A Dance Of Crowns & Thrones | Book I

Chapter 20 | "It Drowns You, If You Let It"

It's been said that every time you think about an adverse event from your past, your body produces the exact same chemicals in the body as when it happened.

That meant when Eko stood there with the soldiers scourging through their sixth search site by the afternoon break. She had relived the experience a hundred times over with the stories told on the faces of those who survived the massacre.

What she had found from them was that those that managed to escape. They had made a run for it the moment the pods crashed down to Isadora, refusing to stay in case Ezra had hunted them, while the remaining survivors had remained in hopes of a search and rescue.

It made the job easier, for the ones that had made the break from the crash sites had found their way to nearby academies that took them in. The ones that remained had been accommodating in their version of events, and luckily, Eko relaxed, that none could provide any accounts of their Princess's movements.

Six hours it had taken the soldiers to power through the pre-planned sites, and with plenty of daylight left, the current teams were wrapping up things at the seventh site that they had managed to get to.

Eko stood in the chaos that was the upheaved bushland. The site had been different from the previous ones, and the pods had sustained critical damage from the attacks. Due to their state of them upon entering the atmosphere, they had burnt up upon arrival, which meant that there was a wreckage of metal that were fireballs falling upon the skies at one moment.

No survivors had been the verdict. That was incredibly clear as the brunette watched the soldiers pull the unrecognizable bodies out into the open. She watched as they tagged them for when another fleet from another academy would arrive to transport them back to their base. The soldiers told her that they would identify them and then bury them.

"Your welcome to return with the Ventura, they're heading back home."

It was his voice that she found that broke her from her thoughts. Matthew's ease of a simple statement had produced a comfort that she didn't know entirely existed at this point. With that, Eko turned her head over her shoulder to greet the Commander.

His presence had been one among a few that she didn't mind having in this particular situation.

"Who would have thought, standing where we are now, that we would have survived what we had, only to be standing on the brink of another war."

Matthew placed his hands behind his back and allowed the brunette to continue speaking. She had needed to get whatever was in her maelstrom head out; her constricted body language spoke volumes more of her state of mind than anything else.

"We all swore as children that we would never let it happen again, and yet here we are."

Two sets of eyes continued to watch as more bodies were pulled from the escape pods, and Matthew completely understood what she had been saying right there and then.

"This is our life. Some people don't care to make that easier. They just want to watch the world burn simply for their selfish needs, never considering the victims in their wake, nor might I add the consequences of this said war coming,"

"Those people shouldn't be living in this world then."

"That's what we think, but we can't just become savages and kill people, Eko. There's been too much of that in our lives. We don't need more."

"Savages? Skarsgard. It's ironic, isn't it? Our upbringing has taught us those same qualities that we detest."

"Hmm," he nodded, "qualities that I also do not tolerate in this academy. Instead, we must teach different qualities than what we were bred from and teach them to the younger cadets. We do not want them to be governed by our experiences. We do not want them to become the monsters that tainted us."