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Marcos hesitated. “Were the Twins not heroes?”

Wendy paused to mull the question over. ‘They were good in a fight, I suppose. And their hearts were generally in the right place. And they were natural leaders. In those regards, at least, I’d say they weren’t entirely dissimilar to Zeff. But I certainly don’t think they were deserving of the fame and affection that history has afforded them.’

‘Few people are,’ said Shenado. ‘And many deserving people end up all but forgotten.’

‘True. But I will always reserve the right to complain about it.’

‘Ha. Fair point.’

Octavia made her way toward the next painting over. She nudged Marcos with her elbow as she passed. “Wendy can be a real downer sometimes, but he’s not wrong. See this one here? I commissioned it a few years ago.”

An enormous canvas depicted a castle engulfed in flames. As he looked closer, he realized that the silhouette within was the same as that of Red Lake. And above it, a rift in the deeply gray clouds allowed sunlight to shine through. The title at the bottom read, ‘The Day of Clear Sky.’

Marcos tilted his head. “What is this?”

Madame Redwater placed both hands on the top of her cane as she looked up at the sprawling work. “Everyone remembers the Uprising. Of course they do. It ultimately brought down the empire. But people often forget that the Uprising itself was a grisly failure. All of the Rainlords suffered terribly, but my family had the worst of it. Only a handful survived this attack you see before you.”

Wide-eyed, Marcos only listened.

“The Redwaters were the first to truly stand against the empire,” Octavia went on. “The Twins’ early victories inspired people across the continent and sparked dozens of other rebellions, which tend to get lumped in as all being part of the Uprising, too, but they weren’t. Not really. You see, because we went first, we received the full weight of the empire’s military strength. So this painting--it’s a bit of an eyesore once you know what you’re looking at, but this gallery would be incomplete without it, I feel.”