A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1531 - 1531: The Resentful - Part 3

It was a bellow that fell like a hammer, and it was a Command echoed by all the mighty that Queen Asabel surrounded herself with. Lord Blackthorn and Lancelot gave their chorus in growls to accident it, and there was no resisting to be had.

The less wilful men scrambled. Those that were soldiers stood up briskly, to the fullest of attention. The peasantry, tainted by fear, saw themselves organized as best they could, operating on the same instincts that had saved them whenever a noble carriage had come riding through the town. The only ones slower to react were the nobility themselves, and the high ranking Serving Class officers, who were unaccustomed to being told to move. But even they, slowly though they might have done it, saw themselves organized.

With a few harsh words, order returned to the crowd, and they stood like an instrument, even more unified than before. Of course, it was difficult to ignore the mud and blood that stained their clothes, from where they had wrestled.

"Look at you," Oliver said, shaking his head. "The state of your clothing, and your faces. The grandest of nobles amongst you have seen yourself tainted like pigs, fighting in the mud, without reason, without purpose. You yourselves are the truest example of it – you are what happens when indulgence is allowed to reign, and justice is shown out of the door, rather than ushered through, as it ought to be."

"You gentlemen, when given a choice, have seen yourselves reduced," Oliver said. "There is a mistaken assumption in your behaviour – the belief that, whatever conclusion you were to come up with, would be a valid one. There is an assumption that you should even have to think. Thinking allows your fear, and your indignities, to crawl in. This," Oliver said, drawing his sword, "is how a Stormfront man thinks. We think with action, and with courage. When we stand around debating, corrupt words are whispered into our ears. Our courts fall into despair, and we arrive at the situation we are in now – a country that has strangled itself, with its own blackened heart. We end up with a High King that has never even seen the battlefields that we fight upon."

"Is it possible, then, for a country with the foundations of ours to function with that level of disconnect? Weakness, for a time ,can be ignored, but corruption cannot. Weakness turns to corruption when left unattended, and look, gentlemen, how indeed it has switched. This is the cancer that our blind eyes so turned have allowed to brew. It is our mistakes, our consciousness, refusal to acknowledge its existence that has allowed it to prosper. You fear treachery in taking your arms up against such corruption. So I ask, ask, who is your loyalty to? The man that used every underhanded means at his disposal to sit the throne, or to the Stormfront?"

Oliver looked at them hard as he said that, letting the words hang in the air. "Mine is to the Stormfront. To the land beneath us, that which the First King conquered. Was his greatness written in a chair delivered to him by his ancestors? I think not. The First King clawed his way to the throne himself. The throne was not the achievement – the throne was the symbol of it. Our throne has ceased to be that symbol. It no longer embodies the struggle for glory that our people went through. Our throne now is blackened. It has lost its capacity as a symbol, just as the High King lost his capacity as a symbol when he ceased to lead. He betrayed the legacy of the First King, and now, justice will follow him for it."

He had the sense that, even though his words kept the crowd quiet, he did not bend them to his will by it. He could feel their resistance, and hesitancy. They heard the word traitor, and they were cowed by it. It was an easy blow to throw at those that sought to fight against the crown, and a mightily difficult obstacle to overcome.

Oliver shifted his feet in the mud, to take a step forward through it. He felt the squelch, and the minute resistance, as its stickiness clung to him.. He raised his boots so that they might see.

"You already stand in the mud, gentlemen," Oliver said. "You have already had your soldiers fight in it. You have cheered your champions in it. Now fight for it yourself."

Still, they did not stir, and Oliver tutted, shaking his head, his battered armour clacking from the motion. "Are you content, then, I ask you, with the mere position that you stand? Are you so fearful of losing what it is you have, that you would not take up your arms to fight, even on the most important battlefield our lives can offer us?"

"Do you not dream of heroism, you that be old, and you that be young?" Oliver said. "Is that not why you appreciate the glory of our champions, and they fight to prove their might? Are you hypocrites then, in your standing still? Or do you merely not have the eyes to see the opportunity when it is presented before you? Are your hearts so uncertain, that you cannot identify the right time to move, when it is right in front of your eyes, beginning for the very moment when you will declare yourselves towards action?"

Oliver flung his arm out in an angry flourish, and he turned, like an angry cat, to shoot them all an outrageous glare. "Cowards, the lot of you," he pronounced. "You'd fight each other, without stakes, but the moment you are given opportunity, you stand with your feet locked firmly into the mud. Is that not the problem with you? You feel something that doesn't exist. You appreciate rigidness, without knowing how it is formed. You see the current state of things, and you mistake it for reality itself. This country was formed by the hands of man, the hands of our ancestors. When you ignore its rotting, and you feign ignorance, as if there is nothing you could do on such a grand scale, you lie to yourself. From the waste lands of hundreds of warring tribes – from a continent replete with great kingdoms, the First King, and the first men of the Stormfront, we built a mighty nation – and you men do not even have the confidence to climb up a ladder, and fix a leaky hole in the roof of the grand temple that our people saw built?"