I can’t help but wonder what it must have felt like to walk the aimless streets of late-feudalism. What measure of life would remain after being cursed to live and die in an interstitial era? Would it feel familiar?
The once proud faces of a people with conviction, replaced with vague indifference and fear. Never have I seen such a struggle for life, such callused hands and minds, yet the products of their toiling seem to vanish into air. Their dreams died long ago, yet they carry on like the undead.
The meager luxuries afforded by our rulers are crumbling around us. Trinkets bestowed to placate, but leave wanting for a soul. I see the stockpiles, what we made for them, the fruits of our being, our loathsome surplus once a source of the nation’s pride decaying in unattainability. The common people lay awake in shared quarters above full and dusty storehouses, terrified one night yet they may sleep on the city’s neglected streets.
The sovereign words no longer sound inspired. Self-temperament cannot appear virtuous when surrounded by barren fields. How could one be called to devotion in a land devoid of generosity? The words of the priests ring hollow. There is no inspiration, they are as lost as we.
We live in a world between worlds. All around I see the ruins of a bygone era and the specters of a better world strangled in its crib. The temples to the old gods still stand as if lost in time, but we do not know whether to congregate or flee when neither provides salvation. Congregate with whom and flee to where? Our humble commons have all been seized. In their place stand gaudy monuments to the new God, the new state, the almighty coin. Their armored doors, stronger than dungeon bars, keep us out and seal the new world within. We are left in the cold with our fellow alienated, disinterested, preoccupied tenants.
The merchants for which the old world was cast aside are floundering at the realization of their emerging lot. A new serfdom ready and willing to invoke the Spirit of History and march onwards towards progress, but still haunted by the genocide of the slaves that build their world. Vassals convinced of their own lordship, ready to assume individualized tyranny, though they rule over lifeless dirt and serve new invisible masters.
The peasantry, those forgotten people outside the castle walls. Their labor unwanted, they continue to search for their enclosed and confiscated land. They are hungry and though they are surrounded by subsistence, it remains out of reach, behind lock and key and stained-glass panes.
Behind plates of armor stand the keepers of our dull order. The chivalrous knighthood soon to become romanticized. We live in the torment of the order’s reality. Working to forge swords to be pointed at the throats of those who refuse servitude. Our honorable imperial legions, weary of conquest, return home and with them their yearning for servitude and death. Content with their subjugation, their campaigns turn towards disorder and the unordinary.
Our sciences are stale and lifeless. The pews of academia sparse and deserted. Our tired formulas could not conceive a better world. Our sophistic debates only obscured. In service of the crown, we ceased looking towards the heavens and lost ourselves in alchemy. We reclaimed ancient teachings only to corrupt them with our modern superstitions.
Our world once stable has nonetheless shifted under our feet. Kept so long in the dark, we lack the vision to see the causes of our failure. The social vail is tattered and underneath we see the winding, serpentining flow of animism. All-powerful, ever-present nature has come knocking once again. We see our fingerprints upon it and, at last, its fingerprints on us.
Yet somewhere there is still decadence. We are force-fed the stories. We see renditions of the banquets. We’re sang epics of the nobility. Unwittingly, they’ve shown life still exists and slowly the feeling rises that it has been deliberately kept from us. The guards are asleep at their posts, God no longer protects them, and the righteous anger mounts higher and higher every passing day.
Where are our lords — voices once so bold, now faint in the distance? We see the frailty of the gentry all too clearly. These are God’s chosen? Surely it could not be so. Those so blind to their own ineptitude could never be town criers. No single utterance within their ivory towers could be so profound as to deserve proclamation. We now must take up their discarded mantle and become purveyors of our own destiny.
We live in the time before we’ve even realized what we had is gone. We were never taught to look ahead and up from the ground at one another. We pray that we live to see the new world ushered in, but we are not hopeful. The old way is dying, but the new way has not yet arrived. Will we hold our breaths or breathe rageful fire? Will we dig wells or smelt chalices?
We live between the Bastille and the House of Lords. Between familiar barbarism and inevitable emancipation. Between dead Gods. In withered bodies not yet reclaimed by Geist.
Only through the frays does the future become clear. Only at the threshold of the new valley does our path up trails and down mountains appear briefly before being lost once again.
Only now are we offered the choice between an enlightened or a dark age. Our time is not interstitial, wedged between futures, but fulcrum, like Atlas, with worlds upon our shoulders.
Soon the scales will fall from your eyes. The old legends will lose their shine. The marketplace will grow to displace even the artisans. The castle walls will obscure the painter’s subject.
You will live to see the hideous vertex of our moment. You must choose to revel in it or descend into nihilism.
Welcome to the inverted zenith of fringe history. Where tabula rasa becomes tableau. Where actions small and grand, amplified across time, create inconceivable futures.