Chapter 5 -- The Choice of Men
The Crown's warning still hung in the chamber, heavy as stone. The scarred veteran stood motionless, one hand braced on the table, silence drawing every gaze. Beyond the tall windows, the storm grew louder, rain pelting the glass in furious waves, thunder rolling like a distant drumbeat.
The Crown delegate had asked his question plainly: could the veteran bear the weight of self-rule, and bury the dead if he failed? The chamber waited for the reply.
The veteran's fingers pressed deeper into the wood of the table. His knuckles whitened. For a moment—just a moment—something flickered across his face. Not fear, but recognition. The weight the Crown spoke of was not abstract. It was real as the scars on his hands, real as the names carved into his memory, real as the villages that would never wake again.
He had carried dead children from burning huts. He had written letters to mothers who would never see their sons return. He had made promises in the dark that dawn might prove impossible to keep. The Crown's question was not a test of resolve—it was a mirror held up to show him what he already knew.
The burden of a nation was the burden of every life within it.
The veteran lifted his head. He did not turn to Gaule, nor to the Federation, nor to the Union. His eyes fixed on the Crown's, and the air tightened between them. It was not the rigid stance of a parade soldier, nor the swagger of politics. His posture was steady, relaxed but unbending, like a man who had carried weight long enough to know he would not drop it now.
When he spoke, his voice was calm, every word chosen with care.
"We will not be lifted like children by empire. Nor carried by markets that trade freedom for debt. We will stumble. We will bleed. But we will rise on our own soil, in our own time."
The Union envoy's smile faltered. Gaule's envoy leaned forward, fingers tightening around his notes. The Federation general gave a small, approving nod. The Crown delegate did not move, but the gaze between the two men hardened like steel struck on steel.
The veteran drew a breath, his tone softening without losing strength.
"To those who came when we cried for help—Gaule, who broke the lines so our villages could breathe again. The Federation, who carried children from fire. The Southern Commonwealth, who fed the starving when the fields were ash. Your names will live with us. As long as our people endure, we will remember."
He turned his head and saluted them one by one. Gaule's envoy inclined his chin, sharp and formal. The Federation general snapped his salute back, precise as iron. The Southern Commonwealth's delegate bowed his head, his eyes lowered in grave respect.
When the veteran returned to face the Crown, his voice deepened.
"A people must first learn to stand on two feet before they can fly. No hand will cheat us of it."
The words were steady, spoken man to man—the answer to the challenge. A quiet strength filled the space between them, a recognition that neither would bend.
The Crown delegate's expression did not change, but something shifted in his eyes. Not approval, not disapproval—acknowledgement. He had posed the question not to break the veteran's resolve, but to test its foundation. The answer had been given. The test was complete.
Then the veteran's posture changed.
His shoulders squared. His spine locked straight. The weariness that had shadowed his movements—the weight of decades, of exile, of loss—seemed to fall away like shed armour. What remained was not the politician who had spoken minutes before, but something older, something forged in fire and tempered by survival.
He straightened fully, his scarred hand leaving the table and pressing firmly against his chest, sharp as a soldier's salute. The chamber stilled as every head turned. Even the typewriters at the walls ceased their clatter, keys hanging suspended above paper as if the very machinery of record-keeping held its breath.
The veteran pivoted, slow and deliberate, away from the table and toward the tall windows. Outside, the storm raged harder than ever, rain slamming the glass as though the sky itself was demanding an answer. Lightning split the horizon in jagged flashes, each bolt illuminating the chamber in stark, electric white. Thunder cracked deep and rolling, the sound echoing off stone walls like cannon fire.
But the veteran did not flinch. He lifted his face into the stormlight, his scar catching the glow of lightning, his eyes fixed upward, unblinking. The hall seemed to vanish around him—the delegates, the observers, the weight of politics and empire. All that remained was the storm, alive and waiting, and the man who stood before it.
For a heartbeat, the world balanced on the edge of his words.
When he spoke, his voice cut through the roar like a blade through silk, carrying not to the chamber but to something far beyond its walls—to the sky, to history, to the dead who lay beneath the soil.
"Government of the people, by the people, for the people... shall not perish from this earth."
The words hung in the air, suspended between thunder and lightning. They were not his words—they belonged to another man, in another time, spoken over another field of graves. But in this moment, in this place, they became his. They became a promise carved into the storm itself.
For a heartbeat, the storm paused. The thunder stilled. The rain slackened. Then, slowly, the clouds began to ease apart, the lightning dimming at the edges. Sunlight broke through, pale but resolute, pouring across the chamber floor in a golden shaft that seemed to anoint the moment.
It was as though the heavens themselves had heard the vow—and accepted it.
The chamber sat in stunned silence. Scribes froze mid-keystroke, their hands trembling above typewriters. One bowed his head before jolting back to work, striking keys with desperate intensity. Another mouthed the words to herself as she carved them onto her shorthand page. In the gallery, journalists leaned forward, pens racing, yet more than one stopped writing just to stare. Even the lesser delegates, normally statues of neutrality, bowed their heads slightly.
It was not agreement. It was not politics. It was reverence — the instinctive respect for a man who had turned the discipline of a soldier into a vow, and sworn it not to men, but to the sky itself.
Only when the veteran lowered his hand, slow and deliberate, did the chamber remember to breathe. He folded his scarred fingers back onto the table and sat. His face betrayed nothing. He gave no smile, no sign of triumph.
He had not spoken.
He had sworn.
And the sky had answered.