The war was long and ugly. I can still remember it vividly enough to know we're both better off if I spare you from most of the details. We weren't special, we were just angry at being stepped on.
We didn't know that we could fight. Who were we to fight? We knew how to hoe the fields or weave the spiders' wool. Things like that. We would talk feverishly by candlelight about all the things we would do if we were liberated at last.
All we needed was a push. When Ashen Liberty came to us, she showed us that hoes could be weapons in the right hands, that spiders' wool could be used for traps to ensnare our enemies. At every battle she was at the front, fighting with claws, with swords, with weapons our fallen enemies left behind. Without her, we would still be convinced that we couldn't fight, we could only dream.
There was a great warrior god that our enemies deferred to, mighty beyond our comprehension. But there was no enemy that could stand up to her might on the battlefield. When she dealt the final blow, the god's heads fell with a crash mighty enough to make the earth quake. We couldn't hear it. We were too busy cheering for Ashen Liberty.
But by then she was gone. There were other chains to be broken.
–Excerpt from an interview with Haktor, Community Leader from Plain-Along-Ash
“YOU WOULD DEFY ME? DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH. EVEN NOW THESE FOOLS COWER AROUND YOU. THEY ARE WEAK AND IT IS THE YOKE OF MY RULE THAT KEEPS THEM TIED TO PURPOSE. IN THE END YOU STAND ON THIS STAGE WITH ME, ALONE. THOSE WHO CALLED YOU HAVE LEFT THIS MORTAL COIL OR COULD NOT STAND TO EVEN STEP OVER THE THRESHOLD OF THIS PALACE. THE PEOPLE WHO CALLED YOU? THEIR HOMES ARE BURNED, LEAVING YOU THE LADY OF NOUGHT BUT ASHES, OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW THAT THEIR HOPE LEADS TO ASHES. ASHEN LIBERTY IS THE TRUEST MONIKER YOU COULD HAVE CHOSEN. YOU LEAVE NAUGHT BUT DESTRUCTION AND DESPAIR WHERE YOU TREAD. EVEN OUR BATTLE IS POINTLESS. THE PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO WANT YOU HAVE LOST, WHICH MEANS YOU HAVE LOST. YOU WILL ALWAYS LOSE THE WAR, EVEN IF YOU TRIUMPH IN THE BATTLE. AND THERE IS NO TRIUMPH HERE.”
He steps from the stage, resonant in steel and glory of a thousand battles won. His armour is resplendent. Around the stage there are bodies of the defiant, those who hoped for more. At the foot of the stairs is Ashen Liberty, her mantle grey, her expression neutral under the blood streaked across it from an uncountable number of enemies slain.
She waits for his armoured foot to touch the ground, and it is only then that she smirks. She does not need to say anything. There will always be more like this one, but she has raised armies to fight and to dream of greater things. She knows what it means to raze hope to the ground, and she knows how to bring it back.
Still, they fight. Both suffer glancing blows, scratches. Both are swift, both are confident and sure and have piles of experience. But this is the dance she lives for, her joy plain in her grin. She pushes him back, wears him down.
When she cuts through his armour and rips out his heart, she raises the bleeding lump, triumphant. Wherever these people rise, she is always ready to be called. She is always ready to turn their dreams into ashes.
That is what it means to be Ashen Liberty.
– Account from Watches-Ever-Hopeful, battlefield historian
It is time. The tent has been raised, and there is no better place for it than here, next to the latest battleground. (There are an endless supply of battlegrounds, but to honour newness, this is the only true place it could ever have been.) The young one's tail swishes nervously. Her coat is glossy (this she insisted on), her ears twitching in the breeze, or with the hushed whispers of the crowd.
Our Liberty, Ashen Liberty, burning through the darkness with her inferno, setting all our hopes ablaze, refusing to lay down her weapons (for the battles are never done), never bowing to the dour weight of despair; now lying on a straw mat, her life's flame near extinguished. To hear the stories, she went where she was needed, and there was always a new place. She went where anyone called to her in the deepest part of themselves, screaming for liberation. Though her back began to bend under the weight of age, her determination was immortal.
Is. Is immortal.
The whole crowd holds its breath and only takes time to breathe in whispers. As a chronicler, my whispers are contained on the page. Dear reader, can you tell that I am nervous, that I talk of whispers, of the glory of her past, to spare myself from the looming shadow of the future?
The young one approaches the mouth of the tent, yawning before her, ready to consume. Her back is straight, resolute. It is inflexible as one of the Great Trees' trunks, uncompromising until a True Wind strikes it, breaks it in two. Her hair stands on end and it is only from that that I know she is afraid.
She steps into the shadows of the tent. Inside, Ashen Liberty waits on a bed of straw, her milky eyes looking to the future entering her tent, this young one who has mastered her fear enough to know that she is afraid but that it is secondary to what she must do, what she must be, not for herself but for all the oppressed, whether they have forgotten their voices, whether they know no words and know only to scream in the depths of their hearts.
Ashen Liberty raises a hand to the young one, beckons her closer. The young one leans down, listens to Ashen Liberty's whisper. The young one nods, her back now relaxed but now less liable to break in even the most fearful of storms. The two clasp hands. There is a flash of light so bright that even the most determined in the crowd must shield their eyes.
When it is extinguished, our once-Ashen Liberty is at rest, eyes closed, defiant smile plain across her face. The young one's spirit is a little older now. She raises her sword to the sky and is gone, heeding the next cry of those seeking liberation.
Though our Ashen Liberty is gone, her determination is immortal, her legacy everlasting.
– From the Blazing Histories of Liberation, anonymous
The travellers are galaxy-weary. They are a group only by virtue of having the same need to rest. They cluster around the fire, the light tiny against the myriad of stars above.
For a time they do not talk of much - of the weariness in their bones from the travel, the traffic, the weather. In time, talk shifts to places they've been, or the roles they had before this.
“Once I was a soldier,” says one, their gelatinous flesh rippling with memory. “This was in a place with no justice, where there wasn't even a word for justice. We just did what we needed to do.
“We went to our latest conquest. It was about what you would expect, buildings destroyed, bodies cast out on the street. But this place was different. The eyes of the people there were defiant. They warned us of Ashen Liberty, who had liberated this place a thousand times before and would do so a thousand times again, until the lesson of Liberty was truly learnt.
“That's when her stories started to catch hold of the hearts of us soldiers. They started to spread through the barracks like wildfire. Old stories, aeons old, maybe, of planes whose tyrant rulers were slain by this 'Ashen Liberty', or whose armies were led by the hope she represented. It was just a few stories at first, but soon we were all telling them, we'd all heard the old stories from someone or other. I don't even know if some of them were made up, but I realised it doesn't matter - she is an idea, a story, a wildfire through the multiverse.
“We wanted freedom, you see, but we didn't have the words to form the idea in such a clear way. We were tired of the endless wars for land that no one cared to use, or resources that would only benefit a select few, never us. We wanted justice. We wanted the whole thing to burn to ashes, for our own Ashen Liberty to strike.
“Turns out, some of those old stories had merit. Just like the old stories, she broke the chains, she fought alongside us, she handed us our freedom and gave it a name.
“She gave us the hope that even wet matches can burn if they have a bright enough spark.”