r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 2d ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 8 - The moderates

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Chapter Eight – The Moderates

Theja's clutch-partner was named Rovain, and he administered three colonies at the outer edge of the empire. He was not a man of great visions, more a man who ran into the same wall every day: instructions from central command that knew nothing of local conditions, quotas set from a desk without knowledge of the soil, the harvests, the moods of the world in question, decisions that took weeks to get any answer at all, while action was long since needed on the ground. Something was wrong, he sensed more clearly than he could have explained it, a diffuse feeling that the way things were governed no longer matched what actually needed governing. He didn't demand great reforms. He demanded more freedom for administrators on the ground, the right to decide for himself when a decision was needed, without waiting on a central command that didn't know what it was talking about anyway.

He was not alone in this discontent. Other administrators, scattered across various sectors, felt the same friction and began exchanging views, cautiously at first, then more openly, in letters no one outside their circle was meant to read, in meetings disguised as coincidence. They didn't call themselves an opposition among each other. The word would have been too dangerous, even in confidence. They called themselves the Moderates: a loose circle united above all by one thing, more latitude on the ground, less interference from above. What might come of it, if they were allowed, they themselves didn't agree on.

Theja knew about it. Rovain hadn't kept it from her, because he trusted her, and because he believed clutch-partners shouldn't keep things from each other, especially matters that could become dangerous. She had listened, some evenings joining the discussion, other evenings staying silent, never quite sure whether she heard something legitimate in his complaints or only the impatience of a man whose own power had grown too small for him. She had seen the feasts, the waste, the excess she herself lived under her brother's roof with, and sensed, without being able to grasp it, that something in this whole structure no longer fit together properly. But suspicion and certainty were two different things, and she had never quite managed to decide how seriously to take any of it.

Volcro learned of the Moderates not by chance, but through the same diligence with which he ran everything: he kept spies in nearly every sector, small, inconspicuous eyes and ears reporting to him what moved beneath the surface of official reports, because he had long since learned that official reports rarely contained the truth. One of these spies, a secretary in Rovain's own administration, reported the circle, the meetings, the letters, without knowing or asking himself what he was setting in motion by doing so.

Volcro read the report twice. Some of it wasn't even wrong. That changed nothing about what truly occupied him.

The question was what a circle of administrators organizing themselves in secret, without informing central command, without seeking the official channel, meant for the authority the whole empire rested on. However justified their grievance, an informal network striking its own arrangements without submitting to control from above was a precedent Volcro was not willing to tolerate. Not because he thought their complaints wrong, but because he didn't know where such a circle would develop, if allowed to continue.

He had Rovain arrested, without public trial, the same night the report landed on his desk, along with the others whose names the secretary had given. The charge was conspiracy against imperial order, an accusation that compressed the real, more mundane truth — impatience, frustration, the wish for more say — into a word that sounded larger than the matter itself had been. Rovain was executed, quietly, without the spectacle Yadh loved on such occasions, because Volcro despised spectacle, however necessary he considered the consequence itself.

Theja learned of it before anyone officially told her, from the face of her own steward, who wouldn't open the door for her when she came to Rovain's quarters that morning. She understood before anyone said a word, and this time she didn't cry. She had already cried once in this family, before a door behind which corpses lay, and something in her had changed since, in a way she herself couldn't have named.

Volcro didn't have her executed. He had never believed she herself belonged to the Moderates, only that she'd known and stayed silent, which in his eyes was an offense, but a lesser one. He had her deported, to a remote sector, far from the capital, from her brother, from everything she'd known, with the curt justification that her presence was no longer tenable for the security of the court.

She never once saw him before they took her away. He hadn't found time for a conversation that wouldn't have changed anything anyway.

With Rovain's death and Theja's banishment, Volcro lost something whose value he himself did not yet know how to assess: a handful of voices that had reported to him, unvarnished, what was actually happening in the outer sectors, instead of only what they thought he needed to hear. It was not a loss he felt as such in that moment. It was merely a file being closed, while he already turned to the next report on his desk. Only much later would he understand what he had actually closed with that one file.

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