He exhaled. It wasn't quite a sigh, but it was a controlled, heavy sound.
Errol should have expected that he would have to speak of this sooner or later. If anything was to come of this, it would be monstrously unfair for him to keep such an enormous secret from her. But he didn't want to think on it. Oh, how he didn't want to.
Get it over with, then. Rip it off quickly and be done with it. He knew something about that.
He sat back, closing the book and holding it tightly, still not looking up from its cover. The photograph on the cover was a close-up of a pair of lilies. How fitting.
"It might be important to know what Libria was," he said slowly, his voice quiet, the tone not quite discernable. "There were a series of wars long after your time, each worse than the last, and after the third--well, humanity was nearly wiped out." He could remember the war in flashes, little snapshots--mostly just a distant, academic memory of terror. "And in the aftermath, when the survivors tried to pick up the pieces, someone had the idea that it was the extremes of emotion that were the cause of it all. That we could wipe out war if we suppressed what made us human."
His face twisted, his hands tightening on the cover so that his knuckles went white. "And that was Libria. Where everyone was free to be drugged into complacency and anything that reminded us of what we used to be was purged."