Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
It should be remarked in terms of scale that Vaspukaran is somewhere around Qing China in size. When the continental map is revealed this will become more clear.
A True History of the Conditions & Society of the Kingdom of God
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
- Original Worldbuilding
It should be remarked in terms of scale that Vaspukaran is somewhere around Qing China in size. When the continental map is revealed this will become more clear.
- Location
- Norfolk, England
...go on.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
So many sinners among the readership who hold thoughts of carnal lust rather than the upstanding behavior of a pure soul - to sneer at every other person in this country besides me
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- Location
- Australia
I love the narrator so much. He's so great. So much personality and so entertaining to read.
I would like to subscribe to their newsletter.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
"Sacral position"
Is he literally up someone's butt?
Is he literally up someone's butt?
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
5. Theories of History
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
CHAPTER 1: THE TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL ORIGINS OF HISTORY
On Man & God
Man is born good, and everywhere is bathed in sin. Everywhere, false shepherds rise to stray him from the path to heaven. Enemies spawn, within and without, emissaries of evil that hide among the righteous and seek to destroy all that we have done, and all that has been created. I have lost children to the Western Coven, grandchildren to the Mare. I have fought and bled and killed for Vaspukaran and for the dream of a Kingdom of God that seems so distant from us now.
I have seen death riding upon a pale horse, and he doffs his Juror's cap at me.
History is alive like a witch that will not die. It squirms beneath us, seeks to pull us down into the muck of our transgressions. In the Book of Judgment God keeps record of our sins, and he has gathered all the sins of history into it as well, turned it into an epic with pages beyond counting. This epic is a tragedy, for man has not been able to overcome the same evils that have plagued him since his banishment from paradise. But there is a promise of greater world that lies beyond. This is the promise of the spiral of truth, the unbroken covenant between God and his creations. A promise that one day, in the world to come, we will be reunited, one and all, and with His mysteries unveiled, God will have no need to welcome us to paradise, for we will have built it on this earth.
But God will not take us there if we are not ready. We must build the road ourselves.
There has been an eruption of interest in history in my lifetime. But I am sorry to say that historians have never been poorer than in my lifetime, also. I do not mean in scholarship - indeed our scholarship has advanced tremendously and we have unveiled mysteries that have dogged us for centuries within decades. It is that our students and scholars are starving. In my time I have put to room and board hundreds, even thousands of the desperate low priests and monks who thought that they might make a living recording our own history that must survive on intolerably slim stipends from orders whose abbots seem to expand in wealth and weight by the year. I have written many times to the Patriarch but I receive only form letters or no reply at all. When I have complained that the exam requirements are locking out more and more of the intelligent and pious at a time when the population of our priests is doubling by the decade, again the vicar of God remains silent. But I will not.
I have had to urge my own students away from sinful thoughts of complete despair as they realize there is no future for them. Several I have had to turn out after their habits turned outright criminal and they started to pursue avenues that led them entirely away from God and into realms inhabited only by the devil. But I still have faith in them, and faith that by our hands, guided by the righteousness of God, may yet be rescued. And I dedicate this book and its production in part to my dear students, many of whom had a hand in researching and assisting me in writing this with me. I am not ashamed to admit that as I age and my bones begin to creak, I rely on them more and more, especially after the passing of my dearest. I would not dare to erase their contribution, for as said by Rav Zurah, "there is no such thing as a scholar without a school behind him".
Many of these students have also brought forward their own theories to me, and studied and adopted the theories of many men they might consider wise. The next section is dedicated to these sweet and brilliant students, who are with no exception, entirely and completely wrong. I will endeavor now to destroy each and every one of their arguments until they have nothing left but ashes in their mouth and shame in their hearts, and then we will share fine-brewed Yingin Tea as they contemplate their mistakes.
On the Prophesers
The prophesers are a group entirely obsessed with the celebrity of revelation. Building upon the true reality that a number of prophets have been entrusted by God to greatly expand the Truth available to the people, they have created a philosophy of history that bends to satisfy their obsessions with a prophet-driven history. In the words of their most foremost proponent, Yevaho Burganin, "There is no history without history's prophets, who see forward to a new age and arrest and reverse the decay of prior generations". For the prophesers, history is cyclic, and the spiral is more a series of loops. Societies grow, develop, enjoy apogee, decline, and then are saved by revelation. Some societies, to account for aberrations such as the gnat-born Yuhwa, may go down dark paths and have false prophets, but by and large the Prophesers are less interested in this for it countermands their model.
Some prophesers have become so bold as to put specific dates onto the interval of each stage. 50 years to grow, 50 years to develop, 50 years of apogee and 50 years of decline following by a further revelation. There are a few issues with this theory's presuppositions. First, it is wrong in every single way. To put such confident dates on the multiplicity of human history immediately opens the theory of prophetic cycles to criticism from historians who have actually studied such periods and may point that the coming of prophets is much less common and much more dramatic than is given credit. It is also not clear that the social milieu of prophets suggests the idea of them arriving to rescue every society from decadence. Let us take the example of Mashyana, first prophet of the Ashareians.
It was said in certain legends that have been translated that Mashyana was born onto a pile of cushions, in a land where a peasant can survive on nothing but limed corn for months at a time. She spent most of her life in various states of joy and tranquility, in that country where paradise appears nearer to us than most anywhere on earth. By the end of her life, it is unclear if there had been any reduction in 'decadence', and in fact it is said that she encouraged a trend of babies being born on cushions in the hopes they may be prophets too. This is hardly the end of decadence that has been declared by her coming.
But more than that, there is a failure of definition. The logic that follows on who a prophet is cannot be generally applied because it is uselessly circular. A prophet is successful because they are known as a prophet. But what about prophets who failed? What about false prophets? If the Pasan Ghadi had succeeded in his rebellion, overthrown the Patriarch, and instituted his War Against Five Evils, would he not be a prophet? The Prophesers would scoff at this, for Pasan Ghadi did not win, but why? Why is this the case? If he was a false prophet, why did the righteous have the strength to defeat him? Society in Vaspukaran at the time was certainly in some parts decadent. And how can we say there have been prophets every two hundred years when the last true prophet legally accepted by the Flame is Amalgast? The Ravs may be called prophets but they would rejected this, as says Rav Karogen, "let any man who call me prophet see me at the bottom of a drinking cup, and observe the nature of my revelation."
The prophesers cannot be a way forward for history. There is no clarity to their positions, no way to falsify their claims and put it up against the mantle of Truth. It has no answer for the whole enormity of human history, where for many eons there has never been a prophet, and also not to the failure of Babarak to accept revelation in the form of the Bambisnan Vashti, which would presage its end. There is more merit to the evolution of this theory in the idea of Permanent Reformation, but I am afraid the texts and theories of the Ashareians on this matter have not been properly translated, and so I do not wish to speak on something I rely on the words of certain students for.
On the Determinists
I dislike the determinists. I shall say this right away. I find their theory risible, unholy, and displeasing to God. The reason is simple. In their view, everything is preordained and moves as planned by God. This world is in fact the best of all possible worlds, because if God is good, if God is powerful, if God is all-seeing, then he must have made sure that the world we are living in is in fact the greatest world, and that we are always nearer to the Spiral of Truth even when we believe we have begun to stray from the path. But this is indefensible madness. In the first place, it forgets the dualist foundation of our faith, the fact that evil exists within the hearts of man and seeks to derail us from the path to heaven at every opportunity. In the second place, it is simply vile. It is a defense of every cruelty that exists within this Patriarchate on the basis that it must be in god's plan.
Oh, that is a fine thing for you to say, Prelate Atagan, that you embezzling thousands of silver dirhams meant for the stipends of your students from the Yeshiva of Warabad is in God's plan. Oh, that is a fantastic insight, Ataman Hulganar, that you setting alight three-hundred moth priests in the Bonfires of Hulan and confiscating their temples for yourself, is all simply following the will of God.
It leads to mad delusions that justifies an apathy to the project of our own salvation. It is the worst distortion of Rav Rongen's pronunciation that "if we are still like water, God will come to us," which was a message of meditation, not a defense of utter stasis. If in the face of iniquity Rav Rongen had been still like water, there would have been no Second Patriarchate! There would be no end to the warlords and the rapacious Melikim. Everything would have stagnated, and the Spiral of Truth would have slipped out of our grasp. It is clear that those who proclaim that this is the best of all possible worlds serve to benefit from the current diseases which afflict it. They are not content to be leeches and parasites upon the body of the people, but insist that their sucking motion is a form of sacred massage and that we should be pleased they have deigned to infest us.
I spit on you determinists. You reject the dualism which is inherent to the reality of God, that he is not all-powerful. By insisting he is One United you forget the seven special names of God, which our own Patriarch confirms for us every Iklokart ceremony at the crack of the new year. Let us priests who rose up from the autocephalates remind you that God is a being of a thousand faces, and that He is called not just God, not just the One, but also: All-Mother, Ninth Trigram, Thunder Demon, Many-Feathered, Serpent Leviathan, Hamadami, and World-Totem. That He has as many names as there are grains of sand, as many eyes as there are stars in the sky, as many arms bearing swords as there are heads to cut, as many legs as it would take to reach you before you can hope to escape. And He has seen you, and your works, and the lies you have spun in His name.
And in the time to come He will have no mercy for you and your justly made world.
On the Schismatics
There are also those remnants of the four great schisms who still forward their ideas within the limits of acceptable discourse. These men and women are all brave but I am afraid are also misguided in theology and theory. It is difficult to cover the breadth of their ideas, for between Iconoclasts, Pugilists, Havadis and Confessors there is very little agreement or commonality to speak of them all at once, and I can better address them as they historically appear as rebellions and movements against the orthodoxy of that present moment. In general terms, there is much to laud in many of their theories. They correctly identify the dualist nature of the cosmos, that there is an evil and a good force that works within and without man, and that God is entrapped in battle with the flaws of his creation, that although he will triumph he cannot triumph without the human will that supports him against the danger of the encroaching sin.
Where they falter in general is identifying the source of that evil. Iconoclasts point to the very existence of institution, and that surely if everything was stripped to a personal relationship between man and God that all would be well, but this is an absurdity, for without institution there is no way to mediate the relations of man and walk together on the Spiral. The Pugilists eagerly wish to trigger the apocalypse and make a final war against all five evils, but their hopes for an instant conclusion to everything that has plagued man from the beginning of all time opens them to tremendous disappointment. The Havadis not only place all their hopes on a hidden Patriarch that has yet to arrive and may well have died in ignoble circumstances, but pursue a mystic theosophistry whose complicated irrationality clouds the judgment of the mind and prevents the Truth from appearing. Finally, the Confessors in their over-eager focus in constructing at a stroke a reformed and perfect covenant endanger themselves like the Pugilists to disappointment when the foibles of Man appear once again. But how can we explain that every single one of these beautiful hopes shall be dashed up against the walls of less elegant reality?
On Historical Dualism
It is because they ignore the fundamental energy and theories of history. Inside human society, and not in an individual soul but in the agglomeration of souls, there are two essential forces. There is the constructive force, and the destructive force. These two forces are trapped in endless conflict. The constructive force is the push of man to build society, institutions, rules, laws, faith, wealth and power. It is the greatness of the city, the breadth of the railroad, and the volume of religious law. The destructive force is the push of man to tear it down. It is the breaking of the chain, the shattering of the wall, the swinging of the sword. But importantly, neither force perfectly represents the good or the evil that lies within man. They are agnostic to the war of God against his unspeakable counterpart.
My students ask me how this can be, when the constructive force is reflective of everything that seems good. And to them I say simply: You also build jails, and the shackles of slavery, and unjust laws. The constructive force privileges power, and the elite, and those who are the ruling class in any society. And the destructive force by contrast privileges war, and strength, but also the rejection of the stasis premised by the constructive force. Was not Prophet Amalgast first a destructive force, who made war on the false foundation of the House of Gushan? Was not the end of Babarak the ultimate destructive force to destroy the ultimate constructive force, and it was necessary if the people were to survive? Were not the Ravs who cut down their enemies and abolished all the Melikim destroyers? Is that not the nickname of Rav Karogen himself, 'Destroyer of Walls, Breaker of Cities'? Is it not the binding of the constructive and destructive force together that has created the Patriarchate and allowed it now to grow?
The constructive force and destructive force are present at all times and in all societies. As I shall elucidate in the coming chapters, they are as clearly seen in Tsakharia as Tzadan, as in the Coven (where an excess of construction has produced an evil country), and in the Mare (where a relentless lust towards destruction has despoiled great sections of their conquered lands), and in Vaspukaran itself (where the constructive force and destructive force are both accelerating beyond any bounds before seen, so simultaneously our institutions are more corrupt than ever but every form of ordinary and traditional life is destroyed). The balance between construction and destruction is what defines the affairs of Man and determines his closeness to the Spiral that will take us all to Heaven.
But this is the theory. In order to apply it we must return down to Earth from our preoccupation with the instruments of Heaven, and discuss the first origins of the constructive and destructive forces in Vaspukaran. For along Lake Hamgad, in ancient and mythic climes, man learned to plant a field and tame the elements around him, and with this, to build the very first of what today we would describe as fledgling civilization...
END CHAPTER 1
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
vasparak moment tbh
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
I love how the author does like the peak philosophical scholar thing of just blithely shoving other philosophers into historical schisms and boxing them into wildly overconfident lines of direct lineage, before then casually explaining a whole 'nother heresy as the Clear and Simple Truth.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
If these scholars wanted me to respect them, maybe they should have agreed with me.
- Location
- in the trash
maybe they shouldn't have been wrong just saying
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Oh missed this from the previous page. Not human sacrifice rituals so much as burnings of heathens and heretics, which definitely has nothing to do with that
Oh also, something to keep in mind: Nothing said here about the different schools of history is heretical. Not even the schismatics are heretical - they are after all schismatics, and not heretics. As a country where religious orthodoxy is so flexible that you can incorporate definitions of God that turn him into a her for all intents and purposes and integrate huge portions of foreign theology directly into your religious bloodstream, Vaspukaran has a fairly wide window of debate upon these issues.
6. The Process of Archaeology
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
CHAPTER 2: THE VANISHED WORLD
On God's Just Expulsion of Man from Creation
A boy was too afraid to speak to girls, and thus was the greatest discovery in the history of Vasparak archaeology unveiled.
The year was 787. It had been less than twelve months after my imprisonment in Kutan that I was again forced into captivity. I had been assigned to the fishing village of Takan-Baal on the island of Baali Gar, at the center of the tranquil expanse of Lake Hamgad. The island seemed a mystic paradise, where morning mist crested cedar canopies and the distant trumpets of rutting dwarf elephants can be heard from pashangs away. In the water, wonderful tranquility was interrupted by the splash of breaching whales beneath the surface, hunting after scorpions fleeing to the safety of the tidal pools.
Longhouses neatly lined the shoreline, moored ironwood canoes holding as much as twenty men lapping up against the sturdy dock, secured with fern-fibre ropes. The village was secured with a palisade of tall driven-sticks, and great carved pillars of totemic adoration for Patriarch and God had been erected in its central square. It was an extraordinary place, a mysterious place, a place that has been immortalized by paintings of the style paradisaical, eager to capture the condition of a people closer to the conditions of the creation.
It also taught me exactly why God had expelled man from paradise, for the wonders of this extraordinary land could not have been granted to a less exciting people. Every day on the village was precisely as the last. The men would fish in the morning and return in the evening while the women weaved and beat out moa hide. Sometimes a large fish was sighted, or a scorpion nicked the finger off the proctor's son, and this was treated as a prophet's revelation to be discussed from morning prayer to the evening meal. To the villagers, God was a personal being who was to blame for various happenings: if a wheelbarrow's wheel broke, that was likely the fault of God, who had been angry at old Tymi for cursing out an elephant, and he should better apologize by going to the highest point in the village and begging for forgiveness.
Superstition and ignorance abounded: When I mentioned I had been to the witches' quarter in the suburbs of the northern capital, the villagers asked me if I could confirm whether they had double-tusks or trunks that sucked the blood of the believer. When I said neither, they scoffed and said I must have been mistaken, because those are the two types of witches that exist. When I pointed out this sounded suspiciously close to the description of an elephant, a number became deeply distraught and began to wonder if witches could shapeshift into animals as well as well. I was nearly ejected from the village by the proctor, who managed to barely calm down the fishermen before they declared the start of a witching hour.
Temple-time, meant to be for the sanctification of the Holy God, was mostly for the purposes of the sin of gossip. Every week the whole village would gather and agree on who to dislike in the coming week. Tevya was the subject of their ire because he had furbished a new boat that made him stand aside from the other villagers. Senna had been caught picking her nose by another woman and it was suggested that it was because she had stuffed notes from her secret lover into her left sinus. One particularly rancorous scandal resulted when Punto proposed to Sweet Yelina. Old Julkan and Young Julkan (who was older than Old Julkan) disagreed on the match, with Old Julkan supporting it and Young Julkan opposing, and both for the same reason: Punto was said to argue often with the whales. Neither of these men were related to the prospective couple.
In the fact of this I prayed to God every single day that he would deliver me by way of a second flood and I could go home to study rocks in peace. But God and I had never much agreed on what was fair treatment, and so instead he sent to me Halavani Dina.
On Frightening Women Who Help You Discover Ancient Sites
It is said in the Legend of Katagara: "Uliyana descended down from the mountains with the heads of three thousand men including twenty-three princes of Kutan and said to her husband, is this enough to repay your debt? And Goshin said to her, my darling, what?"
This is the spirit that best exemplifies Halavani Dina, who I met at the age of nineteen and immediately put so much fear into me that I rather wished to have been abducted and eaten by an eagle than stay a moment longer on the island. Dina was assigned to Takan-Baal as a nun of the Hessenine Order of the Open Hand, tasked with inoculating the isolated villagers against the Red Death which had been sweeping through the eastern shore of the Lake. To do this she had been granted few resources and great responsibility, but she embraced the task with murderous efficiency.
Villagers were made to be inoculated whether they wished to be or not, and she played upon their superstitions. I watched one morning that she announced she had discovered in the night a heathen idol in the shape of a claw that had been found in the foundation of the totem pole, and if the village was not inoculated by the evening a giant scorpion would emerge from the water and eat them all. One of the villagers remarked this had happened in his father's time, convincing many of the skeptics (who did not ask how he was alive if this had happened). I only found out much later she had paid him off with yam-root to chime in at the right moment to convince his fellows.
The villagers soon begged to be made safe against the giant scorpion, which miraculously did not arrive once the inoculations were complete. In the aftermath, Dina was more powerful than the village proctor, and everyone was fearful of the sorceress' power to manifest good and banish evil. As for me, she barely spared me a single glance, save for the diabolic looks that she would send my way at the least opportune times, as when I had just been covered in guts from a fallen barrel of wretched stinking eel. To avoid these looks which deeply troubled my commitment to God I opted instead to take long morning and then evening walks, ostensibly to survey the mountain peak for signs of special rocks.
On my Exploration of the Mysteries of Takan-Baal
My only friend during this ordeal was a dwarf elephant that I took to calling Butakuq after the yam-loving magician of a favored children's story. Butakuq was addicted to the root of yam and I became the enabler of his habit. In exchange he kept me company, and walked with me to strange and untouched places far beyond the villages, where I began to notice ruins and foundations of buildings that had been abandoned for many years before. I found a Juror's castle on the east side of the island from the wars against the Gushans, now long-since left behind, and the decrepit ruins of monastery of Simurgh from an era even before Amalgast.
The island's antiquarian heritage thus began to eat at me and I started to range further and further afield, not just to avoid Halavani Dina but to get closer to a mystery that had long rankled me: to just how far before the flood did history begin? It had been assumed by the borrowed stories and oral history of the Vasparak that history had begun with Babarak, which burst fully formed from the first scions of post-creation man. But for decades, industrial works and infrastructure projects in the central basin had been uncovering artifacts which clearly had no connection to the times of Babarak but were of ancient antiquity, or were found in the layers of our towns and cities that seemed even older than the oldest steles and boundary stones of the Malekate.
Disturbing, even heretical questions raised by scholars emerged that the flood had not just wiped away one empire but a whole hidden history of man, reaching back further and further with every burrow of the shovel's head. As we dug, the finds grew ever more perplexing: petrified tablets rolled into spirals with script carved into ironwood in alphabets unknown to any modern dialect, ivory and whalebone bracelets in designs unfamiliar, and feathered-moa burials in tombs burrowed underground. The vanished world beneath our feet was at least yielding to the modern man its mysteries, and with it started to grow a whole field of research that had never been thought of before.
As my walks grew longer and longer I began to develop an instinct that this island may hold some of the secrets to this time before the flood, before Babarak, even before Harasdad, long called city of ten thousand years which surely must have been the first place to be inhabited but now some wondered might only be the first expression of life's civic character. That there was a place primeval that even God himself forgot and demanded we unearth. Perhaps I was simply frustrated about my neverending mission, or even by this point a little mad, but I believed this all the same.
It was in pursuit of this instinct that on a damp Nisan morning in the early spring I ventured out once more. And it was here, slipping down the treacherous sides of an unfamiliar gully, that I found myself before the remains of the first shrine in Vaspukaran...
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- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Man, this guy's such a dork. The vaccination lady sounds awesome though, I love deeply pragmatic but well-meaning characters.
- Location
- PA
The people of the place in Chapter Two (assuming I am correctly reading this as the same place!) sound like they are drowning in an excess of spare time and could use an immense supply of comic books to entertain them.
Or, perhaps more in the sensiblity of our author, holy texts preaching of this' Spiral of Truth', and of the 'Mysteries of God'...Assuming I didn't just mangle those terms to the point of driving the author to commit bodily harm upon me!
Or, perhaps more in the sensiblity of our author, holy texts preaching of this' Spiral of Truth', and of the 'Mysteries of God'...Assuming I didn't just mangle those terms to the point of driving the author to commit bodily harm upon me!
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
The key is to accumulate spite and grievances in casks so they can ferment into excellent vintages you can later put into your books that definitely won't get you put on trial.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
The process of waiting for the bitterness to ferment to just the right level of acerbic wit also comes with the bonus of making you old enough that you have a decent shot of faking a heart attack and so pathetically pleading to your infirm senility that the inquisitors just remand you to house-arrest inside a cozy little cottage by Lake Hamgad.
7. The Silent People
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
CHAPTER 2: THE VANISHED WORLD
On the Temple of the Silent People
Before there was Babarak, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there was Baalon.
These are a people of such antiquity that their voices are unheard, their symbols unfamiliar. Not once in their remains do we spot the image of a spiral, or a winged bull, or a feathered beast. They are the first people of this country, but the world they inhabited is closed to us Only glimpses can we see now, artifacts and sites and mysterious ruins left behind by those who brought us from the dark night after exile from creation to the foundation of the first city.
After the Temple of Baalon was discovered and I had recovered from the injury when my head was dashed up against the side of the gully (forming a quite attractive scar), I needed to set to work. I may have found the temple, but it had to have been exacavated by the whole village. Stirred from their sinful slumber, all were put to work for the sake of truth and discovery and admittedly my ego. Old and Young Julkan, sweet Yelina, Punto, Tevya and every other villager was rallied to the task by the exacting command of Halavani Dina. She was the first I tried to enlist, but at first coldly refused and promised she would inform her superiors of what I had discovered. I begged her, kissed her feet, got on my knees before her and prostrated myself in a way I later insisted was chivalric. And then at last Dina raised me up and put a finger on my chin and said to me, "I had been waiting for the moment you might kneel before me, rock boy."
In that moment, I better understood what it might be like to stand before the angel of death, albeit perhaps a bit shorter than the real thing.
Accepting my ritual supplication, Dina sprang into action. She told the villagers that a holy site had been discovered to the east, and that they better be prepared to dig for it or else the prince of all the whales would come for them and snatch them in the night. It was the dry season now, and as good a time as any for an excavation, and so all were implored to dig on behalf of her plea (as well as an ample rationing of tef rolls and ironwood pinecones, we were not jurors, after all, and paid people for their labour). She allowed me to instruct the villagers on the correct method of the excavation, and how to preserve and protect artifacts, information that she herself seemed to listen with a rare respect I had never been afforded even by my own family. The proctor had been paid off with the promise that his own fortune would raise when the excavation was complete, and he allowed us to use the village printing press for all of our needs.
All of us formed a fine team indeed, focused on a purpose that appeared with each passing day to of divine significance. I developed a newfound respect for those I had dismissed as idiots, as the villagers knew the soil well, and sometimes could explain to me how to dig best when it might be waterlogged or else how to remove roots without damaging the stone underneath. I was tremendously grateful for this, for what we had found was not just a temple, not just a ruin, but a reliquary of an age nearer to creation than any that had been before discovered.
On the Midden Heaps of Ancient Man
Great heaps of filth can yield surprising secrets in today's Vaspukaran. The most well-known of course is the Great Synod, where one can discover many squirming creatures who purport that serving God is primarily a matter of composing poorly written psalms and replacing the flock of their faithful with more profitable flocks of fat-wool sheep. Besides them we have many other kinds of colorful and interestingly-scented mounds, hosting all kinds of organisms, from the well-organized fecal towers of the Jurors to the kerosene-scented bonfires of the missionaries always hunting for another heathen they can use to fuel their pyres.
But for those of us who are tired of the stink of today's great garbage heaps, more intriguing trash is available to us. Every man who came before me was an excellent archaeologist, except in the ways in which he was absolutely in all ways an idiot. All of them made the same mistakes, avoiding getting their hands dirty, digging through layers straight to get to what they wanted and thus destroying priceless artifacts from times they were not interested in, and hunting for great monuments that might furnish their personal museums. It is thus that a great many imbecilic scholars ignored that it is in their garbage that men reveal who they truly are, for that which is discarded informs our culture as much as what is glorified. This was a skill that I had learned during unspeakable periods on latrine duty in Kutan, and it would serve me well. Indeed, I am by all accounts the first man in all of history to woo a woman by digging through a tremendous pile of old garbage.
Amid the dirt was all matter of broken pottery, sherds and shattered ceramics with unique designs. But also there was the secret history of agriculture, for I found seeds, half-chewed bones of moa and of whale, petrified cones of ironwood and the shells of lakeshore claims, layered atop one another like a record of digestion. And so as the settlement developed, the diet of the people changed, and we see the progression of the whole of human history written in the refuse of the past. From it, and the work that was done by enterprising scholars who came after me and accepted that our role as historians requires us sometimes to dig through human dreck, we have built a rough understanding by when and where humans abandoned our role as gatherers as in paradise and became tied ever to the river and the rain for our survival.
On the Progression of Baalon
We know that in the beginning there was Baalon, and the oldest part of Old Amurru, where hunters settled as the chilling air began to warm and the great beasts receded to the north. For these migrating men, coming from the south and from the west, the Lake attracted all, for in ancient times it bustled absolutely with every kind of fish, and the bones that we have found of whales suggests behemoths larger than any inland whale today, save perhaps the Archdeacon of Titarkulan (a note to censors: you should not remove this portion, as to be compared to a whale to the people of the Hamgad Shore is to be glorified, and therefore I am only praising the Archdeacon of Titarkulan for his closeness to this enormous glory).
In this period men lived primarily off of fish, and the beasts that they could run down or penetrate with spears of bone and stone. This might have endangered the whole of the ecosystem, for moa, haakwai eagle, elephant, whale, goat and every other beast large enough to eat was the target of these free-ranging spearthrowers, and without them the land would be much poorer indeed.
But a general decline of all these creatures demanded an alternative to impending starvation, and those who arrived here began to cultivate in the rainy seasons those essential plants we know today: Amaranth, the immortal flower, the red and yellow yam which planted together can yield enough along for a whole village to survive the harshest winter, and tef, which planted in the highlands needs little tending but the nourishment of rain. On Baalon they first fed from the cones of the ironwood tree, which in those days had a much smaller and more bitter flesh, but still could maintain the body against the threat of famine, whose bark could be fashioned into armor and whose trunk was excellent as the base of a canoe.
In time, too, those animals who strayed close enough to the gardens of these people were tamed and brought into the fold as they had not been since creation, among them: moa and kiwi for their eggs, feathers, and their fine leathery hides, dogs for their companionship and in those days their tangy meat, goats for their milk and mutton, and on the islands even the humble eel, for its oil, skin and nutritious meat, to be cultivated in enclosed pools built from dirt at the edge of Hamgad Shore.
At first they moved about, migrating either from island to another island, but at Baalon they settled first permanently in that place which would be the greatest of this people's places. I cannot tell if they were much more interesting than the villagers today, but they found just as much a paradise, and from here they could establish themselves safely in one place. But with that came surplus, extra food, the growth of population, the emergence of those who might need not work all day for their own labour.
And from this cycle, ever accelerating, ever tightening, a revelation: a home that could grow into a town, and a town that might grow perhaps into a city. And for this bounty, this glorious emergence from the shadow of the fall from heaven, there would need to be congratulations. The first people looked towards the sky and stars, and the rain which kept them fed, and the lake that all surrounded them, and the ground beneath their feet, and first painted the symbols of great and hallowed divinity. It is around the temples that the settlements all form, and it is to the temples that the greatest of their works were dedicated.
On the Gods and Culture of this People
But who were the Gods they worshipped? What heathen ways did they practice, and in what ways did they stray from the truth? The constructive force would guide them closer on the path to heaven, but this close to the fall the fraction of the Truth that they held would have been tiny, smaller even than the funds of a High Priest when he finds himself passing by a beggar. And indeed, nothing of their ways can be recognized today. They depicted sacral figures on stone walls and pottery and in the midst of their temple with great tusks, or circle-lakes that reached out spider-tentacles, or behemoth whales that swallowed the men who exalted them. The worshippers were depicted wholly as afraid, their wide clamshell eyes frozen in a moment of otherwordly horror, comparable perhaps only to the face of my mother when I told her I wanted to elope with a nun I met on an obscure island so that we might publish a report together.
My colleague, the abbot Majukani, found at the site of Haj Hamani opened a terrible crack into the dark side of this ancient world with its worshippers so frozen in terror. Digging at the edge of a considerable settlement of perhaps two or three thousands, he found a tomb in a shaft deep underground, and a warrior buried inside still within the armor of burnt ironwood that he had adorned in life, inside the great canoe that he called his propery. But all around him too was buried everything that he had owned, among them his herd of domesticated moa, the cruel weapons of bone and teeth and ivory that so define the bounty of the lake and at last the skeletons of those who had been his servants or his family buried all at once in a great commotion, piled together with their heads caved in, likely by clubs of stone and black obsidian. This was the fate of those who served the great and mighty of the silent people of Baalon - to not outlive their master to which they had been chained to servile love and eternal allegiance.
But we cannot judge these people, for they knew not what they did save for the little fragments of the revelation that God had seen fit to grant to them. It is by their hand that the world we inhabit now was made, for we know here that here, before all, are the strata that reveals agricultural prowess, the reveals the domestication of the moa that is not yet ready to be ridden but can be used as a beast of burden, of the first artisan tools to glorify God and the act of human creation. It is here, and not the Hadit, where the thing we can call civilization first begins, where the misty morning haze of history can begin dawn. And all before writing, before the tools of metal and the coming of the emmer wheat and the oxen's mighty plough, here they were, growing and shifting and expanding their domains. Their canoes cut all across the lake, bringing their culture and their implements with them, spreading human knowledge and the light of illumination to peoples still struggling from the shadow of the fall, drawing into their domain those who might kneel in awe of the terror of the great beyond with them and be buried in their ornate tombs.
On the End of the Beginning
And then, like all things, they came to an end. It is at Yarnaj, one of their great hubs of the northwest of the lake, where we have found so many of those fright-frozen figurines in extraordinary colors, where we also find the first evidence of the collapse of this mystic people. Suddenly, a break in the record, a great line of soot that cuts through the merged and fused mud-brick and stone and petrified ironwood of this ancient people. We know not how, we know not why, but this place fell to the fires of the destructive force that swept them all aside, one by one by one. Haj Hamani and also Old Amurru fall soon too, and then at last, Baalon itself is burned, and the silent people disappear for once and for all, replaced in time by motifs that we recognize today as the first glimmers of the time before the flood.
Perhaps not all who had been buried like the servants at Haj Hamani so easily accepted their fate, or perhaps disasters such as famines or the reversal of the western monsoon dried up the rains these dry-farming people so depended on. Perhaps the growth of tef cultivation on the great plateaus lead to the expansion of a more nomadic people, who did not need to listen to the fearful priests and their canoe-plying warriors, and turned against the towns which they had left behind. Perhaps the coming of the moa rider, which reveals itself in the cave reliefs of the Ischak at the end of this period, disrupted a society which had been based on the control of the temples to till the land for their enigmatic betters.
Very little is yet known of these people, for they have so far refused to speak to us and perhaps never will, and without better methods of dating and understanding of the connections of each era of Baalon in time, everything appears a jumble, where our only hint is the emergence of one method of pottery or another, hardly satisfying to lay down definitions of the most truthful progression of events. But we know now, thanks to me, and to Halavani Dina, and the village of old Takan-Baal, that they were here and then all at once they disappeared into the mists of the now-vanished world.
All of this was published in a report to the Monks of Sediment, with myself as the author, my new wife Halavani Dina as co-author (it had been after all her idea to marry to get around publishing restrictions for those with witches' lineages), and the village as contributors, with evidence gathered over two years of nearly surreptitious digging in which we were able to convince the villagers not to slip the news not by lying to them about some curse but simply by telling them the truth: that those who would benefit from this knowledge had no interest in their own wellbeing but would instead destroy the work that we had done together.
Indeed, many great and powerful people depended on the lie of a past that had been studiously maintained by generations of lazy and uncreative scholars, and so soon as our report was published, we were summoned to Nachivan by the Great Synod. There, to Halavani Dina's unabashed delight and my abject terror, we were charged with crimes against the Divine Truth and a general affront against the Patriarchate that would be constituted as High Blasphemy.
As I contemplated the possibility of a life as a penitent or even worse, Dina patted me on the back and remarked that it was fine of them to bring us to the capital so we can better celebrate our honeymoon. Whether I would have wished to or not, the war to unveil our true history had just been declared.
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Squidfam
Functionary of the Gender-Communist Party
- Location
- Atlantis, Sweden
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Love him or hate him, he's spitting straight facts
ThatGazzer
Minds Eye Bind
- Location
- PNW
- Pronouns
- They/Them
'you, you're my little bitch boy now.'