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[andrewnicus-blog]

#2 - The Warcycle

War is a noxious weed that carries in it the seeds of the next war.  The collective state of exhaustion that we mislabel as peace provides fertile ground for these seeds to fester and germinate, until at last we tear off the bandages and let the old wounds bleed once more in an endless cycle.  We sow death, and we reap it, and though we complain of the taste, we seem to prefer the salty, iron tang of blood sausage to bland peace porridge.  “Peace porridge hot, peace porridge cold, peace porridge in a pot, all unsold.”

Naive mortals dream of a place of eternal life and light, a heaven of peace and rest, but I think they are wrong-- life and light cannot coexist with peace and rest, for they are opposites.  Darkness is the natural state of the cosmos, pierced only by scattered flares of starlight.  The universe fights to keep the light on, while we shiver in its pale glow and fight to survive.  In this universe of conflict and war, I fear the only lasting peace will come at the end.  When the last star burns itself out, when the last planet stops spinning, when the last asteroid breaks it orbit and goes hurtling outward beyond the reach of any gravity well, when all is frozen, silent, and dead, and the dark curtain falls across the stage of creation for the last time to hide the tragic performance of this play called life will we know peace.  Only in the endless embrace of oblivion can we find rest.

“The beginning of wisdom is understanding that one day you will die,” my friend and mentor Baemen Wellfe once told me; “Until then, we fight on-- for life, for freedom, for the right to exist on our own terms, or to exploit, enslave, or exterminate those in whom we cannot see ourselves reflected.  Learn to see your own features in the faces of all those you fight.”  His day came soon after, at the point of a Battle Lord’s ion lance.  He was as skilled a commander and fierce a fighter as I ever met, but as the aphorism goes, the surest method of suicide is to pick a fight with a Battle Lord.

Words are a poor container to convey our grief.  I could say that my heart broke the day the Karthinai killed Baemen, but the depth of my feeling passes through the gaps between words like water through a sieve.  I felt no grief, only pity, when I learned of the fall of Deitros where I was born, but my friend’s death and the scouring of his home planet upended my world.  Baemen was the father I chose when I left Deitros; my mother was centuries dead by then, and though my biological father still lives as a prisoner of the Karthinai, I felt an orphan from that day on.  

I crave vengeance for my father.  And though I hope to achieve much more than petty revenge by bringing down the Karthinian empire, vengeance will always be a motivating factor.  I simply don’t know how to rid myself of the need for it.  Those I hurt along the way will leave behind loved ones who need vengeance like I do.  The ones they hurt to get to me will leave grieving survivors of their own.  Pain begets atrocity begets pain.  Victims become perpetrators, oppressed rise up and become oppressors, and on it goes in an endless cycle.  The Karthinai are trapped in it as much as I am; their rise to power began in oppression, and it will end with the collapse of their empire.

I mean to hasten that collapse with a suicide attempt, so to speak; my brilliant plan is to maneuver a Battle Lord into single combat and kill him.  The legacy of the Battle Lords is one of the five pillars which hold up their empire; their undefeated status in single combat and prowess as military commanders has done more to expand the sphere of Karthinian rule than perhaps any other single factor.  Armies and fleets have surrendered to the Karthinai with no shots fired at the mere rumor that a Battle Lord would be present on the battlefield.  They are revered almost as gods, and any revolution I might lead will need to see god bleed.

I'll probably die.

But if I don't, I might just bring down an empire.

[andrewnicus-blog]

#1 - The Dagger

There is magic in fire.  It has always been with us, part of us; before we mastered it our species was an imago, swaddled in darkness, our world limited to how far our legs could carry us, to how far our arms could reach.  Fire was the first light to fill our eyes when we broke free of that prison and emerged as something new and superior.  Fire gave us mastery of our world; it allowed us to draw ore from stone, to cook and to sterilize, to shape wood and metal and glass.  And though we are tens of thousands of years removed from our ancestors’ world, fire is a direct conduit back to our roots.

As I sit here, turning the dagger over in my hand, watching the fire light slide off its non-Euclidian surfaces while it seems to phase in and out of reality, slipping between the threads of space and time, I feel a queer tugging at my mind and soul, as if the revenants of my ancestors are calling across time to summon me back.  I can almost see them ringing the night fire, sitting on stones, logs, and stumps.  Though they are hemmed in by darkness and the predators which prowl it, they bask in the glowing oasis of warmth and light, drinking the life and comfort that flow from the shimmering coals like a red-orange fountain.  Here they find cheer and camaraderie; here the scent of roasting meat mingles with wood smoke, sweat, and musk.  Here is the birthplace of philosophy, astronomy, and culture, where they dreamed their gods and mythologies into existence and passed them down from generation to generation.

Then the ghosts fade, and I am left alone beneath the naked sky.  Nature’s ambient symphony plays all around me, humming, rustling, and blowing in time with the crackling of the flames.  The darkness that engulfs me is a small thing indeed; I have swum through the space between the stars and know what true emptiness is-- not a mere intellectual approximation, the way you “know” what a billion is because you can count zeroes and take mathematical shortcuts to get there from one, but the way someone who has counted by ones to a billion knows it: intimately, with perfect comprehension.  I feel the ease of familiarity in the darkness, but I love the fire as a vagabond loves a roof overhead during a thunderstorm.

My mind turns back again to the dagger in my hand; as daggers go, it is a poor sample; it has no cutting edge to speak of, though its point can pierce reality and draw the threads of space-time behind it.  Once it was the spindle of Sylak, the loom that wove the macroverse over the course of gigayears.  That was before the Great Ones lost interest in creation and turned inward to play their petty games of power, before Balthamuir the Turncloack brought Phyar to the Karthinai and hurled them like a spear at the heart of Deitros, before Massior the Lawgiver was cast down with all his fellows and thrown into Claustrios, before the realm of the Great Ones was sacked and renamed New Karthina to honor the dead planet from whence the conquerors came.  During the sack, Sylak was smashed and discarded, for the Karthinai in their ignorance passed over many priceless treasures as they rushed headlong towards power and plunder.  I think of the magnitude of chance which brought this relic to me, the last free being who knows its nature and purpose, who understands how to use it and what might be accomplished with it, and I can almost believe in destiny.

But from whence does destiny flow?  Surely not the universe itself, for it is a mindless construct with no will or purpose, and it does not play favorites; destiny, then, must be the providence of a higher power and purpose. I have dwelt among the Great Ones, those who once shaped and tended the universe as a garden, and I watched their higher purpose, if ever there was one, wither and rot on the vine as their infighting consumed them.  I have heard first-hand accounts of their downfall from refugees who escaped Deitros during the sack, and I have watched the grisly fruits of higher power falling into the hands of lesser beings.  The ambition and greed which drove the Karthinai to conquer the realm of the gods itself are insatiable, as such baser motives have always been.  Even now, after they have won it all, it is not enough, and their conquest spreads outward from Deitros.  Who can halt the advance of the Karthinian juggernaut?  What can be done to blunt the death cult that feeds the war machine?  I travel the macroverse in search of answers, but they remain, for the time being, beyond my reach.

But the dagger in my hand gives me hope.  It may be sharp enough to pierce the heart of the Karthinian empire.  I have come to this remote world in search of a weapon, but perhaps the one I already hold is sufficient.  And as I watch the the dying fire light play across its surfaces, the barest shape of a plan begins to form in my mind.  Five ideological pillars hold up the Karthinian empire; If one should fall, the rest will be vulnerable.  I shall have to think carefully on how to knock them down.