wisdom

The omens say the destroyer is nigh, that I am the one who will save us from ruin, but the omens, they tell me, have said that dozens of times in the past and no destroyer has come. The people have started to see them as omens of an era of peace and prosperity, and I suppose to them I'm a symbol of that. They love me, because they know that with me as their princess they will want for nothing. Which is to say: it's not me they love at all.

The empire I am due to inherit spans the entire continent, and is build on the backs of hundreds of nations, nations who starve so that my people will never know hunger. The songs I have learned that will save this empire from disaster were written because once we were a beacon of hope, a shelter against the darkness. Now we are a symbol of decadence and of oppression and of needless cruelty, and those songs . . . these people had no love for heroes, and anyone who saved them would not be a hero.

When I first met the destroyer, I knew them immediately, the same way that you know your father immediately. But they did not come with an army, and they did not come with the intent to destroy us, and when we became friends at first I doubted that they were the destroyer at all. Then, one day, at the top of my tower, I said to them, "The world would be a better place if this empire fell."

And then I knew. The destroyer, the person I was born to oppose, had come to help me. Had come to make the world a better place.

All empires fall, they explained, but the songs, for as long as other princesses before me have learned them, have kept mine alive and festering, an engine of ceaseless suffering. All I had to do is flee, abandon this people, and it would all finally fall apart.

*** 

The world burned slowly. It was not the great cataclysm from the prophecies, not the cleansing collapse that I had hoped for, but as the years went by the destroyer was clearly right about one thing, at least: all empires fall. Some die quickly. Some, like mine, bleed out slowly, painfully. I found a village in the mountains to wait out an end that seemed both inevitable and impossibly distant. It was peaceful, in its own way, to simply live, not as the embodiment of peace or hope or decadent, but just as a person.

The people hate me, of course, as much as they used to love me. But here in the valley the tax collectors haven't come, and the commissars haven't conscripted any new young people into the empire's armies. Maybe that's enough.