Chapter Text
From the pen of Prince Erin (once Aaron) Alpin:
One thing that people fail to understand about being trained as a ruler, is that the first and most important thing you are taught is that you will frequently, inevitably be wrong .
You will make decisions that affect thousands and people will die because you did not understand that reducing taxes would mean that there would not be sufficient coffers to import wheat when the famine struck the neighboring countries.
After all, Burens produce flowers, not grains.
You learn this and you learn that the most important tool of the ruler is not whether or not your citizens suffered but who told the story of your rule. The Alpins pay no one as well as they do their biographers.
You might be wrong, but in the histories that write of you, your rule will always have been correct.
History will speak of Regina Alpin, first of her name, as the Queen of the people, the woman who spoke of equality and set it into practice for nobles and commoners alike.
Yesterday, twenty years after her death, the last of her schools for commoners burned down in a mysterious fire. Her other reforms have long since vanished, most within five years of her passing.
Schools do not build themselves. Teachers are not made from stone. Distribution of bread does not fall from the sky.
Thousands of unnamed, unthanked people made the words of Artem and Regina reality, myself included. The words are necessary and powerful but it is people who must make them reality.
It is not enough to have a dream. Someone must create your buildings, brick by brick, in reality.
And if you cannot put in place a system strong enough to survive without you…
I am an old man now. My hands are worn to the bone and I eat my potatoes carefully.
The realm of kings and queens is now far beyond me.
Was Regina a bad queen? Was she a good one?
I will not live to know.
After all, only you can determine whether a story will find a way to rebuild, to create the bricks of something more concrete than a fleeting dream.