Speaker Ryf-Av, Silent Conversation: Call to End the Blockade of Agerre

Each morning I wake up and keep to a ritual. Shower. Dress. Coffee and a smoke outside the newsroom. Breakfast occurs somewhere in there, along with some chatting and the start of the workday.

But as I have my coffee and smoke, I take in the scene around me that many others in New Gyr take for granted each day. Green grass and trees toward one horizon. A breeze carries fresh salty spray from the other horizon. Above, a blue sky that kisses the ocean as the two meet in the distance.

I was born on Agerre nearly 30 years ago. I lived there for the first 20 year of my life. In that time, I only saw my home sky once. It was during my sunwalk when I left the caves a child to return as an adult. I lived on the surface for two weeks and killed other predators to survive. All the while my eyes gazed upward because a far greater predator sat poised, waiting and wanting to kill me and my people.

I couldn’t see it with my naked eye, but I knew of the fleet imposing its blockade for longer than I’d been alive. In that time they have bombarded the planet and resorted to acts of smuggling, piracy and extortion. Countless stories circulate of loved ones lost trying to leave or return from Agerre; or of people who stayed in the open too long and fell victim to an orbital strike.

People who look up to Arlann Ya-rett, a man whose dying words were of peace between worlds, have to ask what he would have thought of all of this? Perhaps those words were just what an old, dying man was supposed to say. After all, we know the atrocity he oversaw on Kaldir, so should the actions of those attacking Agerre in his name really come as a surprise?

And we shouldn’t be surprised as the Silent Conversation lives up to its name. In the past three decades, its members have hardly said a word about Admiral Therra or Ya-rett’s Irregulars and the blockade of Agerre. I sometimes wonder as the Silent Conversation members move their arms and fingers to communicate, if they don’t pause for a moment to notice the blood of Agerran civilians that stains their hands.

I suppose Admiral Therra can be forgiven for not noticing the blood of thousands, for those are a few drops on hands covered with the blood of billions. But given how few Gyrans there were after the Immolation, I’d have expected the loss of thousands of lives to be something that the Silent Conversation would notice. In a way its members did take notice and, in choosing to turn their backs on an ongoing atrocities committed by those claiming to fight on their behalf, in their silence, they became complicate in them.

The Silent Conversation has a new speaker now, Arlanna Ryf-Av. My one hope is that she will break the silence and speak of Admiral Therra and Ya-Rett’s Irregulars. Maybe being half-Agerran will make her feel for her people. Maybe she can attempt to reason with her grandfather the Immolator.

I sincerely hope she will tell them to end the blockade. Then we can see if that fleet consists of members who are simply misguided loyalists who will return home when called or if they really have given into the darkness and are became criminals that will need to be hunted down and destroyed for the greater good of all civilized peoples.

Should the Silent Conversation encourage Admiral Therra and Ya-Rett's Irregulars to end the blockade of Agerre?

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