rather than the past. Years later, the woman would tell herself her family name wouldn't define her—that she was her own person in a world born anew from the ashes of war. A new beginning, a new path free of tradition and superstition! Surely there had to be a place for her beyond the crown of thorns some would place atop her head. She'd find it, she'd grasp for that chance to be herself and to bring her family something that wasn't the cup filled to the brim with grievances and tears.
How ironic it had been that she ended up denying her daughter the same dreams, driving a rift between them wider than any ocean could ever hope to be.
But the fact that this apparition of ivory and gold now loomed over the square had to mean something more. The songs, the tales, and all of the bloodshed—they weren't merely the relics of bygone days. Those coming here weren't nobodies, the kowtowing bastards with no past or the future, doomed to forever be marked by the sins of their fathers.
No, they were just as good as those idiots beyond the seas.
Better even. Greater.
Many people would feel that way, even if she wouldn't. They'd cheer and they'd roar until the mirage of her daughter had cast the shadow over all those visiting this square.
A better idol, a memory, a better view than a city razed to the ground, they had never been to. An idea, a martyr they could relate to, projecting their hopes, sating the itching scar etched into this Kingdom that would never heal.
As she placed the bouquet, the woman gazed at the statue, at its features, the metal so unwieldy to capture her daughter's face.
Maybe because this wasn't a statue of her daughter, no.
The visage gazing upon this city held no warmth, nor a smile or laughter that only a mother could recognize. What would greet her every week had merely been a ghost of the past, a pied piper assuming her daughter's form.
A memorial to something that had no name or form, born of pride and glory and all the familiar cheers before the fall.
The champion of Mistral took a stand in a war she would never win as she burned away in a land far away. A true hero. Yet even that sacrifice could never hope to compare to the once-fire still smoldering inside the hearts of those who rose and fell with the names of their Gods and Kings upon their lips.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
