The throne room lay in ruins, just like the rest of Datredinrezin. All the killed Sjetta have reformed into newborn and you could hear their cries echo off the walls. Jaliehv took her time making it through the debris, not even using her wings to fly over them.
Algasath sat on a piece of the ceiling in the middle of the room. He looked so sad, so sad! How dear his people were to him! So dear that he did nothing as they died around him. Jaliehv tripped over a rock and couldn’t keep in a giggle.
Algasath’s eyes locked on her and said: “You could’ve stopped this.”
Jaliehv wandered closer. “You could’ve protected them.”
“I could’ve decided to kill your people to save some of my own. What difference would that have made?”
“Not all of you would have been killed.”
“You don’t understand and at this point I doubt you ever will.” Algasath sighed.
“You are weak.”
“You killed hundreds of innocents just to prove a point.”
“Well, did you understand?”
Algasath grew impatient and rose up from debris and looked down at Jaliehv. “Let’s say I did. What now?”
“Now you understand what we have to do.”
“And that is?”
“We get rid of the humans.”
Algasath sunk down again. “The humans have shown no aggression towards us. Attacking them would make absolutely no sense.”
“This is our planet and they invaded it. They don’t belong here.”
“If you recall, neither the Asterians nor the Shandari originate from this world and we live with them in peace.”
“They did not drive us to the edges of our world.”
“Neither did the humans! We did it ourselves, we were too intimidated by their technology to approach them and thinking they were alone on this planet, naturally they would expand across all of it!” Algasath never got loud, he only raised his voice ever so slightly and spoke faster but he never got loud. Softie. “...I admit, I was scared myself. But we can clear this up without blood, without death.”
“They’re violent people, Algasath. They have fought countless wars amongst themselves on their home planet.”
“They haven’t here. For three hundred years, they’ve been here and while there was conflict, there was never a war. Yours was the first in the history of the planet. Did it get you what you wanted?”
Jaliehv left that unanswered.
“I could show you that we could talk with them, but unfortunately Apolo has been given the final decision on this and he’s a coward just like you.”
“I agree, we deities just stand in each other’s way. It’s time to change.”
Algasath seemed to have lost all will to talk to her and resettled into the way she found him.
“Well, seems you’ll have to rebuild the kindergarten a little larger this time. I’ll leave you to it.”
Even as she turned her back on him, she could see the moonlight reflect in a tear on his face. She licked her lips and smiled.