“You used to be able to fly here,” Maria said as she plucked a wilted cherry blossom from a tree. “We never got to see this place back then.”
“Maybe because we hadn’t been born yet,” Dario mumbled, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
He and Maria had passed through the park on their way to school that morning, wanting to soak up what was left of the blooms on the flowering trees. Or Maria had wanted to, and went to Dario’s place just to drag him out of the house bright and early to see it with her. Sadly, most of the blossoms had already been shed, forming sad pink heaps on the path that hadn’t been cleared yet.
“It’s such a stupid rule.” Maria twirled the blossom over in her fingers. “We can both summon our wings now, and we’re told to, what, not use them? It’s a bit unfair, isn’t it?”
“That’s Silph, I guess,” Dario yawned. “They want to be able to use magic for labor, but flying is too much. How dare you have any fun?”
The Ora colony, being across the ocean from mainland Silph, was always trying to remind you it was still a part of Silph. Which involved the park and the wilting cherry blossoms, which did not help with the image.
The blossoms weren’t natural. This whole park wasn’t natural in this climate or in the city, the man-made jungle of concrete and steel beams. Not much of what grew in the park was native to the area, just whatever some nebulous planning committee thought would look nice. It was springtime in Silph, so they had to force flowers to bloom there in the opposite hemisphere. Since the plants wouldn’t grow on their own in these conditions, they were kept alive with essence, pure magical energy. The cherry blossoms had been cultivated for the spring festival, managing to burst from branches that clearly weren’t cherry trees. But now that the festival was over, the blossoms were left to shrivel up. The park would likely be completely overhauled by midday, no one letting it be an eyesore like this for too long.
It was always strange to celebrate a springtime holiday as the chill of autumn was setting in, but the Silphion Empire decided the best way to exert its control across the sea was by getting Ora to ignore the weather.
Maria kept fiddling with the blossom. It started to glow, and wilted petals were revitalized with the essence she added to them. She twirled it again, then crushed it and threw it over her shoulder. “What do you think they're so afraid of?” She mumbled.
“Afraid of? Feeling inferior, maybe?” Dario suggested. “Witches can fight, sure, but conquering the skies is a bit out of their skill set.”
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
Dario and Woo-Jin had met each other in their first year, when they were both a lot shorter and scrawnier. It was a chance meeting really. Woo-Jin had been passing out fliers to get people to sign up for the school’s drama club. Dario mostly wanted a distraction from the disaster that was his home life at the time.
What he didn’t expect would come with it was Woo-Jin, who was far too excited to have a new member.
“You don’t understand how big this is. If we couldn’t get enough people to sign up, the club might have had to shut down. It always comes back to budget cuts.”
The two had been attached at the hip since.
A few months before, they had been running through lines during their lunch break, where they seemed to always come back around to heated debate about the material.
Dario was quick to mention that a play is a piece of literature first, and should be analyzed as such. Everyone has their own opinions and beliefs about the world, and those opinions and beliefs make their way into the art they make.
“The sonnets at the beginning are basically parodies of older love sonnets. Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.” Dario waved his rolled-up script for emphasis, sweeping gestures as he quoted. “It’s not a very good metaphor, and I think that’s the point. Referencing a lover’s sigh was already a cliche at the time, and comparing a sigh to smoke isn’t a very good metaphor for love. The imagery it invokes isn’t that powerful. And that’s what writers do, they use their work to talk shit about other writers and the overdone cliches from years before.”
“Sure, but it’s about two lovers who would rather die together than live apart,” Woo-Jin said. “Maybe some parents wouldn’t like the message, but what’s so provocative about it?”
Woo-Jin was firmly in the camp of it being a piece of entertainment first and foremost. Entertainment was meant to entertain, not bog you down with the woes of everyday life. Entertainment should be escapist, and this level of picking apart every line could quickly take the fun out of things.
“The play is set in Mellif,” Dario continued. “The social hierarchy was much less strict than that of Silph at the time, so the families were able to ignore the orders of the prince and carry on with their feud. The entire plot wouldn’t have worked if it were set in contemporary Silph, so it gives room for societal commentary without directly stating it by forcing the Silphion audiences to compare life in Mellif to their own. ”
“Or maybe it’s two dumb teenagers who have sex and then die,” Aza chimed in as she picked at her food. “A classic.”
Woo-Jin groaned. “If you hate the play so much, you don’t have to stay and listen.”
“I have nothing better to do,” Aza shrugged. “Besides, it’s funny to see you duke it out. It’s like you're fighting to see who can be the bigger know-it-all.”
And that seemed to be where the fight started. Their debates went from who could be the “bigger know-it-all” to who was correct. Objectively correct.
Dario knew a thing or two about how writing was used to influence groups of people, fictional or otherwise. His mother had always been a stickler when it came to looking out for implicit biases and what was written just to incite rage. And maybe that’s where the self-assurance came from. Just parroting the opinions of others and being quick to call something out as propaganda.
And the script for The Golden Princess came across as just that. Propaganda.
It was an original play, an experiment of sorts, and it had somehow made its way to their drama club. The group of four had gone to see it once when it was first showing downtown, and collectively agreed that it was awful. Dario thought it was the last he’d be hearing about that play, until it was announced that they could be doing their own performance of it.
Dario had managed to tolerate the changes in the drama club over the years, budget cuts and script rewrites to make things more sanitized, but he drew the line at the revisionist history puff piece. His mistake was thinking that Woo-Jin would share the same opinion.
“I mean it’s a bit dull, but 'dangerous' has to be an overstatement,” Woo-Jin had said. “And what’s dropping out going to do? They're still going to put it on.”
“It’s the principle of the thing. I’m not going to kiss the boots of colonialism, and you shouldn’t either.”
“Kiss the boot of colonialism?” Woo-Jin repeated. “It really is just a play.”
Turns out the drama club could cause a lot of interpersonal drama.
Woo-Jin had later asked if Dario would come to at least one of their shows. The full play was being put on at the academy before the break, while the abbreviated show was for the kids at the spring pageant at the end of the festival.
The full play did not have a narrator to keep everyone up to speed. It made the witches and wizards of that time out to be these small groups who were hopeless to defend themselves without the rallying cry of Orlaith I to unite them. In actuality, magic users were much more organized, having their own underground resistance networks. The play did include Orion Drabek, a man who was arrested and executed for magic use. He was a healer working to keep the spreading plague under control, and his execution was the catalyst for the common people to sympathize with the plight of the magic users, sparking years of civil war and the complete restructuring of the country.
The play provided quite a rewrite to this history. Orlaith is given a much more active role that she just didn’t have. She did not rally to unite the people, she hadn’t fought in the ongoing war with Hikmah (that had been a militia of golden-ringed fireflies and other entomon who were suspiciously omitted from this retelling), she hadn’t even been a farmer.
Orlaith was a young witch with prodigious skill with the rare, and quite uncontrollable, power of ether. She was placed on the throne by the resistance leaders as more of a figurehead, to show that the strong were naturally meant to be leaders. She was a girl born into wealth and status and natural magic. She had been trained to use that magic and was groomed to be a political prop. She was placed in the right places at the right time in order to give her the image of the “golden leader” the country needed.
But the play needed to make Orlaith likable. An underdog who rose above her station. A girl who came from nothing and took back what was rightfully hers. A girl who was fundamentally good and brought the kingdom together through sheer virtue. The most egregious ahistorical additions were the lines about Orlaith being the “rightful heir” (she had no connection to the previous dynasty, she wasn’t even from Silph), and a scene where she rallies the people after the execution of Drabek.
Dario had already seen it and knew it wouldn’t be something he would bother seeing again. He’d already told Woo-Jin about this and didn’t know why he was still pressing the issue. They ended up arguing about it one day after school. Most of that argument Dario didn’t remember, but he did remember how it ended, that part replaying in his mind for weeks.
“If all art has a statement to make, can’t everything be considered propaganda? Or is it just the things you don’t agree with?” Woo-Jin had asked.
“And you do agree with it?”
A beat. “You are impossible.”
Dario and Woo-Jin were not at all on speaking terms after that. Maria and Aza stayed aggressively neutral in the conflict, refusing to get between them.
“I’m not touching that mess,” Aza had said.
Maria insisted they’d see how silly they were both being once they got back from break. And in a way, she was right. Not really about Dario finally dropping it; he was too stubborn for that. But he did realize he missed having Woo-Jin around. They were fifth-years now, and they would all be going their separate ways once they graduated. Dario wanted to go to medical school, Woo-Jin was gunning for thaumaturgy, and Aza had plans to take over her mother's shop. Maria was being pushed into healing by her parents, but blood made her incredibly squeamish. She was likely to study abroad in Danaus, "reconnecting with the motherland”, she called it.
Safe to say they wouldn't all be in the same place like this for long, and Dario felt foolish for wasting even a moment of it.
He didn’t want to spend the entire school year angry, the last year they had together.
But finding a way to admit that now felt impossible.
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
“Honeyoak Academy. A school that prides itself on the training of young entomon to be functioning, productive members of society who blah blah blah —”
The speaker at the podium, a tired old man with a bushy mustache, spoke with such a drowning monotone that Dario found his head lolling. An assembly at the end of the day couldn’t have been the best way to convey information, right when the students were itching to leave as soon as possible.
Students started to get up from their seats, the speeches were evidently over, and Dario had dozed through most of it. He rubbed his eyes and gathered his things, hoping that he hadn’t missed anything important. But when was anything important said at these assemblies that wasn’t also communicated on the bulletin board?
He felt a tap on his shoulder, turning back to see Aza.
“Roslin’s?” she asked plainly.
“Oh,” Dario hesitated. “I don’t know, I’m kinda—”
“You’re not busy, don’t lie. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“If you want fun, can’t you go with Maria?”
“You know she doesn’t do Roslin’s.”
“Then don’t do Roslin’s. Do literally anything else.” Dario knew what she was doing. Aza wasn’t the type to initiate this sort of hangout. What she wanted was the same as last night: trying to push Woo-Jin and Dario together to finally talk this out.
“Come on. I’m buying.”
Then again, free food. And he would have to get things over with sooner or later. Guess it was going to be sooner.
“Fine,” Dario said.
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
“Just a pint for me and my friend,” Aza said casually, leaning on the counter as though this was her usual order.
“You’re getting a lemon honey,” Roslin, the tavernkeep, said plainly.
Roslin’s, the tavern, was a building your eyes would usually skip over, which might have been by design. The rest of the street was trying to grab your attention with their flashing lights and colors, huge windows that showed their insides like a dollhouse. Roslin’s was tucked away between two buildings. Its colors were muted, minimal windows, almost like a storage building rather than a building. Being stashed away like that seemed like it would be bad for business, and yet the place was always buzzing with activity. Literally buzzing, entomon flying around from table to table on their indoor balconies. The sounds and warmth of a beehive.
Roslin, the tavernkeep, was a stern woman. Gray roots always poked through the dyed blonde hair with black streaks. A honey bee who never smiled and could be rather intimidating, but still gave their group a discount or freebie from time to time on account of them being students. Brain food, she’d call it.
Despite the building codes and laws being broken, Roslin was a stickler for not letting them drink. She’d cite the law, but with the shady figures that came in and out on a daily basis, it was clear she didn’t care at all about the law.
“In Mellif, you can drink when you’re sixteen,” Aza argued. “And even here, you’re basically an adult.”
Roslin raised an eyebrow. “Well, we aren’t in Mellif, are we?”
“So I’m not legally an adult, but I can go off right now and work in some refiner for next to nothing, and then I can’t get a drink at the end of the day? How is that fair?”
“You don’t work in a refinery. You go to school, where you should stay. Your brains ain’t done cooking, so mead is the last thing you need.”
Aza put her hands up, admitted her defeat. “Alright, then two lemon honeys.”
It was the same song and dance every now and again.
“You shouldn’t piss her off, you know,” Dario said when they had gotten their tea. They shouldn’t be in the tavern at all, but Roslin let them hang around as long as they didn’t cause trouble.
“I’m not trying to piss her off. She’s always pissed off. In a constant state of being annoyed.”
Aza started the argument now and then, knowing she’d walk away with nothing. The hope was that they’d eventually wear Roslin down, but the woman wouldn’t budge any time soon.
Aza would sometimes ask Maria to tag along, even though Maria had made it clear she wouldn’t set foot in the place.
“It’s the only place you can still have a hot meal in peace,” Aza said. “You don’t have to worry about some dolt denying you service, making a scene about it. They don’t just tolerate entomon, it’s a place for entomon.”
“Every coin that passes through there has a crime behind it. It’s not safe,” Maria said. “Besides, my mother would have me by the throat if she ever found out.”
“So would mine,” Aza replied, leaning in close. “Which is why she never will find out.”
Aza and Dario had changed out of their blinding white uniforms, exchanging them for more muted colors that could blend in with the crowds and the streets themselves.
The crisp white and gold felt like a horrible choice for their school uniforms, being so hard to keep clean. But that seemed to be the point. Trying to keep the uniforms clean forced students to stay out of trouble while in uniform and not give the school a bad name.
“While you are in uniform, you are representatives of Honeyoak Academy. Your behavior reflects on this entire institution. While you are in uniform, your misbehavior will be treated as though you are still on school grounds.” The speech was given at the start of every year, and they all practically had it memorized. This lecture was meant to encourage students to follow the expectation of going straight home at the end of the school day. In practice, some students just kept a change of clothes on them for any after-school shenanigans, which is what Aza and Dario did regularly.
Azalea’s sleeveless top showed the stripes down her arm. Bumble bee stripes were a bit thicker and bolder than honey bee markings. She had gotten hers remarkably early, eleven or so, but never let that go to her head.
Getting your wings should have felt like a momentous occasion, and the markings should be something to be proud of. But Aza described it as just being subject to all of the rules that came with it. You can’t fly around outside in public areas, and indoors is far too cramped to maneuver around in. Which ultimately meant flying nowhere, and having people being able to tell you were entomon just by looking at you.
Dario’s were always front and center, the white dots scattered on his cheeks weren’t easy to hide. Aza could conceal hers with longer sleeves, and Dario once asked why Aza insisted on wearing sleeveless tops until it was below freezing outside.
“Why should I hide it? To make things more convenient? Hiding my markings is like admitting that who I am is an inconvenience.”
That was another reason they liked Roslin’s. The place was old and falling apart and had a strange smell constantly emanating from somewhere, but it was a place they were allowed to just be. The place had more than enough room for flying around. People had their wings out all the time, and nobody would stare. Because it wasn’t strange there. It was the most normal thing in the world.
And Roslin may or may not have paid off the guards to keep them from sniffing around the area. Allegedly, of course.
ˋˏ-༻❁༺-ˎˊ
“Wait, she didn’t tell you? They broke up over the break.”
“Well, I wasn’t here. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
The two had flown up to a table on the top balcony, getting some cool air after the stuffiness downstairs. Not exactly fresh air, city air was never fresh. It was deep in the evening now, but the sky that should have been a rich orange was muted and washed out. The smog was apparent, an omnipresent haze that never went away.
Aza filled Dario in on what he had missed during the week he had been gone, which included Maria breaking up with her boyfriend.
“I’d’ve thought she told you by now,” Aza said. “She kept whining to me about it all week, even though I said this would happen eventually. But of course she doesn’t listen to me.”
Dario hadn’t thought it would last that long, more so because they were all fifteen and nothing lasts long at this point in your life.
“All they care about is blood lines and blood purity and all that bullshit,” Aza said, swirling her tea around. “You would talk some sense into her. Maybe she didn’t tell you because she knew you also saw it coming.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Dario said flatly.
The guy, Basil, was a witch. Of course, it wouldn’t have lasted long, but Dario hadn’t said anything. And he still wouldn’t.
“Lea,” a voice called from behind them. Dario knew who it was before turning around.
Woo-Jin was the only one who called Azalea by the nickname “Lea”, specifically because Aza hated it. He stopped at their table.
“Hi,” he said to Dario.
“Hi,” Dario said back.
Neither said anything else.
Aza drummed her fingers on the table. She suddenly got out of her seat.
“Oh shoot, I forgot… something downstairs,” Aza said, flat and unconvincing. She was already buzzing away as she called out, “Back in a minute.”
Woo-Jin hesitated before taking a seat. Dario picked at the edge of his paper cup, avoiding eye contact.
“Aza dragged you out here, too?” Dario asked.
“I wouldn’t say dragged,” Woo-Jin answered. Then, after a pause, he added, “I wanted you to come. I wanted to talk to you.”
There was another pause. A pregnant pause. For someone who wanted to talk, not a lot of words were exchanged.
“Hey, I’m sorry about before,” Dario started, breaking the silence. “I get not wanting to drop the club all of a sudden, just because I felt so strongly about it. I shouldn’t have been so judgmental.”
Woo-jin leaned out over the edge of the balcony, looking at the people walking far below. “No, you were right. For being judgmental. And about the play being shit.”
“What?”
“I think you were right. About all of it.”
Dario scoffed. “You don’t have to tell me I’m right just to make me feel better about—”
“I’m not,” Woo-Jin cut in. “It didn’t seem that serious before. I mean, it felt like just a story. But then there were more demonstrations and protests, and--- I think after the Assel riots, it was that serious.”
There were some sort of riots in Assel, a city in the factory belt. New advancements with aurum made a lot of things quicker and less labor-intensive to produce, but it also put a lot of people out of work. There had been protests in the factory belt for months now, and one in Assel had turned violent.
It had been less a riot and more a massacre. News publications reporting on the incident seemed much more outraged about the death of two witches who were part of their police force than the entire building's worth of workers who were trapped inside a building that ultimately collapsed.
“My parents work in the aurum industry. And–” Woo-Jin gave a weak laugh. “And I really asked, ‘Isn’t there a way to implement these changes without putting these people out of work? Without taking away their livelihoods?’ My mother said that it’s just the way things are. That they should have gotten with the times and moved on to other work. Learn a more useful trade than trying to get a handout for their unskilled labor.”
Woo-Jin rubbed the back of his neck, still looking out over the edge of the building. “She said that they deserved what happened to them.”
He looked up at Dario now. “How could dying in a burning building be what anyone deserves. Especially people who just want to make a living. Provide for their families.”
Dario didn’t say anything. He didn't know what he could say to that.
Woo-Jin continued anyway. He stood now, pacing and talking with his hands. “And that’s just what aurum does. It makes things quicker, easier, cheaper, and the factories are always going to take the cheap option. They only care about their bottom line. ‘Three hundred years of progress’, ‘the era of magic’, and ‘the era of Ora’. Their slogans, they don’t mean anything. All that progress only benefits the people who are already at the top. And the play. It’s another tool, trying to justify the system. And I’m a part of it, I profit from the system. I always have.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” was all Dario could say. Those riots happened weeks ago. The news cycle had moved on, quick to pretend it never happened. “Why’d you stay with the play if you knew what it was for?”
"My mother..." His parents were big Silph loyalists, he didn’t have to say that part out loud. He took a deep breath. "I've always done theater. And dropping it so suddenly, right when the new material was added, could be seen as— rebellion sympathy? So my mother made me stay in the club, at least for the rest of the term." Woo-Jin sat back down, rubbing the back of his neck again. "Which, of course, is a horrible excuse, I know. I just— I can't take any chances. With my parents, with the school."
Rebellion affiliation was more than enough to get someone expelled. And while being suspected of rebellion sympathies wasn't grounds for expulsion on its own, you would be put under a microscope by the school board, and they'd find a reason to get rid of you anyway. A student last term had vandalized a flag that hung in the classroom of a teacher they disliked. The vandalism was a string of obscenities directed towards the teacher that would have warranted suspension and a talk with their parents, but since the country's flag had been vandalized, the punishment was harsher.
"So do you think I'm in trouble for backing out?" Dario asked. While him not doing the play was a silent protest, it was still resistance.
Woo-Jin shrugged. "People come and go every year. But since I was president, leaving so abruptly might have been seen as making a statement."
"So you think I'm in the clear because I'm not important enough," Dario joked.
Woo-Jin didn’t laugh. "I'm dropping out of it this year, if that means anything. Had to make a formal resignation and everything, saying that since I'm a fifth year, I'll need all my spare time to study for the aptitude test. It’s just— I’m not sure what happens after that.”
“Then…” Dario sighed. “Let’s not think about what happens after that. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”