Title: Hellequin
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: Eighty-Six
Characters: Jérôme Karlstahl (posthumously), Shinei Nouzen (referenced).
Setting: Sometime well after the fall of the San Magnolia Republic.
Rating: PG.
Length: 305 words.
Summary: As a Shepherd of the Legion, the vestige of the man once named Jérôme Karlstahl remembered many things about his mortal life.
Notes: A "what-if" story. Written for the prompt of “The Other Side”.



As a Shepherd of the Legion, the vestige of the man once named Jérôme Karlstahl remembered many things about his mortal life.

He remembered the bitter pride of a people; and in contrast to the cutting sharpness of their arrogance, he remembered a weak corrupted softness, like something rotting from within. He remembered a society fraught with decadence and denial, its citizens resolutely oblivious to the horrors that waited beyond walls they thought invincible. He remembered faces passing in the street, rows of soldiers standing at attention: vacuous seas of silver hair and silver eyes, smiling and laughing, never once sparing a thought for the plethora of hues that had been purged from their midst.

Now, as he surveyed the squadron of gleaming white Legion units under his command, something deep beneath his programming laughed too—thinking that this was how so many of his fallen countrymen had attained the pure and shining uniformity they wanted. As a reward for their willingness to commit secondhand genocide or simply turn a blind eye, their own heinous wish had become their hell.

He had laughed at that irony even as he died, on the night the Legion came. The night he stood bloodied before them as the last to fall among his cobbled-together defense force, surrounded by headless corpses of soldiers who tried to flee and civilians who fought for their lives, all in vain… and he knew that she had been right in every last word of warning she ever tried to give him.

The distorted voice of his Supreme Commander spoke.

No Face to Hellequin. The presence of target Báleygr is confirmed. You may proceed.

He could only laugh even now, as he ordered his forces to advance upon varicolored humans with spirits far stronger than the silver cowards who once exiled them to die.

---

2022 Jordanna Morgan