A joint coalition of Auxientia’s Gilded, Parastin, Irregular, Luciole, and Bāhira factions voted to erase the victory monuments of the Exiles over the Bāhira during the Conquest.
“These monuments served one people not two,” said Elden Orshi, the officiating Parastin sergeant delegated for the ceremony. “It was only right that we destroy them so that we may join our Bāhira brothers and sisters as equal citizens of Auxientia rather than as peoples who fought on opposite sides of a war.”
The Gilded representatives organized a festival for the destruction of the monuments, hiring entertainment and merchants to populate each block of the city where the monuments were erased.
In a rare show of solidarity, the vast network known as The Irregulars sent a force of hammerers to do the work, and these able laborers smashed the icons of the Exiles’ strength to some cheering from the crowd.
Luciole Ltd. provided cleanup services, demonstrating their new rock grinder, which crushed the fragments of the monuments to fine sand. The sand was loaded onto Luciole Light Rail, transported to the lake, where the white marble dust mingled with the beach sand and the water.
“These monuments serve one people, not two.”
Elden Orshi, Parastin Sergeant
Among the monuments destroyed was the famous Auxientius Triumphant, once rated among the finest pieces of Saguro the Sculptor’s works. As a contemporary to Auxientius, Saguro knew the man and sculpted the statue in his likeness, a task that reportedly took the sculptor thirteen years to complete. Auxientian citizens possessing plaster replicas of the statue are encouraged to dispose of them in solidarity.
The Founding, which depicted the Exiles and the Bāhira signing a peace treaty after the destruction of Mutu, was also torn down, as was the remaining two thirds of The Trio, which once portrayed Auxientius, Dahura, and the Scourge, though the Scourge’s head and shoulders were removed two centuries ago.
All in all, one hundred and fifty monuments were destroyed, among them several works of Auxientian antiquity. In spite of the cheers, the mood that followed the festival day was somber.
