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July 30 - August 9, 2025
Icarium turned to him with a faint smile. ‘I am my own curse, Mappo. I have lived centuries, yet what do I know of my own past? Where are my memories? How can I judge my own life without such knowledge?’
Seven Cities was an ancient civilization, steeped in the power of antiquity, where Ascendants once walked on every trader track, every footpath, every lost road between forgotten places. It was said the sands hoarded power within their susurrating currents, that every stone had soaked up sorcery like blood, and that beneath every city lay the ruins of countless other cities, older cities, cities that went back to the First Empire itself. It was said each city rose on the backs of ghosts, the substance of spirits thick like layers of crushed bone; that each city forever wept beneath the
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‘I deal with my pain, you deal with yours.’
‘It’s a poor scholar who trusts anyone’s judgement,’ Duiker said. ‘Even and perhaps especially his own.’
Every now and then a distant scream sounded from the city’s heart. It was clear that the mutiny’s destructive ferocity had turned on itself. Freedom had been won, at the cost of everything.
Only two kinds of people die in battle, Fiddler had once said, fools and the unlucky. Trading blows with a demon was both unlucky and foolish.
Sites of battle held on to a madness, as if the blood that had soaked into the soil remembered pain and terror and held locked within it the echoes of screams and death cries.
Mockery is just hate’s patina, and every laugh is vicious.
Words can so easily glide over mayhem and terror and horror, it’s a wonder trust exists at all.
Fighting is for people who fail at everything else.’
‘Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.
‘Victory tastes sweetest in the absence of haunting memories, Bult. Savour it.’
The dead were gone through Hood’s Gate. The living were left with the pain of their passage.
It’s quite possible that his very existence is nothing more than a collection of if-this and then-that suppositions. Hood’s Abyss, maybe that’s all we all are!
‘Eventually a man reaches a point where every memory is unwelcome,’ Fiddler said, gritting his teeth. ‘I think I’ve reached that point, Trell. I’m feeling old, used up.
‘You can view the past as something like a mouldy old book. The closer you get to the beginning, the more fragmented are the pages. They veritably fall apart in your hands, and you’re left with but a handful of words – most of them in a language you can’t even understand.’
Nastiness grows like a cancer in any and every organization – human or otherwise, as you well know. And nastiness gets nastier. Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it’s easier to get used to it than carve it out.’
The Jhag was generous, compassionate. If horrors still trailed in his wake they must be ancient – youth was the time of excess, after all. This Icarium was too wise, too scarred, to tumble into power’s river of blood.
Not the first scene of horror I’ve witnessed, after all. A soldier learns to wear every kind of armour, and so long as he stays in the trade, it works well enough. Gods, I don’t think my sanity would survive peace!
The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no-one learns.
‘That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. Quote me, Duiker, and your work’s done.’
To fear the gods is to fear death. In places where men and women are dying, the gods no longer stand in the spaces in between. The soothing intercession is gone. They’ve stepped back, back through the gates, and watch from the other side. Watch and wait.
A dark shape appeared at Duiker’s side, lowered itself into a squat, held silent. After a while, Duiker said, ‘A Fist needs his rest.’ Coltaine grunted. ‘And a historian?’ ‘Never rests.’
Imagination whispered untruths that only experience could shatter.
The count of losses was a numbing litany to war’s futility. To the historian’s mind, only Hood himself could smile in triumph.
For all that scholars tried, Duiker knew there was no explanation possible for the dark currents of human thought that roiled in the wake of bloodshed.
‘Show me a mortal who is not pursued, and I’ll show you a corpse. Every hunter is hunted, every mind that knows itself has stalkers. We drive and are driven. The unknown pursues the ignorant, the truth assails every scholar wise enough to know his own ignorance, for that is the meaning of unknowable truths.’
She wondered if the gift of revelation – of discovering the meaning underlying humanity – offered nothing more than a devastating sense of futility.
It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance … all the bastion of fools.
From something delicate to something brutal, a pattern repeated through all of history. These truths weary me, down to my very soul.’
‘Damned sappers! Who invented them? Madness!’ Fiddler grinned. ‘Who invented them? Why, Kellanved, who else – who Ascended to become your god, Pust. I’d have thought you’d appreciate the irony, High Priest.’
‘Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?’ he asked. ‘All those tomes you’ve read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we’ve seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?’
‘Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks – all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.’
We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again …
Gods, our struggles are as nothing, our inner scars naught but scratches. Bless you, Hood, for your gift of mortality. I could not live as these Ascendants do – I could not so torture my soul …
He shrugged. ‘It’s our nature, isn’t it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief that simple solutions exist.
