Philosphitect Lurian Priamat
There was once a civilization whose philosophy prized a single question above all others; what do you want? That was they said, the way to know one’s self, to examine at length one’s own desires to consider them and put them in place, to meditate on these matters until everything became clear. To know one’s own desires and then to take action upon these.
For a culture, that is easier than a single person. I would tender that we know what we want. We want peace, prosperity, love, laughter and the leisure in which to enjoy them. That is not the problem. We know many ways to achieve these things, and those of us who have joined this cultural movement that disguises itself as a single culture know it better than most.
We have taken the precepts and sworn the oaths, but we understand even then that our vision is flawed, and our desires are never so perfect.
That’s when our answer becomes something that we find difficult; we want to undo what has been set down. This is possible, of course as any child can tell you, particularly those who enjoy adventure tales. But responsibilities prevent the use of such things in all but the most egregious circumstances.
There are no shortage of things that we would rather have undone; the end of the Rashan, the unmaking of the Old Kind, as our Yldari comrades would say. Much and more lies behind our culture that if we had the luxury of unraveling our mistakes, we would pick and twist at the tapestry of our history until nothing was left but sundered threads. A river of sorrows carried us here, and here at last we can at leisure rest a while and think.
We are a people who have tried to undo some of the wrongs of the past, those within our power to do so. The Silvae, Yldari, and others among us would attest to that, even while they remind us that our efforts are yet inadequate, incomplete and best considered a work in progress.
There is a phrase, cruelty in its words, that those who have opposed us have become archeology. We bring our children to the mortuary worlds and the barren plains of our many genocides, not just those conducted by the first Great Civilization but others besides. We tell ourselves that we seek to set right what has been done wrong.
We know no better way to do this than to build, we will not restore the past as it was.
What then of broken friendships? We can make those; why can we not mend them?
Some do not understand what has happened between us and the people of Allanea, what has become of our friendship.
For them I will summarize with brevity. Our people and theirs act from strong beliefs, we are moralists, and for a span of generations we sought to bring an end to slavery, and many other crimes.
In the land of D'hɑlbrisir, we both found a people in need of our help in the wake of a cruel genocide.
Sadly, we found two different peoples there. They found the royals and nobles of the land, we found others.
In the neighboring land of Sylandral, we acted unfairly, even when acting from our principles.
It doesn’t matter whose cause is right, what matters is that this division came before us, and created a rift between us that has torn relations apart, and attempts to repair relations are like trying to sieze the rain.
How do we acknowledge that our principles have led us somewhere we do not want to be, to people whose principles are no less dearly held than ours?
With difficulty, my esteemed colleagues.
And yet, how hard can it be?
For a culture, that is easier than a single person. I would tender that we know what we want. We want peace, prosperity, love, laughter and the leisure in which to enjoy them. That is not the problem. We know many ways to achieve these things, and those of us who have joined this cultural movement that disguises itself as a single culture know it better than most.
We have taken the precepts and sworn the oaths, but we understand even then that our vision is flawed, and our desires are never so perfect.
That’s when our answer becomes something that we find difficult; we want to undo what has been set down. This is possible, of course as any child can tell you, particularly those who enjoy adventure tales. But responsibilities prevent the use of such things in all but the most egregious circumstances.
There are no shortage of things that we would rather have undone; the end of the Rashan, the unmaking of the Old Kind, as our Yldari comrades would say. Much and more lies behind our culture that if we had the luxury of unraveling our mistakes, we would pick and twist at the tapestry of our history until nothing was left but sundered threads. A river of sorrows carried us here, and here at last we can at leisure rest a while and think.
We are a people who have tried to undo some of the wrongs of the past, those within our power to do so. The Silvae, Yldari, and others among us would attest to that, even while they remind us that our efforts are yet inadequate, incomplete and best considered a work in progress.
There is a phrase, cruelty in its words, that those who have opposed us have become archeology. We bring our children to the mortuary worlds and the barren plains of our many genocides, not just those conducted by the first Great Civilization but others besides. We tell ourselves that we seek to set right what has been done wrong.
We know no better way to do this than to build, we will not restore the past as it was.
What then of broken friendships? We can make those; why can we not mend them?
Some do not understand what has happened between us and the people of Allanea, what has become of our friendship.
For them I will summarize with brevity. Our people and theirs act from strong beliefs, we are moralists, and for a span of generations we sought to bring an end to slavery, and many other crimes.
In the land of D'hɑlbrisir, we both found a people in need of our help in the wake of a cruel genocide.
Sadly, we found two different peoples there. They found the royals and nobles of the land, we found others.
In the neighboring land of Sylandral, we acted unfairly, even when acting from our principles.
It doesn’t matter whose cause is right, what matters is that this division came before us, and created a rift between us that has torn relations apart, and attempts to repair relations are like trying to sieze the rain.
How do we acknowledge that our principles have led us somewhere we do not want to be, to people whose principles are no less dearly held than ours?
With difficulty, my esteemed colleagues.
And yet, how hard can it be?
Philosphitect Lurian Priamat ita Frith
"A Study in Pride"
Verbal Address to the Sixty Third Concord Concilium
"A Study in Pride"
Verbal Address to the Sixty Third Concord Concilium
The Palace of Peace, Duat
The Palace of Peace was a structure that everyone knew on Duat, perhaps it was best described as the home of the Great Civilization for it was a structure that housed many of the most important public rituals.
It was replicated on every core world and every major settlement, to some greater or lesser degree, but this was the second and greatest of them, the oldest, that of the old Seroi Republic was now only used for the formal investitures of the Triarch and otherwise a tourist attraction and not a working building.
The ancient Romanii had their Forum, the Greki their Agora, this was the site of the same heart of activity for the entire culture of billions. For all that it was a plainly underwhelming building in its exterior, a mountainous cathedrum of mellow golden stone that rose lit on its sides against the dark hours of night. The actual precincts of the Palace had long expanded past this structure, taking in markets and central buildings on all sides.
This central open area on all sides of the single core building was paved in flagstones of textured glass reflecting its brightness like a limpid pool before the building, which was by many standards ugly, it certainly did not have the fluting elegance of many others nearby, instead it looked like something between a pyramid and a hive-city, towering and bulky, but not without its charm, even if it was widely thought that many far prettier buildings existed.
__ __ __
Djerfri Paneer walked across the plaza, hands deep in his pockets. He nodded in courtesy to those they passed for though the palace sat at the heart of Tephet-Sheta’s commercial districts it was not a place for rushing, but one to be seen. Djerfri did not mind the slow pace, the outskirts of the Palace bustled with lightweight fliers whose aerodynamic shapes always put him in mind of teardrops or eggs.
“Eisen,” he said, as he saw another figure from his acquaintance, who differed greatly from his own appearance.
The halls of the people might be a place to be seen, but Djeri was never one to dress to the standards of others, and he wore tight black leggings and a wide jacket with the broad circle of the galaxy set on its back, it was a resolutely low-tech attire and one that proclaimed where he came from to any that saw it. He didn’t stand on ceremony, and that was the point.
“Djeri,” his companion said, by comparison the ancestral-human wore garments that showed belonging not to a subculture but to the culture as a whole, robes of starweave thread that billowed slightly with each move. They exchanged a subtle half bow each and clasped hands to one another’s wrists in a brotherhood clasp.
“How’s Aline?” he asked.
“Good,” he said, “she’s gone back to the stables,” she said, “taking up riding again out on Aquana,” she said, “she’ll be looking to be here at the twenty third hour.
“Oh, she’s coming to hear the Ranisath thing?”
“Pretty much, so of course,” he laughed, “I have to be here, she’s hoping to get a floor seat.”
The building was a maze, and its entrances required the use of a wayfinder scarab to navigate, the chirruping construct greeted them and wended its way through the crowds with its hyperplastek wings flurr-ing through the air as they passed mezzopicts of the Great Civilization’s founders and influencers.
This was not a purely political space, and science, art and commercial achievements were celebrated in blazoned colours that marked out the successes.
The builders of the first modern Inertialess Drive, the Iterator-missionaries who brought the precepts to the Skyriver Galaxy, the explorers of the Fornax cluster and the Traders who had brought the first of the riches of Parnassus and the Dream Realms to the Great Civilization were celebrated on the walls.
The Palace of Peace was bigger within than without, spread across several locations at once, from the depths of the seas on Garm to the hydrogen-clouds of Agruan and the Magma Cities of Netu.
There was the diversity that one would expect of any group, though Djeri and Eisen were both human, they were different in many ways, and even so they had more in common than many of those who occupied the building.
They stopped in a bar on the way, to drink and smoke, the wayfinder had taken their details on entry, and it was enough to let the building know where one wanted to be, sadly, seats were drawn by lot and while one could book, one could only book for others who were coming to the building, and a few others; late arrival meant worse seats, even here.
__ __ __
Lady-Senator Windthorn
She moved about the space, without the need for notes, her mind’s neural companion-lace provided all that she needed there, and she spoke in suave cosmopolitan New Standard Necrontyr, the public language of the Great Civilization, which took its lineage from the Dynastic speech of the Thurasids. Like its ancestors it was a very precise language, without ambiguity, with context tenses that showed how one had come into possession of a thing if believed to be factual, that made much rhetoric difficult to impute; one could never leave an audience to draw a fact from inference within the properly spoken New Standard tongue, it had several evidential tenses.
It was a language of scientists, not poets, but Elsina made it sing anyway.
“We must acknowledge that while we can afford to set our minds on higher goals, we cannot lose sight of our other responsibilities, introspection must not become the drive of our culture; we remember the Angelins, and the myriad of cultures whose goals, while commendable have rendered them small, insignificant,” she said, her hair, pigment-combed to a silvery white for the season, “rapprochement is a necessity.”
“If we cannot have Rapprochement, we cannot move, we cannot breathe. The War of Three Giants has not come to pass, but we cannot deny that there are those that want it.
“We need this, it has already gridlocked us in beliefs that are unconscionable, and it is up to us, here on Duat, and elsewhere to ask, what will we do to bring Rapprochement about?”
“But let us ask, first. Why do we need Rapprochement? I will present now, arguments to that effect. And then we may weigh them against pride...
“The first is one of cost, we keep a million necrons and attendant forces in Crystal Spires and the Satrapy to dissuade Allanean aggression, even for us this is a considerable waste of resources; we could with the same resources have brought forward our plans in the Webway, or made greater inroads into dealing with other issues in the region, instead of keeping one eye open for betrayal; a lasting peace would mean we could reassign a portion of those forces to tasks that everyone agrees are more valuable.
“The continued cold relations between ourselves and the Allaneans are a cause of considerable distress to others, notably the people of Crystal Spires, who believe that the Allaneans would, if they could, restore the oppression of a caste system in their country. They’re not wrong, of course. And it is not only just that we prevent his, but it is imperative for us to do so. We would make people sleep easier if we replaced force with peace.
“It is also a fact that fear of this aggression has driven the Spirean sentiment towards the desire to be a protectorate of the Great Civilization. Is that what we want our future to be based upon, fear and despair, those who join us for freedom from menaces to feel that forever that menace sits outside our borders ready to destroy them? We welcome all, of course we do, but we need not encourage fear even beyond our borders. It is better to found something that will last than to rely on temporary politics.
“It’s clear to us all that we will either have Rapprochement or we will have to consider the situation totally unsalvageable. There are those who see the argument between us manifests clearly in the issue of the nobility of old Crystal Spires as one of our own making, and while we disagree with this, we must remember that while it is our first duty to protect the people of Crystal Spires, we can do that best by bringing a lasting peace.
“The peace dividend; those soldiers we are keeping in Crystal Spires can be freed to other tasks, be they helping prepare the Myst continent for the Golden Path or to venture to any of a thousand other tasks.
“An answer is simple; so simple that we can easily embrace it, we have flirted with the idea a hundred times. We admit that we are not perfect,” she paused, at last her gestures became impassioned, “We aren’t, of course,” she said, in a tense that said it was known to her to the highest degree. “We must proceed on that basis.”
__ __ __
Djerfri watched indifferently, Elsina Windthorn was well known, but she spoke only to focus the mind on what most of the audience already felt, they knew the consequences and they knew the ease with which such things could be resolved. A shimmer-winged scarab deposited a tall glass of carif, a carbonated cocoa drink, and he watched the stage carefully.
The next figure was well known, a figure from education and childhood. Ranisath Cuilahîr Cuilévaher nos Fëanor, Mephet’ran, ARtemorra, Mohagg, Harrimoch, and many other names, it had almost as many titles as it had names, The Deceiver, the Jackal God, Emperor of Thelas, and last and most significantly, Supreme Coordinator of the Great Civilization. He did not hold that role now, but still he was escorted by a troop of the Triarch Praetorians who acted as Lictors for the highest officials of the Civilization.
He sat up slightly in his seat, and inhaled. There was something magnetic about the creature, even in a benign elven form.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, the creature was phenomenally powerful, of course; if Ranisath wished it he could unmake the entire world on which they sat, and while there were damocles protocols to avenge such a rampancy, it would not make him nor any of the other half-million people watching this event, or the half-billion on the rest of Duat any less dead.
But there was more than that. There was a fascination, to watch a C’tan was to watch history itself. The creature was on one level a stellar parasite, a being that existed by nature within stellar photospheres, but that was only part of it. They were titans, primordial beings, energy-forms coalesced from the cosmos’ creation, there were many stellar-dwellers, but they were on a different order of magnitude; imprints of creation striated across the structure of the cosmos, and salvators of the material realm from the dissolution of vacuum decay.
The being before him had existed in the darkness of on the far distant past, it had lead empires to ruin, and perhaps even meant to lead this one to ruin. A primitive part of his mind wanted to be away from the thing, on another world entirely, preferably in another star system.
He looked positively prosaic, seven feet of broad shouldered humanoid with dark hair that fell in pleats down his back, dark against the silver coat he wore over necrontyr-blood blue robes adorned with metagold. He could be any other man; only the wide crest-crown of black and gold he wore marked him from others, along with a sort of holo-star handsomeness and the blue eyes that spoke of something profoundly different.
They settled on Djerfri and he felt a flutter of horror in the moment, and of ambition, even though the chamber was shielded from every form of effector, there was something knowing about the creature.
He wanted to scream, to kill it, to destroy the being at once, whatever the cost. He knew that everyone else in the room felt something not dissimilar.
All antipathy melted like butter striking a skillet as it lifted its hands to speak.
“I am not here to offer a policy, our leaders are wise enough to draft policies. Nor am I here to return to public life, I should not be trusted as once I was; we are beyond that now, and that is well. Anyone can lead this culture, and it has no need of god-kings.
“I am not here to ask to lead you again. I am the least suitable for that task. We have been brought to this by my errors, and I have learned well the cost of hubris time and again; an era’s sundering has taught me this, little time has passed by comparison. But I have learned.
“I have traveled since I left office, and I have considered all my failings. I have sundered parts of myself to learn from every angle.
“I have ridden a chicken-bus up country in Crystal Spires, and eaten starched noodles in the small towns on the Altean border, I have bought land in Allanea and sold it, spun myself a billion dollars and lost it for the experience, and I have this to say.
“We must consider our policies, what they have brought us and where they will lead us. Already it has become clear that more of our knowledge must spread, as we have known, the laws of the cosmos require it.
“It is time to set aside false humility, and simply consider who and what we are; for a long time it has been our policy to ignore this problem. Now we must accept that the price of remaining silent cannot stand.
“We have feared to engage with this issue would be seen as weakness. No more. No more can we keep pride. I know that all of you want an end, one that is clean handed, one that all can accept.
“We are a people who build, and we stare across a gulf. Let us build a bridge. Join with me; empower the senate to compose a True Offer; let us have at last an end to this strife. I call for a the Senate to issue a final act!"
Transmission Source: Telissat Amris, Supreme Hierarch of the Great Civilization.
Destination: Cassiopeia Blaken-Kazansky, Empress of Greater Prussia and the Thousand States, Queen of Allanea, Alexander Blaken-Kazansky, Emperor of Greater Prussia and the Thousand States, King of Allanea
Subject: Mystria
Security: Nil - Public Disclosure
Estimable Cousin and Battle-Brother,
I am empowered by special act of the Senate to write you to discuss the matter of our estrangement. We have discussed it before, but I now have in hand the authority to take any means necessary short of betraying the trust placed in us by the Spirean people to forge a settlement with you.
We would have a normalization of relations between your great nation and our own, and we would like to put to rest the ghosts of our Mystrian treachery. I will happily admit to the misdeeds of our government in the matter of the Treefolken invasion and agree that this has proved neither wise nor beneficial in the long term, while your own efforts have brought fruit. For our treason to the principle of the alliance that bound us we are deeply sorry.
Furthermore while we support absolutely our allies in Crystal Spires, for we have learned since the days when our promises came with less intent behind them, and particularly their sovereign right to popular government, we are also aware that the expulsion of a group of several thousand nobles has struck a chord with you that has shaped policy, and we would see you content and satisfied if we can.
Thereby empowered by the Final Decree of the Senate to bring a permanent resolution to the situation in Mystria, I would like to ask you one question.
What do you want?
I have a number of options available that have been put to me. If you want a land for nobles to rule, we will happily geoform and prepare a world to match their desires, using every art at our disposal to make its cities as harmonious as Caltris and to shine as Vinyatírion in the Sixth Age, and anyone they wish to go to it may do so, and you may rain gifts on it until the stars grow cold with our blessings.
If you want us to compensate them, I now have a mandate to pay ten times the loss of every single item and artefact, taken in Crystal Spires from any entitled person since the day of the revolution.
I am empowered to make offers of great value, such as have never yet been provisioned, in this I am a dictator of a small sort; describe to me what you want from us, and we will see it done. If you wish, you may ask the displaced entitled who care to participate what they would have of us, and it will be made or provided.
In exchange we ask only one thing. A return to your friendship; that is the value of our friendship, test it and see that it is not strained by your imagination.
End all state rhetoric against Crystal Spires, end sabre-rattling and end sanctions, return all relations to equanimity and accept the hand of friendship, and I will shower gifts without limit upon you or anyone else you care to mention.
Name your price.
Telissat Amris,
Silent King
