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Morning in the imperial palace could be a blinding affair: one wrong turn and a wall of solid crystal would send a glory of brilliant red light soaring into your unprepared eyes. Both inhabitants and staff had learned to fear certain corners in the wee hours of the morning.
Staff. Wasn't that a thought? Staff. She had maids she could order around – not that she could work up the nerve to – and soldiers who were tasked with her protection. Part of her was still back on the estate, she thought, the part that itched for some sort of work, but almost every skill she had developed back there, beyond reading, was useless. The grooms wouldn't let her so much as feed the horses (she could pick from a score of them, all graceful thoroughbreds instead of the drafts she had fed back home).
Historia had circled the palace on horseback a few times, the horse trotting along as the sunlight slid through mad fractals. There had to be millions of facets in the imperial palace, most of them located in the newer wings of the building, the ones designed by the finest jewelers the empire could source. She wasn't sure if that finery managed to trump the sheer, awful scale of the main block of milky crystal that the palace had started as, part residence and part unassailable fortress.
In those depths, you could find serious defensive measures: larders a hundred meters high, narrow halls that doubled and tripled back, dozens of dark dungeons and hundreds of arrow slits, but it had been a thousand years since the capital at Quiloa had ever been at risk. From siege, at least. The royal family was holing up in the palace, and Historia had been yanked along to make up for numbers.
There were, at the moment, three members of the main line of the Eldian imperial family alive, if you included the illegitimate Historia. There had been, or so Frieda and the papers said, a plot by a cabal of bomb-throwing anarchists that hit the royal carriages while they toured the capital proper…
(The other imperial lines were scattered very far. A distant relative – Dina, her name was? – had died of some unique new world tropical disease that hadn't been accounted for in the typical immunities built into Eldian blood. That, more than looming catastrophe on the Eldian Bourse, had compelled imperial invention in that Darien Canal mess… Historia was learning a lot of modern politics very quickly.)
The non-Eldian culprits had been shot and the perfidious Eldians involved in the scheme had been sentenced to penal labor as Titans, but that still left the imperial family wanting for members. Eldians, as a rule, had easy deliveries and low maternal mortality, but two royals was a small number, especially when the thirteen-year deadline loomed.
That had been a revelation, Historia would admit. Her mysterious older sister Frieda was, in fact, something like a living god, awful in power, supreme executive of the largest empire in the world. And she spent her time on Historia.
Historia recalled their initial procession to the capital after Frieda first retrieved her from the farm. (In a car! A car! Admittedly, mundane cars were a little less impressive, their bodies not being made of perfect crystal that gleamed like mother-of-pearl.) Frieda had leaned over and asked: "Would you prefer it if your mother was here?"
"I… I wouldn't want to waste anyone's time finding her."
"I can find her, if you'd like." Her eyes flashed silver and purple, like the jewelry Historia's mother would wear when she went out at night. Alma could go as far as she liked, she couldn't hide from, or even disobey a god. And yet that god stooped to ask what a mere mortal like Historia desired.
"No. I don't think… I don't think she'd like the capital." She certainly wouldn't like living there with Historia.
Frieda frowned. "Alright. But if you ever want to talk… I can always make time for you, alright?"
(She really could. Even in the middle of a meeting, Frieda could simply yank them out of time and space, to a world of endless blue and white, broader than even the great desert of the south, marked by a singular, awful tree that loomed like lightning frozen above the dunes.)
They'd talked a bit more as they headed to the coast, but Frieda hadn't thought to warn her of the reaction royalty would provoke when the royal caravan passed through a city. The streets were lined with people, gendarmes pushing the mass back with clubs and sabers, shoving old women to the side or making people drop stretchers.
The stretchers! They were everywhere! Historia had seen suffering before – she'd seen animals butchered or put down – but never in her life had she seen such a mass of human suffering. One of the side streets they passed by was made inaccessible by the sick and the wounded and the dead, all laid out in rows. The crowds shrieked and keened, desperate for a cure, hands and faces sprang from every window like weeds.
Historia's gaze drifted to one of the windows, where a child, perhaps half her age, leaned out of a window, one frail arm holding back against a growing push from behind him. He teetered, swayed… "Frieda!" Historia gasped.
His arm buckled and he fell, slamming into a corrugated awning with a dreadful crack and then sliding down so he fell onto the shoulders of people on the street. Historia couldn't make out a single change in the endless wave of sound. Frieda followed Historia's gaze, her eyes starting to gleam…
The cacophony only grew in volume, so loud that it seemed like the car was rattling. But those were just the shrieks of pure religious ecstasy, cripples leaping to their feet and dancing with joy.
Historia was sharing the car with a god. A god that respected her boundaries enough not to peer into her mind – like she did with the criminals and the politicians and the soldiers – but a god.
Perhaps Historia had been purposefully sheltered from that sort of religious belief on the estate. Frieda or her predecessor probably had the means, and Historia supposed her mother had reason to question the deified status of the Reiss family, considering the treatment she had received from them.
However, the rest of the empire was a very different story. The capital proper – on the mainland – played host to several spectacular temple complexes, rivalled only by the pilgrimage sites around the Root of Eldia, where Historia and Frieda's ancient foremother first became a Titan. Crowds came as close to the palace complex as security would allow, or waited for salvation in the religious hospitals that filled the city.
(It was the hospital visits and their regularity that doomed her relatives, apparently. It was hard to control the people when they were like that, much less vetting or searching them all.)
Frieda had warned Historia not to fall for charm from any old person that wandered by, whether one of her guards wanting… ahem, or political players trying to get Historia in their pocket. Historia didn't think she had much to worry about – any affection from someone who wasn't Frieda ended up feeling too odd for Historia to really buy it. In the palace, it was hard to believe that anyone liked her for her, a rural hick wasting the time of staff and tutors and…
There were occasional visits from viceroys, nobles, or members of the Pan-Eldian Diet, but of course, Historia never believed that any of their charms (or their son's charms) were genuine. They played a game that Historia was never a part of – as anything more than a potential taxpayer and baby producer – until the power sleeping in her blood was revealed.
During sunset, the whole imperial palace would turn from diamond into ruby, a whole edifice built in blood, and really, that was what Eldia was, when you got down to it. It was all blood, all breeding, all about the selection and propagation of 'proper stock'. It was like the farm, if you focused on growing a herd of millions of people.
One 'benefit' of Historia's rural upbringing was that no one took her seriously, especially compared to Frieda. You had to be careful, even in your thoughts, around Frieda, but Historia? She didn't even know the names of the Diet members, the viceroys, the ministers of the legations… she couldn't tell you what drew people to vote for the Tyburs in the most recent election, but she wasn't dumb.
She could read – Frieda had taught her – and one of the few weaknesses of the Founding Titan's power was that it simply wasn't good at processing written information. It could let Frieda gaze into someone's mind, peeling back the layers to get a perfect understanding of their beliefs, their research, their biases… but a dry, three thousand page report from the Ministry of Eldian Health and Population was a waste of her time. Like the vast majority of the documents sent to the Empress, it would be read by some flunky beneath her, notes would be taken, and then it would be tucked away in one of the great filing rooms in the palace or at the Diet.
(One of the filing rooms in the palace was converted from one of those old storage towers. There were four floors dedicated to tax records alone, surveys done on ancient vellum that crackled when Historia tried to read them. She only made the one attempt, to be clear.)
Back to repaying Frieda, and that mighty document delivered to the palace by some ambitious bureaucrat. It was titled "An Investigation of Global Policy With the Eldian People as Nucleus". Very concise. Historia felt sorry for the poor printers or typists who had been assigned to the project, and she felt a little bad she could only skim. But only a little.
The thrust of the document – at least, the part she read – was that the Eldian people had a special mission: to ensure equal treatment of the peoples of the world… by disposing with the false equality of the modern age, and making unequal demands of peoples who were, at the most basic level, fundamentally unequal. (Charming.)
As a people who were, in their very blood, greater, the Eldian people had a special responsibility to put the world in its proper order. As the Eldian people were under their emperor, so the world should be under the Eldian people, each person and nation doing their proper task. There was quite a bit of talk about national character, the emperor as that character made manifest, the emperor as the will of the world and the divine pushing toward perfect order…
The lesser nations could be left to ekeing out their own livings under Eldian supervision – as, Historia figured, colonies in all but name that fed Eldia raw resources while staying ever dependent – but they could be brought of their benighted state and brought into proper order. How? By becoming Eldian, of course.
What followed were dozens of pages exploring the ways in which miscegenation (which should be ideally phrased as exogamy) could be encouraged by the power of the state without crossing over into the diplomatically awkward territories of state-sanctioned…
There were some ambitious calls for massive settlement campaigns and a need to pull the world 'up'. Up from the mire of their petty racism – viewing Eldian blood as filth, a contagion – and up from their feuding. But it should only be up. No pulling Eldia down. Not into that sort of petty discrimination, and not into petty regionalism either. Eldians should stay Eldian, and young Eldians should, perhaps, be educated in the homeland to ensure they weren't lowered to mere nativist concerns by an upbringing abroad.
Occasionally, Historia could almost see the reason to it. If the whole world was under the Eldian roof, would that not be an end to war? If more people were Eldian, then Historia would be able to do more good – cure them, restore them, fortify them – when the time came for her to inherit that awesome power. She could be a physician to the whole world's ills, and really, wasn't that worth personal sacrifices, killing inside one family every dozen years instead of bloodshed inside the human family…
But it would be a cure imposed on the world. Historia couldn't skim through the piece and think that whoever put that into practice was a good person, and something told her a more intense reading would only make it worse. (Could… could any Eldian emperor really go down in history as a good person? Not to everyone, certainly.)
(A lot of comparisons were also made to the family. Eldia as the father, the lesser nations as children. If certain plans came to pass, that might be true, in some sense. Comparing Eldia to Rod Reiss… Historia could see the similarities. That was not a good thing.)