"If they were completely successful, I wouldn't even know that much," he replies with a shake of his head. "There was a group of scholars who had operated quietly for centuries, gathering artifacts and scraps of knowledge to preserve it. But... let's see. Nine? Nine years ago, they were found out. The whole island was bombed back into dust."
It's both unnerving and oddly liberating to be able to actually talk about this sort of thing with someone, and a sort of spiteful, cautious enthusiasm lights up his eyes. Ohara and its destruction isn't itself taboo, but it was tiny and unknown, and if he hadn't already been enlisted, if he hadn't been raised by Sengoku, he might never have heard it happened. Most people in the world likely never will.
"That's why it's hard. I'd bet that wasn't the first time something like that had happened, either. The government has had nearly a thousand years now to keep suppressing it. That's a long time for the world to forget what it lost. I - all I do know for sure was there was a war between some prosperous civilization and a coalition of twenty other kingdoms. The coalition won, vowed to stamp out all traces of the ones who lost, and labeled the survivors the 'enemies of the gods'. ... And then," he shakes his head and digs for his lighter. Not too soon for another cigarette, not with all this talk about this subject in particular.
"...Then they named themselves gods, because who else would come from the stars and win big wars and rule the world, right?" A brief history of the world, a mix of old legends and old bullshit and new bullshit too, with a bunch of omissions he doesn't have the ability to fill because he was too young to know the secrets told to the eldest son, another truly bullshit tradition.
Anyway, poor Will probably has even more questions after all this, and for once he feels eager to clarify, because truly, really and truly, fuck his kin and all his ancestors.
no subject
It's both unnerving and oddly liberating to be able to actually talk about this sort of thing with someone, and a sort of spiteful, cautious enthusiasm lights up his eyes. Ohara and its destruction isn't itself taboo, but it was tiny and unknown, and if he hadn't already been enlisted, if he hadn't been raised by Sengoku, he might never have heard it happened. Most people in the world likely never will.
"That's why it's hard. I'd bet that wasn't the first time something like that had happened, either. The government has had nearly a thousand years now to keep suppressing it. That's a long time for the world to forget what it lost. I - all I do know for sure was there was a war between some prosperous civilization and a coalition of twenty other kingdoms. The coalition won, vowed to stamp out all traces of the ones who lost, and labeled the survivors the 'enemies of the gods'. ... And then," he shakes his head and digs for his lighter. Not too soon for another cigarette, not with all this talk about this subject in particular.
"...Then they named themselves gods, because who else would come from the stars and win big wars and rule the world, right?" A brief history of the world, a mix of old legends and old bullshit and new bullshit too, with a bunch of omissions he doesn't have the ability to fill because he was too young to know the secrets told to the eldest son, another truly bullshit tradition.
Anyway, poor Will probably has even more questions after all this, and for once he feels eager to clarify, because truly, really and truly, fuck his kin and all his ancestors.