The Iron Dirge by Sam Sykes

Author:Sam Sykes [Sykes, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

The Scar

Life isn’t like opera.

I know that seems obvious, what with how often I say it, but people never seem to quite get it.

I know they think they get it. After all, it doesn’t take the greatest mind to realize that the painted actors, the sweeping musical numbers, the magical effects are all fake. But where everyone fucks up is in thinking that opera is emotional, raw, and heavy to alleviate from the trudgery of a world that keeps on going beyond a velvet curtain.

But it’s the other way around.

Opera is clean. Opera is neat. Opera is satisfying. The actors come out, tell you their problems, you watch them figure things out and eventually it ends. Sometimes the hero dies, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes love is the answer, sometimes it isn’t. But every opera eventually ends.

People don’t.

People are messy. People contradict themselves. People lie for good reasons, tell truths for bad reasons, and even if you do everything right and say all the right words and speak to the right people, it can all come crumbling down. All it takes is the wrong word at the right moment for the worst reason.

Opera isn’t there to make you feel like you’re boring. Opera is there to show you what life would be like if everyone did what they said they’d do.

It’s all lies—pretty lies, important lies, necessary lies—but if you learn only one truth from this story, let it be this.

People don’t end when you put them in the ground.

They’d call what happened outside of Paarl’s Hollow by a lot of different names. The Hollow Massacre. The Children’s Revenge. In some versions, I laid waste to an entire town trying to escape. In others, I wasn’t even there. And in the hard times that would follow, maybe I’d lose track of which parts were true, myself.

I wasn’t there for what happened when Rogo the Dervish, trailing twinkling fragments of glass from his wound, pulled himself free of the carnage. I don’t know what happened that made him do what he did. No one does. No one knows what he thought or said or felt.

Maybe I’m just trying to make sense of it, myself.

But here’s what I think happened. What I hoped would happen. What I knew wouldn’t happen.

The night that fell over Paarl’s Hollow was darker than normal. The lights inside the town were few and dim—many had escaped into the woods, many more hadn’t. The woods outside the East Gate were blackened by ash and flame, limbs of seared and devastated trees stretching upward as though they were begging an empty sky for help.

Rogo probably looked at that sky. Mapping constellations had been his hobby, even back in the military. When we went out drinking to celebrate grinding some poor fuckers into the earth, he would go onto the roof of the barracks with his copy of Edevard’s Alamanac of the Heavens and map them.

He found it soothing, he said, to find the harmony in their multitudes.

Pretentious little prick.

But on that night, there were no stars.

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