Hatsuyume
“The tired wedge flies and flies across the sky,
Flies somewhere at the end of the day,
And in that line there is a small gap,
“Maybe this is the place for me”…
Magdalene stirred in her sleep. Her advanced age had proved to be the greatest barrier to a good night’s rest, there was always some problem which gave her retinue such great concern as to wake her and attend to her. She hated being old, she hated the feeling of seeing those younger than her perform routine actions that had become chores for her, and worst of all, she hated knowing that her mind was steadily slipping away from her, that soon she would be a demented husk who knew not day nor date. Privately she hoped that some enterprising general much like her father would throw her from a helicopter and out of her misery, but she could never bring herself to admit that.
On this first night of the new year, the new century, however, her sleep was not interrupted by the careful attention of the imperial medical staff. Overseeing the festivities of the day had been exhausting in a way that it hadn’t been in her youth. She knew that her people could see the advanced state of her age in the wrinkles that covered her face or in the frail nature of her voice. Older citizens of the empire could see right through the facade she tried to put up, the strong act she could barely muster for the sake of the youth. In a few decades people would have a hard time believing that she was the same person who oversaw the grand reclamation of the Aeserian lands. Perhaps it was the internal embarrassment that she felt the day prior that brought to a halt the gnashing of teeth or the loud snores or the tossing and the turning. But her exhaustion did not stop her ability to dream.
On 29 January 2149 Magdalene descended from the heavens alongside her most faithful Regent Jordock so that she could announce from the surface the successful Reclamation of the lost homeland. Tonight, Magdalene saw in her sleep the vision of another war. However, if before she had nowhere to retreat in space, now she had nowhere to retreat in time. Behind her, out of her sight but visible in her mind’s eye lay the void of degeneration and destruction. A voice called out to her to recognize this as her reality, the reality of her nation, the reality of her sons and daughters.
“Our time has come to hold the sky and protect our land. To stand to the death. To attack to the death. To love to the death. To kill to the death. To conquer death.”
And it was then that she understood. The Aeserian man does not live here and now, he lives always and everywhere. The horizon of his thinking and responsibility extends from the source of life and is directed towards the infinity of the future. Sitting at the bedside of a dying father, an Aeserian thinks of his great-grandfathers. And cradling his son in his arms, he thinks of his great-grandchildren. It was in her reign that she presided over the expansion of her domain by thousands of square kilometers on the surface of Kerbalkind’s home.
At once she felt a clarity that she had not felt since her younger days. She remembered once hearing about how old men on their deathbeds would sometimes feel young again before dying, much in the way that a hiker dying of hypothermia feels warm in his last moments. She dragged herself back to the world of the conscious with vigor she had not possessed since forty years ago and rang the bell at her bedside that she resented for all the days prior as a tangible reminder of the impotence of her vocal cords. She rang it now not as a substitute for the boom of her youthful voice but as a clarion call to a sacred war.
Her attendants rushed to her, expecting trouble, and were pleasantly greeted with their Empress sitting tall and dignified on her bed, with an open book in her hands. And it was like this that she spoke to them.
“In the culture of the Crytillians the contents of the dream you had on the first night of the new year would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. As your Empress I am led to believe that the dream I have just had will foretell the course of our nation’s future. I humbly request of you, my countrymen, that a classified meeting of the Imperial Presidium is in order. The rest of the universe will be made aware of what I have witnessed in due time.”