[Lauchenoiria]

Josephine Alvarez was sitting in her office, playing the recording of Prime Minister Toquihu’s press conference about the release of Paul Ramirez on a loop. It was well past office hours, and she should have been in bed but she felt trapped by the video, unable to disengage her attention from it no matter what. The video felt like an admonition, like a warning made especially for her to call her out for her sins. She stared at the screen with a religious fervour, feeling the eyes of the gods watching her and not liking what they saw.

She originally angered Yauhmi by trying to oppose tyranny (in a rather backhanded way, admittedly). It was accepted that Alvarez’s negative view of Huenya was due to her view of Yauhmi. Yet siding with Calhualyana over Huenya for even a moment sent the opposite message than that her original interference had been designed to send. As a result, the conspiracy theorists in the dark corners of the internet were already convinced that the animosity between Alvarez and Yauhmi dated from before the Great Selection; that all of this was just the continuation of a grudge that transcended ideology.

This was false; the situation had lasted no longer than what it seemed on the surface. There was no conspiracy; even if the truth was far less logical than the stories. Alvarez was frightened, but not of Yauhmi. Rather, the fear that fuelled her dislike of Huenya was her fear of civil wars.

Empress Calhualyana was obviously the bad guy; and that made her a known quantity in many ways. Huenya was new. It had no history; it was a collection of peoples who had escaped Xiomeran oppression trying to form a new united identity. Yet identity formed out of animosity towards another always, in Alvarez’s opinion, falls apart when there is no longer a conflict. To keep that unity, there has to be an enemy. Huenya was a state born of war, and if they were not careful war would become its lifeblood, without which the state would crumble and fall apart. For the time being, there was no risk of peace, but if Xiomera was ever defeated, Alvarez doubted Huenyan unity would last beyond a few years.

Alvarez was not, in fact, obsessed with Yauhmi. Alvarez was obsessed with war. She felt guilt over her Great Selection interference; not because of sympathy for Yauhmi but because it would have been a strategic disaster if she had succeeded, and Cozamalotl had won. The timeline for the coup in Xiomera would have been pushed forward; Lauchenoiria would have felt a duty to get involved at a time when they had barely exited their own period of civil strife. It would have destroyed Lauchenoiria, and when the coup did, in fact, happen Alvarez had hoped to stick her head in the sand and watch it pass by.

But Xiomera led to Mallacaland, and Auria, and threats across the globe. The plague of civil wars had begun, and she could have made it worse. The thought would not leave her alone, so she had to find a way to make sure nobody else could ever unintentionally do the same thing. She had to stop these conflicts, and Huenya’s very existence all but set future civil wars in stone. And a high enough concentration of them, with other states interference, would lead to a world war. It was the instability, not the monarchy, that she despised in Huenya.

When the coup had happened in Auria, it had been horribly reminiscent of the day Chaher seized power in Lauchenoiria. At the time of the Xiomeran coup, the memories were too raw. With time, they’d grown stronger and even more sinister. The executions had represented an escalation, in her eyes, of the tactics of those who considered coup d’états a legitimate way to transfer power. It was getting worse; and perhaps a short war now would prevent more in the future. Yet the others had not acted and the longer the blockade lasted the less convinced she was that they were taking the correct course of action, even as the rest of Lauchenoiria pushed for an invasion.

When Ramirez was captured, she had tried to convince Huenya to hold off on their assault of the Golden Blade to give her time to find a solution that would not ignite her fear. Of course, they attacked anyway, leading to the death of one hostage and as a result, everything but a guarantee of a war. Lauchenoiria’s Anti-Terrorist Operatives had been sent to Huenya not to aid in a war, but to try and prevent one. She had contacted Xiomera to try and rescue Ramirez so that war no longer seemed imminently necessary to the Huenyan leadership, but by the time Calhualyana acted, it was already being prepared.

No matter what she did, war was always looming on the horizon. Every act calculated to push it back brought it forward instead. Interference or neutrality; both seemed to be the wrong choices at the wrong moments. Open actions and backroom dealings seemed to push the buttons on one side or the other so that Alvarez had become paralyzed with doubt every time she needed to make a decision. If it seemed that she was playing both sides, the truth was that she was trying to be on neither and it simply wasn’t working.

The world was determined to go to war. And Lauchenoiria was running out of options.