Seda's Sickness

Rina Cassius - Seda, The Senate

The Senate's grand hall, a monument to Seda’s aspirations, hummed with a discordant energy that vibrated unpleasantly against the high, vaulted ceilings. It was a tangible pressure, a static in the air that prickled the skin. Sunlight, fractured by the towering stained-glass windows depicting Seda’s triumphant (and conveniently edited) history, splashed pools of lurid color—blood-red, royal-blue, and a sickly gold—across the polished marble floor.

The light illuminated dust motes dancing in the charged air. They swirled like tiny, frantic ghosts amidst the palpable tension, which had replaced the usual atmosphere of measured, self-important discourse. Rina Cassius, seated amongst the lesser observers in the gallery, watched them, her jaw tight with a weary, simmering frustration.

“The reports from the border territories are… deeply troubling,” Councilor Varrus began, his voice trembling with fear he couldn't quite suppress. He fussed with a stack of documents, his plump fingers trembling. “Sanguine activity, as confirmed by Commander Zalim’s patrols, has increased tenfold. The outpost at Three-Bridges Crossing has gone silent. Silent. Their raids disrupt vital grain routes… their demands become bolder.”

A murmur rippled through the assembled Senators, a sibilant hiss of silk, parchment, and panicked whispers.

Words, Rina thought, the bitterness tasting like ash. Always. Useless. Words. They would debate the definition of "silent" for an hour. While they debated procedural points and jurisdictional boundaries, the foundations of Seda’s security were crumbling.

“We cannot allow fear to dictate our actions!” Her father’s voice, powerful and commanding, sliced through the nervous drone. Senator Cassius. A pillar of the establishment, his face etched with genuine worry, yet incapable of seeing beyond the rigid framework of the laws he revered. “The Sanguine thrives on chaos. We must respond with strength, yes... But our strength must always be tempered with wisdom, with compassion, lest we sacrifice the very principles of justice and order that define us!”

Compassion debated in luxurious chambers while children starve and their parents are slaughtered is not compassion, Father. Rina countered silently. It is hypocrisy. It is a shield of privilege. The last fragile threads of any daughterly admiration snapped.

With a decisiveness that startled even herself, Rina pushed back her heavy wooden chair, the scrape loud in the suddenly attentive hall. She rose, drawing every eye. Her voice, when she spoke, was not the hesitant tone of a Senator's daughter; it was clear, steady, and cut through the stale air.

“Words are not enough, Father.” The address was personal, but the challenge was to the governing body. “People are suffering now. They starve while grain prices are debated. They fear the night while patrols guard the estates of the wealthy. They need action, not promises of future compassion discussed at leisure. They need leaders willing to risk their comfort, not just officials content to analyze reports.”

A shocked, scandalized silence descended. Even the dust motes seemed to hang motionless. Rina could feel the weight of dozens of eyes, cold with outrage. Her father’s face was a battlefield of disbelief, anger, and a deep, wounding disappointment that struck Rina with the force of a physical blow.

“Rina,” he began, his voice strained, tight with the effort of maintaining his public composure. “This is not a forum for passion. This is a nest of vipers. You speak of starving children, yet with your words, you have just publicly insulted Senator Valerius—the very man whose vote we need to pass the grain subsidies. Your outburst, your performative compassion, may have won the moral high ground for a moment, but you may have just condemned those children to another week of hunger. You do not understand the game.”

“I understand the complexity of a mother’s grief when her child is taken by raiders the Senate dismissed as ‘minor incidents,’" she retorted, her voice gaining strength, her gaze locking with his. “I understand that I will not stand by and watch this city decay from within while you all prioritize procedure and decorum over lives.”

Before he could respond, Rina turned sharply and strode from the grand hall. Her footsteps echoed her defiance against the cold marble, a solitary, sharp sound in the vast, offended silence.

The opulent corridors outside felt alien, hostile. Public defiance was political suicide. She needed a different battlefield. The system itself - its ponderous, self-serving edifice of laws and buried precedents - could its own weight be used against it?

She bypassed the lifts and headed for the lower levels. Down worn stone steps, into the cool, still air of the Senate Archives. It was a place few Senators willingly ventured, a vast, dimly lit labyrinth smelling perpetually of aging parchment, binding glue, and the faint, dry scent of the settled dust of centuries. Towering shelves, crammed with scrolls, thick ledgers, and stacks of case files, stretched upwards into shadowy recesses far above.

It felt like a hopeless task, searching for a single useful thread in a mountain of forgotten history. But it was a path. It was action.

She pulled a heavy scroll from a shelf, its parchment crackling like dry leaves. Her fingers were already smudged with ancient dust as she deciphered the archaic, cramped script. This was a different kind of warfare—quiet, patient, relentless.

As she unrolled the scroll, a low, distant thud vibrated through the stone floor. It was so faint she almost missed it. A single, heavy tremor that shook the dust from the towering shelves above, the motes swirling in the dim light like disturbed spores.

Rina froze, listening, her hand flat on the ancient parchment. But there was only the profound, suffocating silence of the Archives.