On days like these, I only have to gaze up at the seat of government itself, visible through the Petrichoral Parks of Glottage, and I begin to feel my resolve strengthen. Seventeen high white columns stood before a great casket of white marble. Standing tall on the western side, collapsing in upon itself on the eastern side.
The Moridame Palace was built some four hundred years ago by High Adjudicator Egriman, who as we all know lost his mind, declared himself king of the Unified Peninsula, and then the very next day a god, or a god-king, or a king of all the gods - he hadn’t quite established the proper terminology.
After we shot Egriman and buried him deep beneath the vaults of his own palace, we decided that while he might have been a maniac and a fascist and utterly antithetical to our own principles of representative democracy, we did like what he’d done with all the columns.
So we kept the Moridame, and we installed a plaque about how the man’s atrocities must, of course, never be forgotten. Then in the last war, the Lingers hit the palace with a lucky suicide-bomber saint, and the entire eastern side of the roof caved in, and we decided to keep the rubble around as well. As evidence of our courage under fire, or just to remind ourselves what foreigners were capable of.
The Moridame’s been subsiding ever since, collapsing in on itself year by year, losing corridors and backrooms to its own gradual decay - but it’s too slow to be considered an emergency and too symbolically important to ever be truly abandoned.
A palace, a monument, and a ruin all at once.
Like this country, a thing both living and dead.
A corpse that keeps dragging itself on and leaving guts trailing in its wake, a triumph of dogged motor function over sense.
It looks like a hive, the Moridame, a swarming insect-nest of white marble and neat-cut grass.[1]
