When people die, they tend to ask themselves a lot of questions. “Is this really what the Fortieth Floor is like?” “What do I do with myself now?” “How do I cope with the crushing expanse of eternity I see sprawled out in front of me?” I spent several years asking myself all these same questions, and then later decided to throw “What in the hell went wrong?” into the mix, both because of genuine curiosity and apparently just because I lack the better judgement to leave well enough alone.

When trying to figure out how to proceed from here, though, I ran into a problem: that’s a big question. A very big question. The entirety of the Rimea-Marre Treaty and everything it led to was a giant heaping trash fire… And, try as I might, any answer I’m capable of producing at the moment seems woefully inadequate.

So, let’s shove that existentialism into a nice little box and shelve them for the time being. Let’s start with something smaller, more bite-sized. How about me? I’ve been told I taste terrible, but I’m afraid you’ll have to cope. The Treaty and its associated dramas definitely didn’t begin with me, not by a long shot, but the problems did start to rear their ugly heads by the time I got involved, so I ended up quite entangled in the whole shebang. And I suppose there is a more practical reason for starting with myself, aside from blatant narcissism: I came into it as a stupid teenager with no context of what in the hell was happening, so if I really am going to recount this entire mess, we at least should be able to start on the same page.

(Ahahah. Page. Writing joke. Do you get it? Fours, I’m hilarious. Shoot me.)

So, with that in mind, let’s tackle the simpler, more digestible problem of how I go about doing that.

For a lot of people, it’s not particularly hard to start describing what basically amounts to their life story. You start at the earliest thing you can remember and move forward chronologically. However, starting right with that feels a little disingenuous, in my case – like I’m burying the lead. Talking about my childhood and formative years as if I’m some normal person. You’re all coming into this knowing who I am. You saw my stupid face on the cover of this thing, you know what you’re getting yourself into. I can’t just start at the beginning without acknowledging it. Let’s just get on with it.

I am Soyataki Hallia, the sixth Sehen, second apprentice of Alkavire Audorian, prince of Teak, who went completely, absolutely, violently insane and ate a bunch of people before being tied to a pole and having my brains blown out with a shotgun.

Caught up? Great.

Let’s move on.

Now, that’s all well and good, but that still hasn’t answered my question. How should someone like me start making sense of all of this? Should I start at my birth? Waxing poetic about my youth seems just seems waste of time. Should I start at the moment it all went wrong, then? (How much do the two overlap?) Hell, where do I even stop? It’s not as if this mess ended with me.

I guess, for the time being, I’ll start with come cold, objective facts. Perhaps I can meander my way into some semblance of a starting point.

Oh, let’s see… The Rimea-Marre Treaty was officially ratified, on the Veetan side of things, in the summer of 1001. It was an agreement formally made between Alkavire Varlequez, the current Sehen (who I have no great love for, if I’m speaking honestly) and Nobles Frasier, one of the Marriest high priests (who I would very much love to see drawn and quartered. Maybe pop his freakish polygonal head off his shoulders and mount it on a wooden spit outside the Veetan palace gates. Fry his black heart in olive oil and garlic and give the Oceanic Leviathan a gourmet dinner. Hell, serve it to the current Sehen – the poor sap could use some catharsis. It would be delightfully karmic.

…I believe I’ve gotten off-topic.)

In theory, the reasoning behind the Treaty was sound. Since Flossikora lost her head, both metaphorically and literally, the Rimean technique of magic replication had been lost to the ages. This is quite an issue when your high priests’ most defining characteristic is their magical warping. Alkavire, after her apprentice died in a fire in 973, was left in an unfortunate spot. She’d been using the dregs of Flossikora’s research for quite some time – and with Elleshiba’s death, she’d officially run out of viable Sehenautosis magics. No more magics? No more Sehens. Eventually, no more Rimea.

In a convenient twist of fate, the Marreists had a priest (that aforementioned flat-faced waste of oxygen) with magikinesis who had gotten quite good at replicating magics. The ol’ abbot offered to lend his services – not exactly a new thing, given how chummy Octolobrous and Bludmar were known to be, but still notable (since the two groups hadn’t said much to each other since Bludmar kicked it). He hardly did it out of the goodness of his own heart, though. He wanted something. But, well, we’ll get to that later.

Either way, the result was that Alkavire had some shiny new Sehenautosis magics (along with her shiny new internal bleeding). After her short recovery period, she could go about appointing a new Sehen, letting Rimeans the world over breathe a collective sigh of relief.

But she didn’t. Not for quite a while.

See, as it turns out, when you live for hundreds of years, losing your only ageless companion, the person you spend every day with – especially when you had been expected to outlive them – tends to get to you.

Needless to say, she was not taking her apprentice’s death particularly well.

The subject of equal amounts of vocal pity and quiet judgement, Alkavire remained in a deep depression for the next forty years or so. Her research dried up entirely. She wouldn’t preach, she would hardly show her face. She spent almost all her time alone, in her office, staring absentmindedly out the window or at grainy photos of her old friend. Initially, it was tolerated: no one would approve of her very public mourning (how un-Rimean of her to grieve a loved one, the audacity), but no one would say such a thing to her face. This likely had something to do with the fact that no one was jumping to volunteer for the currently vacant position. But the tolerance was limited. She would have to choose someone, eventually. The longer she went without an apprentice, the higher the chance of her dying without one and rendering all of Rimea-Marre’s hard work for naught. The people knew this as well as she did. Her priests were getting anxious, the public was getting frustrated, and both were pushing her to finally bite the bullet. Even when she teetered on the edge of relenting, though, there still weren’t any proper candidates…

Until, well, me.  

Now, I can sense your confusion: why in the holy hell did Alkavire pick this royal loose cannon with a chip on his shoulder for the job?

I ask myself that exact question on the daily. After all, that reasoning is pretty integral to the stupendous nonsense that led to things going to pot across three countries and two religions.

However, even all these years later, I still have no idea what in the hell was going through her head. I know the woman was going through a pretty major loss, but come on — even a drugged monkey could tell I was bad news.

Now, it’s true that I haven’t always been a murderous nutcase addicted to sophont flesh. I don’t know where an infant would get access to that. But even before my tenure as Sehen, there was obviously something… Wrong with me.

I wasn’t exactly starting as an advantageous spot, mind you. I was a eumagi child of two magi parents (disappointing enough as it is, but especially problematic for us royal-adjacent types). I wasn’t particularly smart or charismatic. My folks already had two more accomplished children who were far older than I (which also lends general credence to my theory that I wasn’t intended to exist). If that wasn’t enough to screw a child up, my formative years were graced with the man who is possibly the world’s worst father: Sorikthena Hallia.

(While Nobles Frasier would normally sit atop my list for world’s worst anything, he is spared by the fact that he thankfully never managed to procreate.)

To this day, I’ll still hear historians and anthropologists picking their brains about what was up with this guy. Some people cry magic – omenesis is a popular theory, assuming that kind of magic really exists at all. Some people claim it was an unfortunate cocktail undiagnosed mental illness and paranoia. Personally, I think he was just a grade-A jerk. We all have our own theories, I’m sure. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, because the end result was the same: he absolutely hated me.

I’ve never really known why. But even back when I was five or six, I can remember the way he looked at me. Down his nose, with a grimace on his face, that dark something in his eyes. Loathing? Regret? Sometimes I could even swear I saw a bit of fear in there. I was never sure if I liked that better. Omenesis would make that make sense, though. Maybe his magic meant that he knew, somehow, what’d I’d end up being. Maybe he could see it in me even before anyone else did.

Realistically, I doubt that’s the truth. Those conspiratorial, wide-reaching explanations almost never apply to anything. Life doesn’t work that way. He was probably just a normal man – just a jerk.

Still, though, sometimes I wonder.

But enough blaming my entire personality on the sins of the father. I’m certain that a not-insignificant number of my flaws are no one’s fault but my own, because I was very well renowned for going out of my way to make myself a general menace to society.

Like father, like son, I suppose. Of all the traits to share with him.

I was what would be called a ‘wild child’ in settings where ‘maladjusted brat’ would be considered too impolite. One of my earliest memories is of hucking rocks down at my sisters from a second level balcony and laughing while they covered their heads and shouted at me to stop, and the rest of my childhood progressed similarly. It’d be easy enough to write my behavior off as the naivete of youth, I suppose. Kids are never the best at being empathetic or compassionate. They have to have that taught to them, or manage to figure it out on their own. But, both from my own memories and from stories of me, I seemed to have a particular cruel streak when compared to most others. I was the “burn ants with a magnifying glass” kind of kid. I was the “bite and scratch and kick my classmates” kind of kid. I was the “snip off my elder sister’s earlobe with a pair of sewing scissors” kind of kid.

…Hmm.

Perhaps that last one warrants some further explanation.

After all, that’s not something most kids do, yes? (I’m asking you. I’ve never been ‘most kids’.) And I suppose, in some way, it was a significant event in my life. Formative, even. It made me what I am today – and, well, what I am today is what got me here.

I suppose that would make this little tangent a good place to start unpacking this whole mess…

Well, then, without further ado!

Let’s get into it, shall we?

I’ll leave you to it.

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