An excerpt from an address to the high council of the Qui Err Assembly by Annex Iota Pretense, reconstituted leader of her people..

I have heard the murmurs, and I have seen the images. They're calling their bandits heroes. The bored rich like Joan-bee. Invaders like Templeton's Faire. Soldiers like Echo Reverie.

Do not misunderstand. We are the heroes of this story.

Their talking heads will tell you that history is more complicated than that. That everyone is complicit in some misdeed. That by our own logic, what we call ours was the planet's first. That we are colonizers, too.

But do not misunderstand. We are Qui Err Vi Qi-Em, The Soil With Memory.

Their petty historians hold matchsticks and think they wield the sun. Their propagandists will take our pain and twist it into lessons for their children, our struggle into entertainment for paying customers. They will turn sites of violence into souvenir shops, and in their little voices demand from us personalized baubles.

Do not misunderstand.

They will ask you to give them a name like ours. They will ask to touch your bone and branch. They will, with no understanding of their sacrilege, call all this curiosity. They will call themselves "friends of the people."

Do not misunderstand.

That touch is colony ship. Their interest in our ways is not curiosity, it is a hanging rope not yet taut: a whip, a lasso, a noose.

Do not misunderstand.

We do not have friends among them. We have only those who deign to speak to us. The so-called Free States walk on our bodies, toes mingling in soil, without sending so much as a delegation to meet with us. Even the Hegemony, which recognizes our sovereignty, does so as an addendum at best.

Do not misunderstand.

We are not a appendix. We are the body itself.

This week on Twilight Mirage: This Year of Ours: The Muscle

Wish I was there, wish we'd grown up on the same advice
And our time was right

Cover Art by Craig Sheldon (@shoddyrobot)

Episode description by Austin Walker

Music by Jack de Quidt  (@notquitereal)

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