128 / 168
128
Sacrifice
power. Now, in this time of bloodshed and chaos, it represented
little more than a figurehead trapped by legislation and politics.
With the rise of the Median and their conspiratorial agenda to
completely disrupt the balance of power by removing the government
in the name of ‘freedom’, Cassandra could only watch as those
trusted with running the country transformed into rabid dogs
attacking her and each other. It wouldn’t take the Median to end the
golden era of their country, the Forum was about to tear itself apart.
How did it all come to this, she pondered. As she turned away she
felt something small next to her foot. Inspecting it closely, she could
have laughed. It was a cracked white pawn from her last chess game
with her sister.
‘Check and mate, little sister. You always were too impulsive for a
game of such strategy.’ Oh, Cassandra lived to regret those words.
Her brazen sister’s world wasn’t one bound by red tape or regulations
like her own. She saw only black and white. Simple, effective rules.
To her, there was no room for speculation – either you belonged
alive or…
‘It’s simple really, Cass. We just have to remove them from the
equation.’
You were a traitor and you died for your sins. Anyone involved in
the Median, anyone who questioned or fought back, all of themwere
to be culled in a mass public execution. ‘They would become shining
examples to the rest of the populous,’ her sister had claimed. More
like martyrs, Cassandra thought. To enact this would not bring
about diplomacy like her sister seemed to think, it would bring about
hell. A weeping wail echoed through the walls as outside a mother
mourned her son in the dying moonlight. Cassandra’s fingers closed
around the pawn. That’s all this war ever was to her sister anyway, a
big game in which there are winners and there are losers. Simple.
But this wasn’t how you played the game. People’s lives are not
pawns to be tossed aside meaninglessly. That kind of innocence was
insanity, guiltless, without remorse, it couldn’t be controlled. Her
sister was prepared to walk a path paved with skeletons and flesh in
order to keep her simplistic ideals alive. But Cassandra was not. She
turned towards the door. In the dawn’s pale light the shadow of the
pawn, now standing up tall and proud smudged the harsh lines of
the chessboard into palette of grey and black.
For all the world Cassandra looked every bit the graceful ruler as
12