018 – Avna and Gihn

018 – Avna and Gihn

“—meaningdul resistance among settlement NPCs is, in virtually all observed cases, a resource allocation problem rather than an ideological one, a clear mirror to real-world logic. Players in management roles are reminded: do not permit NPC populations to develop proprietary supply chains as a matter of policy. NPC dependency on [ORIGA] at every level of infrastructure is how our guild will maintain power projection as we expand our reach into the Wilds.”

—An internal Aegis Origa [ORIGA] guild memo, dated September 19, 2120

Captain Iorec looked weary. His right arm was in a sling, mirroring Benessel, and his face was drawn and pale from his ordeal in the caves, but he stood with his back straight and dignified. Ai could see why he and Benessel supposedly got along well. Lieutenant Baior flanked him, looking for all the world like an over-protective bulldog.

Iorec stopped in front of her and raised his good hand to his forehead in a deep, lingering salute.

“Lady Ayle,” he said, his voice still rough from his treatment at Inneol’s hands, “I owe you my life. And Avna owes you its future.”

“I’m glad.” Ai replied, not knowing what else she could say. Without an objective, she was once again adrift. She was, after all, chiefly in Avna to tag along to Ashakir with Benessel. This place was, at the end of the day, a side quest.

“As long as you don’t take me flying again, that is.” Iorec deadpanned, a wry grin on his face. It seemed he was in good spirits.

“No promises. Just don’t get kidnapped again.” She joked back. Iorec smiled. They fell into a comfortable silence, standing shoulder to shoulder as they watched the activity from their perch by the new Norric shrine.

“Do you see that?” Iorec gestured with his good hand toward a group of Gihn laborers. They were huddled around a table manned by Varran clerks, pointing excitedly at a map.

“I am offering prime lots to the families of loyal Gihn residents first,” Iorec said proudly. “The Varran registry office is already processing the deeds.

“It will become fertile farmland, once Southern Headquarters sends over the engineer corps karra,” Iorec continued, his eyes flitting over the horizon to trace over a future that wasn’t quite there yet, “We’ve been planning this for a while. Now we can grow more crops. Build homes. Ranch Golga and Korga. In time, I hope to grow this town into a city. Perhaps my grandchild will even oversee the city of Avna’ir, one day.”

He turned his gaze to a pair of soldiers sharing a waterskin with a Gihn woman.

“The Gihn families who have shown loyalty will, of course, be our priority,” Iorec nodded. “Those who have worked with us most faithfully. Those who have intermarried with our soldiers, started families. We won’t just offer them protection, Miss Ayle. We offer them a future and a stake in the Republic.”

Ai fell silent. She saw what Iorec—and since he was certainly acting in an official capacity, the Republic—was planning. Lellen had mentioned the night before, as had Lieutenant Baior some time ago, that Bangari raids took place with some frequency in the region. If what she remembered from Dirge still held true, there was a deep racial enmity between humanity and the saurian peoples of the Bangari Dominion, one that was part of the background lore at the game’s launch, a relationship that far predated the game’s timeline. Even the word Bangari was a bastardized Varran form of the name Angar, denoting barbarism and cruelty.

All of that to say that the Southern Acquisition, as the area containing Gihn was called, seemed to have very real security concerns that only the Varran Republic was positioned to address. By tying the locals’ survival and prosperity directly to Republic infrastructure, they were making rebellion too costly to consider, not when the benefits of participating in Varran society were so indispensable to their own wellbeing.

From this perspective, her participation in the raid to quell the nascent New Gihn movement took on a different flavor. Her only solace was that the movement was doomed from the start, not that that was much of any consolation. Inneol wasn’t a true believer in the Gihn cause, just an opportunist interested only in the power he could gain from hoodwinking the Gihn boys into accepting the Burned Brand with himself as their master.

Then again, she was only helping Karravar Benessel in the first place to make it more convenient for herself to find the city of Ikkasir and return to Karravaran, so what did that make her?

“And what of the Gihns who don’t buy into the Republic’s system?” Ai asked, outwardly dispassionate.

She nodded toward the far side of the square, where a line of New Gihn prisoners was being led away by armed guards. Povi was among them. The boy looked smaller than she remembered. He had been stripped of his Avnan guardsman attire, and dressed in a roughspun tunic. He wasn’t in chains, but still walked with a slump in his shoulders that spoke of internal turmoil.

“The rebels?” Iorec followed her gaze, missing her meaning. To his mind, participation in the system was a binary choice, and Ai saw that his expression was somehow at once calculating but also filled with a sense of compassion. “They expected death and martyrdom. I don’t intend on making any martyrs today.”

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“Prison, then?” Ai tested. Iorec truly seemed to think he was being compassionate in his actions. From a certain perspective, he wasn’t incorrect. If it required Karravar to create new nodes in and maintain the Ve’un, then that pointed towards a Republic that leveraged their control over safety against the literal darkness as a geopolitical tool. To the Varrans then, expanding their control likely represented the spread of peace and safety, of civilization itself.

“Labor,” Iorec corrected. “Making amends to the community through public service.”

He watched the line of prisoners trudge toward a group of Varran soldiers, each of them picking up a shovel from a pile of tools along the way.

“They will dig irrigation ditches for the new fields, help mix the mud for the bricks of the new houses. They will help build the very future they tried to destroy, alongside their neighbors. Friends and family. Surrounded by their community.”

Suddenly, a woman broke from the crowd. It was Lellen.

She rushed toward the line of prisoners, sobbing, reaching out. A guard stepped in her way, gently barring her from getting too close to her penitent son. Lellen collapsed to her knees, weeping—not with grief, Ai realized, but with relief.

It seemed that she had learned her son wasn’t going to the gallows.