Arden Marchland doesn’t interrupt or object, allowing the Crown Prince of Tianci to collect his thoughts and continue. Zai speaks, gently and slowly. “You’re not a fool, Arden. You know what the High Court will do when the arcanite begins to flow out of this country. You know exactly what will happen when that money comes into the Dominion. You think it’s going to the farmers, the miners? The factory workers and the starving child in the streets of Sennokura? You can’t actually believe that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why do you even say it? You told me that you wouldn’t lie, so don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to your son like this.”

  The words shake the bedrock of this Mountain, the Emperor-Consort’s face pulling a long sadness as he doesn’t lie in his next words. “Because as long as your father continues to sit on that throne, you’re right.”

  Because as long as father sits there, the high court will threaten him with civil war. As long as father sits upon that chair in the Palatial Temple, the Dominion will be sick from the cancer of corruption.

  As long as father lives, the Dominion will die.

  “What are you saying?” Zai needs to hear this from him, needs to hear the unspoken words spoken aloud from the mouth of this foreigner.

  “We know what you’re doing, Son. We have our Silver Hand watching you, reading you. All your legislations, your debates in the lower and high courts; we get transcripts and analyses of what you’re doing. We have a… limited picture of you but what we’re seeing gives us hope.”

  Someone in both courts then, was feeding information out. Zai concludes from that admittance. Someone in the highest level of the government was already compromised… and the Crown Prince couldn’t even begin to list out the possible suspects.

  “Hope?” Zai continues off of that single word spoken from the mouth of that father-in-law.

  Arden makes it simple to understand. “You care. Not about the throne, but your people. Even if it makes the high court try and slip poison into your tea, send snipers to places you’ll visit and put bombs in your train carriages… you still care.” He gives a concrete example to him. “You do know your counter-play in Sanji is working, right now right? It’s already gaining traction in the lower court, despite your absence.”

  “It is?”

  “That’s what your father was speaking of when I spoke with him a few days ago.”

  His father knew.

  The Emperor-Consort keeps the conversation on topic. “Zai you are the Dominion’s hope for a better future. Away from how it stands now, rotten with gangrene from within. When you take that throne, you could change everything.”

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  “What do you mean by that?”

  The middle aged man takes a long time to think it through, recentering himself in that one shared memory between these two. “We met informally, during the Great Starving. I believe we only exchanged a few words, a greeting or two. Do you remember that?”

  Zai can’t find the relevance there, but just nods as he does remember.

  “I listened to that speech you gave that day, how you stopped all those dying families that broke through the wire, and your soldiers that were about to kill all of them.” Arden stares, unmoving like granite as he recounts this buried trauma held deep in the Prince’s heart. “Zai, you stopped the Impericutta legionaries that were with us. These Ceramic Demons listened to you. You have something nobody else has, something that…”

  The Crown Prince of Tianci needs to catch his breath as those words blur, his nose filling with the scent of unwashed bodies covered in feces, the tasteless boiling soup of hardtack, his skin freezing against the bite of winter, and his ears filling with the sobs of bereaved parents and cries of orphaned children. His vision spins, reaching out to hold the chair as he tastes bile in his throat.

  “You ok, Son?” Arden worriedly holds a firm, calloused hand onto the shoulder of his son-in-law.

  “Y-yeah.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…”

  And they still sit there for a while, waiting, watching as the Crown Prince of Tianci breathes, swallowing terror and memories and starvation, and returns to the conversation. “The Imperium wants me?”

  “The Imperium sees you as the future of Tianci.” Arden gives it to him like the cold barrel of a shotgun brought into the mouth. “If you take the throne, then everything will change for your people.”

  It’s too much for him, overwhelming this Crown Prince with such terror that he simply stares deep into the eyes of his father-in-law.

  Ask him the question. Zai’s mind sharpens, those words catching light like the poisoned blade of an assassin. “Is that why you gave me her as a bride? So the Imperium can control me?”

  The mention of his daughter’s name brings Arden down, eroded away by the love demanded of him from the ties of blood. “It was… a difficult decision. But… no, not like that.”

  “Not like that?” Zai has to hide a pocket of rage that fills his heart. “Why then? Why could it not have been just the Landfall Treaty; the Stamp of the Dominion and the Signature of your Empress? Why does this alliance need a tie of blood to go with it?”

  “Because the world needs to know that this alliance won’t be fleeting.” Arden’s been in this world for decades, years upon years spent in the Silver Chamber at the heart of Imperial society, and so he plays his honesty. “Because your people would’ve seen us as conquerors otherwise.”

  And no experience could prepare him for the truth that comes out of his son-in-law’s mouth. A half shout, a half calm, cold report; it's the contradiction from the oceanic soul that cracks this mountain from its base to its peak. “You are our conquerors. You and your aerostatics, your ceramic demons… you come here to plunder the dead bodies that we worship as gods and you dare tell us otherwise? You give me the hand of a daughter who has spun the intrigue of the Silver Throne for years, a girl raised to kill, to conquer, to tear apart my home from the inside! You give me the Silver Demon as a bride to bridge our peoples together?! And yet, you still say that you are not here to conquer?!”

  Arden Elise-Marchland, Emperor-Consort of the Ensolian Imperium, has no words to say, and has no response to his son-in-law’s plea.