Memorial

General
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The Empire has its monuments to its battles and retreats, to its victories and losses, but more curious perhaps to many are those monuments it has to those who fought against it.

On my way into the system, the liner on which I was travelling passed the moon Hyníne, where a beacon sponsored by the Office of Imperial Veterans marks the defeat of pirates who fought for the Cerenaith Alliance-in-Exile, but the pattern is repeated in many places elsewhere across the Empire. A monument-complex in Indimór honors the Indimóri who fell against the Empire’s legions as much as it does the legions who died there. The ash gardens in Lorai Vallis house the sophs of the 30th, 33rd, and 55th legions scattered among the forces of the Talentar Commonwealth that they battled, the Commonwealth from which the modern governance of the planet is descended. And even those legions descended from forces which once fought, and fought hard, against the Empire still carry and revere their ancient battle-honors from those days: the Winter Wolves of Telírvess, the Swordbreakers of Ancyr, the Swift Searing Flame.

I asked one of my hosts about this tradition: why permit, and exert such efforts, even, to honor old enemies?

“We deprived them of victory,” she said. “We deprived many of them of their lives. Those who fought for the wrong cause, we took that from them, too, but those who fought instead for their country, or duty, or family, they bled and died and lost everything just the same, and left the new day to us.

“Should we now deny the brave dead a patch of ground to sleep in, or the memory of valor, even ill-spent? We are neither so small, nor so righteous.”

– Travels in the Empire, Sev Tel Beran

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2015/08/12/memorial
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Since this is almost certainly the post my hatedom was bitching about, I shall take a moment in its comments not merely to reiterate that the Alliance make terribly Confederate expies by virtue of never having been part of the Empire in the first place, but also that the Talentar Commonwealth make even worse ones.

(The Talentar Revolt was extremely brief and was, for its extremely brief duration, more analogous to how the Revolutionary War might have gone if the British side had promptly decided that obviously something had gone terribly wrong with the plan if people were that upset, ordered an inquiry, co-opted the revolutionary leaders as the new colony governance, and had them take the lead in fixing all the grievances that led to them wanting independence in the first place.

Oh, and discovering along the way that the cause of most of them was a giant foreign plot in the first place.)

((I mean, seriously, you can imagine the Declaration of Independence getting to Buck House and George III summoning his Privy Council just to drop it on the table and demand to know “What the royal shit have you assholes been doing?”

Followed by announcing that he is giving the gentleman on his right extraordinary and plenipotentiary powers to go to America, find General Washington and the Continental Congress, and fix all these problems right the hell now.

“While you gentlemen will find out exactly what went wrong in Our Government and make sure it and anything like it never happens again, ever. Because if I lose a whole damned continent over your blithering incompetence, I will be quite upset. And there will be no tea and cakes for anyone. Do I make myself clear?”

…and you’ve pretty much captured the flavor of the Imperial response to the Revolt.))