#ooc: some new thoughts on that today feat. the narrative from cradle and why i think its so pervasive

[neramontagueofficial]

Our ship turns homeward now, on a two week trajectory to the nearest blinkgate so we may be home in Ispahsalar by festival season.

Things are slowing down a lot. I've been spending a lot more time in front of windows, using the functions on my dataslate to tell me about the stars we can see from this point in realspace. It is a comfort, looking out of the window and seeing a void populated with the sum total of our universe.

Diadochi, the star of my birth and our eventual destination, is not visible from our path, obscured right now by the edge of some nebula. Nor is the Throne Star, who harbors Karrakis, although I had assumed it would be out of sight as well if only due to its proximity. But Sol is visible, an otherwise forgettable pinprick, declaring itself with light from a time a great many years ago even I am only separated from it by a few months.

A man in grey once told me that most people, looking out on the starlit sky, look first for home. Then they look for Sol. It's a funny joke to a Karrakin: for me it has always been Diadochi, then the Throne Star. Sol is a fourth or fifth consideration. It's a relic of the stories we tell, I suppose. For all SecComm tried to teach us differently, we Karrakin never quite bought the narrative from Cradle. It's a good story, sure: a civilization brought to glory only to fall and reconstitute itself from the ashes, but it is one that requires roughly Ten omissions in order to hold itself together.

The narrative from Cradle assumes that the Fall was complete, it was a total loss, and yet the Ten ventured out as a continuation of the pre-Fall world. Our earliest records include conversations with the society that Earthers consider lost. For us humanity was never in ashes. The schools teach of Union's Great Traumas like it is a memory we share, but the knowledge of old Earth never left us and we never forgot that we are a successor to what came before. It is merely that old Earth fell, and humanity continued elsewhere: the light of that great civilization shifted from Earth to Karrakis.

The Aun understand similarly, to my understanding. It seems a common throughline to us children of the Ten, a skepticism of this story of humanity as told from Cradle. I am told we contested it once, as we contested the decision to be measured by "Cradle" subjective time. But Union were the ones with the bigger guns, and so I tell this story in contrast to this narrative I have been taught since I was a child while no Union standardbearer has ever bothered to frame their history in terms of mine.

But I digress. Sol.

I wonder how many people that feel the pull of Sol have ever seen its light? I have never been to Cradle, but on Ganymede I looked upon the Old Star and felt it on my skin. It did not feel special to me, for all the stories say it is the one humanity was born to. Maybe it would be different if I stood on Earth. Even when I was in the system I balked at that prospect, though. Secretly I felt my skepticism made it akin to a blasphemer stepping upon a holy site. I ascribe no special condition to that rock, yet the sheer force of belief by those currents around me might make me a greater stranger there still.

One day I might visit. I would offer my seat to any who buys its mystique first, though. With the way the Cradle evangelists look at me when I call it Earth, I'm not sure I would be welcome there. Funny, for the place that they insist is somehow also my home.

Anyway, with much of the Concern out of sight I lack interesting subjects for my gaze right now. Sol eats much of my scrutiny in return, as well as an odd dose of bitterness that I'm not sure the star itself has earned. Perhaps this is a shadow ask to tell me of your home-star, so I may look upon new sights with fonder memories as opposed to old bitterness.