There is something wrong with Tuo.
There has always been something wrong with Tuo.
He was made to be intimately familiar with tragedy from the start. He was made to learn to harbor hatred, to walk through life with teeth bared and hackles raised. Good. It made him stronger, more diligent. He could never afford to be complacent, never afford to capitulate to hopelessness. For as long as he could remember, Tuo saw the occupying Valbaaran Empire for what it was: a parasite to be excised.
And so he did. Tuo went to war with his long-suffering comrades, and together they raised their tattered banner back over Itas. They marched into Valbaara and cut down the beast on its own soil. They went to war, and they won. And then they came home.
Tuo was not yet 40 years old when he accomplished his life's mission. He had the rest of his life ahead of him, a lifetime of peace and prosperity. There are now children playing in the streets, going to school, who have never known life under occupation. Factories that once spat out cannon barrels and artillery shells by the million now build radios, toasters, farming equipment. The tungsten mines are worked by paid laborers, not political prisoners. Itas is ruled by Itaseans, and Tuo should be happy. He should be, but he isn't.
The
Great War was when Tuo came to life. The axe, perpetually sharpened, was finally swung. He will be the first to admit that those five years were some of the hardest years of his life. And yet.
And yet. Tuo was focused. He had a purpose.
Back in those days, he was Captain Trent "Tuo" Falkner of the Itasean 1st Arboreals, Company C. His full title was actually
Captain, Twice-Honored, as he had twice been offered a promotion into a non-combatant role, and twice he had declined in favor of staying in the field with his men. He was a man who led from the front, who looked into the jaws of the great beast and said
"Follow me." His men joked about how he'd never cra
cked a smile once in his life, how he didn't know the definition of the word
fun. But the truth of the matter was that they trusted him implicitly. Not once did he ask something of his men that he would not do himself. They knew that, and so they followed him through the dark.
He took shrapnel in the neck while on campaign in
Tirkau. It was the sort of wound that ought to have seen him bleed out there and then, but he didn't. Someone was watching out for him, it seemed. When Tuo came back to the line, stitches still fresh in his neck, Company C rejoiced.
The end of the war was jarring, to say the least. The 1st Arboreals were not there when the Valbaaran capital was stormed. They were somewhere out in the great Valbaaran steppe, securing yet another nondescript village on the day the news broke. Overnight, they went from an invading army to a garrison. It would be a few weeks more before Tuo and his men were sent home, and in the meantime, they spent their days watching over the cowed locals as they began to rebuild.
Tuo couldn't help but feel a pang of disgust at how quickly the Valbaarans rolled over. Maybe it was war fatigue, or maybe it was hunger, but the civilian population offered no resistance. Itaseans dug ditches and set wire traps, but these people just crawled out of their cellars and queued up at the aid stations. They didn't have the foresight to know that they weren't being annexed, and yet they did not resist. Not at all.
When all the treaties were signed and the victor nations took their pound of flesh, Grenvel demobilized all its troops, and the 1st Arboreals went home.
The Itasean 1st Arboreals were no ordinary foot soldiers, they were a group of highly specialized battlemages. Each and every one of them were acrobats in a way that could not be taught. For them, gravity was no obstacle. Arboreals were those who learned to fly without wings. They took their name from the traditional role- sharpshooters who crept around the canopy of the great jado trees and rained terror on their enemies from a hundred feet in the air.
They played this role in the Itasean campaign, but as the war evolved, so too did the Arboreals. The sk
ill to master was shooting on the move. Leap, fire, land, vanish. They leapt about the flat Valbaaran terrain like fleas, moving too quickly and too erratically for anyone but the most ski
lled marksman to draw a bead on.
Their primary function was as shock troops. Move in, hit hard, then scatter. The ol' shoot and scoot. Typically, they'd be followed up by an armored corp, who were tasked with sweeping up the frenzied and disorganized enemy. Overall, it was an incredibly effective tactic. Naturally, it wasn't long before the Arboreals were expected to play into their new role: Destroyers of morale.
The Imperial dog had no effective response to an Arboreal attack. They appeared without warning, cut through units three times their size like a hot knife, then disappeared just as quickly. Valbaarans treated them like vengeful ghosts who came and went like the wind. Unpredictable, unstoppable. Of course, Tuo and his men reveled in their reputation. Never had Tuo felt as much satisfaction as seeing the terminal shock in an Imperial soldier's eyes as he leapt from the darkness.
The last thing they would ever see.
Returning to Itas was like something out of a dream. In the years he'd been gone, the people rebuilt their city. Tuo came home to his house still intact, tall and skinny and crammed into place in the cliffside district that looked out over the strait. It was in need of some general repairs, but his father-in-law had done a decent job of keeping the place from falling into disrepair.
The first thing Tuo did when he came home was collapse in bed and fall asleep. He did little more than that for his first week home. The waking hours were a bit too surreal to wrap his head around. He kept bracing himself to wake up back at the front, having imagined the war's end. But time passed, and things got back to normal. Soldiers came back home and took up work in the factories, returned to the universities and market stalls, and life returned to a quiet state of domesticity. A new normal settled in.
Naturally, Tuo was once again offered his promotion and a permanent position in the Grenvellan Grand Army's peacetime force. Once again, Tuo declined. This time, he took his retirement from the military with vague ideas about how he'd lead a civilian life. He had no plans in mind when he made this decision, just the notion that he'd take some time to rest and recuperate before getting back into the workforce. He collected his pension, and he bided his time.
Years passed.
Tuo took up painting. Landscapes, at first. The sea, the city, the wild jadowood. Things he could see. Then, he began painting from memory. The foothills of Tirkau, the Valbaaran steppe. The countless bombed-out villages they pushed through. Ravaged landscapes with blackened matchstick trees jutting out of the shattered earth. Eventually, he shifted focus away from landscapes and simply painted what came to him. Canvas after canvas filled with dark, surreal, almost incomprehensible images. Twisted figures and firestorms, gnashing teeth and spindly fingers.
By then, he'd converted their attic into a bit of a studio space for himself. That's where he spent his days, painting feverishly for an audience of nobody. Jaromir would come up from time to time and gently patronize his works, compliment the technical quality and whatnot. But for the most part, the finished paintings would go on a wooden rack. When the rack was filled, Tuo would cover it with a sheet, then build a new rack and start the process over again.
Tuo didn't leave the house very much. It wasn't as though he didn't care for the city- he did appreciate his rare nighttime walks around the neighborhood. He just rarely felt the need to go out, and he wasn't sure why. He was keeping busy, after all. The painting kept his hands busy, which was sorely needed, because his mind was never quiet. Never, ever quiet.
Jara was the one who encouraged him to go back into the jadowood. A return to nature, it turned out, was sorely needed. This time he was simply camping, strolling around those great, ancient forests for pleasure. But it brought something back to him, like cool spring water rushing in to fill his tattered soul. This became a new part of his routine. Weeks in the attic, feverishly painting away, then he would disappear himself into the wild woodland to creep about in the great canopy.
This became his life in a world without war.
NAME: Trent Falkner
NICKNAME: Tuo
RANK: Captain, Twice-Honored
BORN: Itas, Kingdom of Itas
RACE: Iroth
D.O.B.: 15/07/14,470
AGE: 52
HEIGHT: 6 ft even
WEIGHT: 245 lbs
Sloppy
Quiet
Lazy
Serious
Mean
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Neat
Outgoing
Active
Playful
Nice
Life was very different when Tuo met Jaromir. Itas was still licking its wounds in the wake of a crushed rebellion, and although both men had seen combat, they were considered young enough and of a low enough rank to be rehabilitatable. Of course this was untrue, but no one needed to know that.
Back then, Tuo was the one who brought stability to the relationship. He was angry at the world, burning with passion and purpose, and so he was the one to hold Jara up, who was never quite the same after being under fire. They bonded over politics and mutual pain, and their youthful relationship grew roots that matured through long and desperate years. Together, they weathered the storm.
Thankfully, Jara never saw combat during his Great War deployment. He served as a radio technician, and it was that skil
lset that kept him just far enough from the front lines that he would never need to take up arms. It was this, if nothing else, that helped Tuo sleep at night. When the war ended, Jara made it home a few weeks faster, and he was the one waiting with open arms when Tuo stepped off the boat.
Jaromir quickly got his job back at Itasean Public Radio where he resumed his role as a much-needed entertainer. He was such a popular performer, and how couldn't he be? Jara was always the more gregarious of the two, and he loved to be in the spotlight. Always happiest making other people laugh. Besides, he had been instrumental in taking over the station during the first days of the uprising, and it was Jaromir's voice on the radio that kept people calm and focused when the fighting moved from street to street. His return to the city's airwaves was widely celebrated, and Jara earned himself a salary to show for it.
And suddenly, the dynamic was reversed. While Tuo drifts through life, aimless and shellshocked, Jaromir is his shelter from the storm. He has plenty of sweet words about the evolution of relationships and the nature of love, but Tuo still feels lucky to have found a man with the patience for him.
Although Tuo can talk to his sweet Jaromir about nearly everything, there's some things that he would just never understand. Tuo held onto those things for years, kept them close to his heart where they could fester and rot. Then, out of the blue, he got a letter one day. It was from
Jaunx, his former first lieutenant and lifelong friend.
When they were demobilized, Jaunx sort of disappeared. He made it back to Itas just long enough to unpack his things, and then he left again without a word. Tuo was ashamed to admit he didn't notice until weeks after Jaunx's departure. Then, after years of silence between them, the letter appeared.
Jaunx, ever the rolling stone, had left to travel the continent. It seemed that, as much as he longed for home, he simply found no comfort sitting still. He regaled Tuo with the stories of his travels and his adventures across post-war Rhodinea, and the pair of them began regular correspondence. Writing to Jaunx made it feel like no time had passed at all, and Tuo began to unravel some of the wires wrapped around his heart.
It was hard not to feel guilt, all things considered. Men died, that was inevitable. It was the nature of war. But the fact of the matter was that it was his job to protect them, and they still died under his watch. He remembered them, all of them. Of course he did. Lachlann Byrne. The bullet he took wouldn't have been fatal, but the hundred-foot drop to the forest floor was. Conall Dunn. Mortar strike. Nothing left to send home but a pair of warped dog tags. Daniel Kavanagh. Grenade. He never saw it coming. But Tuo did.
If no one else would ever understand, Jaunx did. These were conversations meant to be had on paper, thoughts that were never meant to be spoken aloud. Jaunx was running, that was the simple truth of the matter. Coming back to Itas might make it all a little too real, so he kept moving. Jaunx envied Tuo, strangely enough. He badly wanted to come home like Tuo had, but things are never quite that simple.
The worst part of it all is that Tuo misses the war. He misses having a purpose, a goal to drive him on. He was once the hammer striking the anvil, and now he is simply a tool that rusts from disuse. That's good, he tells himself. He'd fought his entire life to see peace, and it was
good that it finally came to pass. Even if that meant he had to fall by the wayside. It was good. It was good that the war was over.
But he misses it.
No, that wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was that it
felt good. It felt
good to squeeze the trigger and watch the bodies drop, knowing that the Imperial uniform would soon become the dirt in the ground. It felt
good to grapple the beast, to squeeze the life out of it.
It felt good to watch his enemies die. And it felt good to be the one to snuff their lights out. He had been righteous and triumphant, he had been the long arm of Death. It felt good, and he misses it.
There is something wrong with Tuo.
There will always be something wrong with Tuo.
Art Collection
(newest to oldest)
Thank you to
Gromit and
Nex for coding help
and thank you to
ME for being SO BRAVE
