They didn't understand. They couldn't understand. The only way to understand was to either live it or see it through the eyes of someone who had. He hadn't lived it through it, but he'd seen it through her. And maybe he didn't understand it perfectly, but he understood it all the same. They? They didn't understand.
It was clear. From the banners they waved, from the words they proclaimed, from the things they believed in. It was clear, from the things they fought and died for. They didn't understand. They hadn't lived it, and they'd built their own twisted vision of what it was, and now they blindly threw themselves in the fight to defend the lies they'd chosen as their truth.
Why did it hurt like that? He didn't care about them. He'd given up on trying to save others long ago. Was it the knife stabbing at his heart? No. That had been there before. He looked back at her letter, still lying opened on the table. Was it because of that? Maybe. Maybe the 'no', maybe the 'never', maybe some other of the words in between. Maybe he shouldn't have asked.
But that wasn't it. He knew what the answer would have been. Maybe he shouldn't have asked, but that wasn't it. Things were just the same as before. Why did it hurt, then?
He looked out of the window, down to the streets below. He knew he shouldn't have.
The window spanned the entire wall. A single large panel of glass embedded in the side of the tower, far above the city. If he looked up, to the sky, it wasn't different from any other day. No sign of the war there. That was what she did, and what he'd chosen to do as well, even before meeting her.
And yet, he always found himself looking down. He even made her look down sometime. It was a stupid thing to do, he knew that. He wouldn't intervene, and it wouldn't have mattered if he had. And he couldn't bring himself to laugh at them. Not when he recognised himself in some of them.
It had been for the best that he'd met her. Because it had made him understand. Because otherwise, he might have been down there, if not fighting at least supporting. And he would have been wrong. They all were, after all.
That was a rather presumptuous thought, he realised that. With that said, he felt he had a point. A war waged to establish the nature of their gods, and he'd met one of them. And why didn't she come come to them, sweep down from the sky to light their way, to teach them the truth? Because they wouldn't have believed her. Because she wasn't the way they believed their gods to be, and they'd sooner add a real god to the list of victims that admit all the other had been in vain. ~~Maybe, because she was just one.~~
And so they kept fighting, and there was nothing that could be done. So they would keep fighting and...
Sunburst lifted the quill from the page and looked at what he'd written. Unusable, poorly structured, inconsistent, too easily traced back to his own experiences. A complete mess, really. He looked at the letter still laying opened on his desk. Maybe he shouldn't have asked. But he would ask again, sooner or later, he knew that.
He looked back at the newspapers stacked in a corner of the room. He knew he shouldn't have cared about what they were saying. He knew there was no way to change their minds. But he still looked. He'd heard talks about what it was like to see a train crash, about wanting to look away but remaining mesmerised by the sight. He thought he understood that now.
Was it really so bad? It would be, if she got to read it, if anyone figured out what it was all about. It would be. So what?
Should he stay on the vague side of things? Wouldn't that have made things worse?
He knew the answer. Don't write about that in the first place. Do something else. Ignore them. It should have been easy.
He looked at the page.
It would have been easy. But he was already too far into it to stop. Change it? Maybe add layers to it? Maybe... maybe...
The vision faded, and he got up from the ground. Why was he getting them? Why was he seeing this other stallion's life? He knew his name, Sunburst, he knew he was writing something, he knew he lived somewhere very different from where he was. Why?
Maybe he'd just gone insane. Maybe the war had gotten to him. Maybe it was his brain's way of finding an escape from where he was, where he couldn't see a solution. It wasn't helping. He should have focused on what he could do if he wanted to make things better.
Nothing. That wasn't a problem, he didn't want to make things better. Those down there arguably deserved it. He'd been like them, hadn't he? And then he'd deserved it too.
He looked back to all the other letters, stacked on the shelves, and...
Sunburst woke up, with an upwards jerk of his head and neck. He hadn't fallen asleep, had he? No, he'd just been resting his eyes a bit. He looked at the page, the flickering candle at his side the only source of light in the room. He really shouldn't have been up at that hour.
He reread the last passage. He really shouldn't have been up at that hour. It was even worse than usual. He tried to concentrate on some detail he seemed to be forgetting. What was the protagonist's name again? Had he forgotten about it?
No. He'd never thought about it in the first place. Again. It was always like that. He was terrible with names. Did the character even need a name? He looked at what he'd written. No, but the lack of one would have made it easier for others to accuse him of writing about his own situation. They wouldn't have been wrong about that, even if he didn't like to admit it.
So where was he again? Those last few lines needed to go, for starters. Then what? It certainly wasn't long enough to stand on its own, maybe not even to be publishable. Some more about the war, perhaps? Maybe switch it up, make it into a longer story told from multiple points of view. That could work.
His eyes drifted to the shelves of unfinished scrolls on the wall, some mere titles, some thousands of words long and yet still far from finished. It could work. It could. They all could. And it would end up as just another unfinished stump. So nothing then. Another pointless window on a world he didn't have the time to expand upon, that would only feel empty to those who couldn't see the rest of the picture. And he couldn't blame them.
He looked back at the page. Maybe he could still fix it. Maybe salvage it, maybe there was...
Another shot. He felt the impact as it shook the barricade he had his back pressed against. Debris from the explosion flew up and fell in front of him. They wouldn't be able to hold on for long. He looked around. He wouldn't be able to hold on for long. There was no one else left there. They didn't know yet, which was why they were still shooting from far away. But they'd surrounded him already, he couldn't get out.
It was all so pointless. Why had he joined the war in the first place? Which side was he on? He kept staring at him from the window, watching as the enemies slowly closed in on him. A matter of minutes and it would all be over.
Another bang. He got up from the table and went to open the door, to look outside. It wasn't normal for the ground to shake like that, he was rather worried.
They were breaking inside a house now. Someone opened the door. Why? He didn't get to see who it was, the shot got to his back before then, he only saw them shooting at the one who'd opened as well. Maybe he didn't know about the war? Maybe he just wanted it to be over. He thought it was a nice thing to look at, much nicer than what was around him. He was trapped, at that point it was a lot more interesting to look at others.
~~Sunburst fell. A blast had shattered the window, right as he'd been looking outside. Now he was headed towards the ground, towards the battlefield, and he would be just another victim of the war, though one that hadn't picked a side. It was...~~
That wasn't usable. He crossed out the lines, as another shot flew overhead and hit the barricades on the other side. It didn't bring any closure as an ending, and it didn't even fit with the scene he'd described before. Not that his own end would be satisfactory, but that was why he wrote, no? He looked up at the sky, devoid of any sign of war. And a little lower than that, on the last floor of the tower, through the window. She was there, watching.
Was she trapped there? Or was she free? Or was...
His eyes snapped open. He looked at the letter on the desk, then his gaze drifted down to the page he'd been writing on. A weird decision, to write something like that. Probably the result of how tired he was. He read through it. Sunburst, huh? Maybe he could write something with that.
Out of the window, a particularly high shot lit the sky.
"They don't care about the truth. They care about being right. That's why they fight. They don't want to talk, to find out that they might be wrong on some things and right on others. They start by the assumption that they're absolutely right, and therefore the others are wrong, and they must be punished for that. And they rally their armies and throw them to fight each other, rather than sit down and talk, because they don't want to admit that they might be wrong. Because it's not a matter of truth, it's a matter of being better than others, just to feel good about themselves."
"And why won't you go down there and talk to them, try to open their eyes?"
"Because I'm right, and they're wrong, and they deserve to go through what they're going through."
