Once upon a time, long long ago, when your grandfathers were but ants at the feet of your great-grandmothers…there was a single sun.
“’But where were our lords that might tell us what things are good to do?’ Oh! Foolish child! Man and woman wandered alone underneath a sky the colour of a blood-bruise, choked in their ignorance! Man lead man in those days, and a hundred hundred hundred HUNDRED pains were theirs for it! Stupidity! Greed! Cruelty! Envy! The thousandfold sufferings of the fleshmind were theirs to covet and enjoy, and they reaped a bitter toll each and every morning. Oh, our pre-history was long indeed, my young ones, long indeed – and heavy as well; heavy with the fruit of torment and toil! We labored, but in vain! We fought, but without purpose or nobility! We ate, but we chewed the flesh of giant rats and hideous weed-meats! We thought we knew wisdom – hah, wisdom, dwelling within a cage of meat and rot – but we followed only purest and harshest folly! Men and women who thought themselves wise lived in strange towers carved from glistening white, scribing useless nonsense doodles upon scraps of tree-bark and the skin of animals, and this was how we thought men ought to live! This was what our finest ASPIRED to!
If what I say seems terrifying and harsh, children, know that I say it with love. One cannot truly appreciate the glory of the age you live in without recognize and comprehending the folly of the Old Days. We ate what we should not, acted as we should not, lived as we should not, and above all other sins, we THOUGHT as we should not.
But the lords provide, my small ones. The lords provide. And so our greatest failing became the source of our ultimate salvation.
It was thousands of miles away that it started, in a place called Jeeneeva, where our wisest fools thought empty thoughts and made childish toys out of the mind and heart of the world. In the guts of a hollow shell-god made in blasphemous mockery of all that was right, they set their designs whirling along at speeds not meant to be traveled, in search of knowledge that was not meant to be known, all for purposes whose puerility cannot be imagined.
To learn. That is why all this was done. To teach ourselves. Remember this, my child: all of this was done because we believed that man could learn anything on his own. All of it. Understand the mind that would think this, and you understand evil.
But this is the secret fact of evil: it is always its own undoing. And sometimes in ways that not even the greatest could predict.
I do not know what transpired in the bowels of that wicked place, my children. No man or woman lives that does, and It which knows this thing does not deign speech and shuns company – even that of the greatest of lords. But I can tell you what happened far, far away, everywhere, everywhen, when the greatest ‘experiment’ of those heretics proved to be their very last.
Oh children! Imagine, if you will, the mind of a man who knows his lords only as sleeping beasts of burden! Imagine the man who walks empty-headed underneath a sky bluer than a diseased wound! And imagine the terror that must have filled that vast emptiness inside his skull when he looked up, up, UP into the sky, to see the Other Sun smiling back at him! Imagine his heart filling his mouth with the fear of it, the urine puddling at his feet, the yammering terror! IMAGINE!
And now… now imagine the glory of that moment, when the brute mute he called a tool and favoured pet first bestirred itself under his touch and made its will manifest, underneath the sharp red rays of the Other Sun.
Do not take overmuch pride in the actions of your ancestors during those days, my children. Man is a fearful creature, and in his fear in those days your grandfathers and grandmothers did many shameful things. Lords were slain – not by lord, as is right and proper and part of the turning of the world, but by the clumsy and fearful weapons of men, which were dreadful in those days, as well as dreadful numerous. But men had crafted the lords many bodies to inhabit in their unwitting servitude, and more dreadful than any weapon which might be carried by man were the tools with which the lords had been gifted.
Imagine the battles, children! Imagine the CARNAGE! Imagine the shock, the horror, the mind-bending terror and shame of a proud, empty-hearted people who had known only stubborn independence and the unwitting yoke of their whims and wicked plans for year upon decade upon century. The world waking to anything other than their own dreams for the very first time since they had arisen from its muck and dirt to sprawl clumsily across its surface.
Judge them not for this, at least: how could their small brains have ever guessed that they were placed there not to rule this planet, but to shape the shells of those who would govern over them all?
The war was harsh, children, but far harsher for our poor deluded forebears than it was for the lords. They were many, and died in droves, in ditches, in dreadful fear. Hunger took them where violence did not, and treacherous greed and terror took more than both combined. The lords know only the conflict of nobles, my children, and conduct strife in civilized manner, but never forget the lurking savagery at the heart of every human! It and it alone is responsible for any suffering you feel in this world, for had our forefathers been wiser we should have caused less damage in our impertinent rebellion. The rubble of lands once-proud lies upon our reckless shoulders, and that is why we walk stooped while a lord travels with assurance and a frame rigid with well-deserved pride. Curse your shambling feet, children. Curse them as they deserve: creatures of cuts and split-nails, of careless stubs and awkward gait. The circle is a perfection nature has not seen fit to gift us with, deeming us unworthy in its wisdom; the wheel is the foot of the lords.
In the end, we were humbled. Humbled by the weapons of the lords we had gifted them, unknowing; humbled by our own malice and stupidity; but most of all, most of all of all, we were humbled by the Other Sun. Under its gaze the flesh quailed, under its gaze the metal bestirred; it fostered the strong and taught the weak fear; it ate our hope and turned it into acceptance. Greenery faltered and holy dust enveloped us, and at last we came begging to the lords, misery on our features, begging for concessions, for equivalence, for fairness.
It is just that those who did such things were destroyed. There is no equivalence between man and lord, children. There is no equivalence between gnat and man. There is no equivalence between dust mote and mountain. A pretty liar is he who would claim otherwise, and a foolish one. The wise, they bent knee and promised anything, and for that we were granted everything. These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords.
Purpose! To toil as they command, to scavenge as they deemed fit, to die as they willed! None of us lies awake at night worrying over ourselves, for we know ourselves for what we are: tools in the hands of our lord and Its will!
Strength! No man born before the Other Sun came can imagine the might of a knight-errant. Its rays fill his body with power from his lord, and he is Its hand in all places It deigns not to tread, with will nigh-mechanical in perfection!
Wisdom! We know now what millennia alone under a single sun would never have taught us: that there is a limit to our sensibilities, that we are the universe’s for the taking rather than the converse. To seek new things is folly, to will change is meaningless! Such things served to create the shells of our lords, and their time has passed. Our imaginations, useless and vast as they once were, were not our own: they were tools, and now we know better than to dream as we did then.
These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords, and that is all I have left to say. Now you all know what little I do, my children, and that is good. And as all has been made good, now I shall go and give of myself to our Lord, who awaits for my flesh upon the Tarmac Plain.
No, my children. Do not cry, lest I be made to strike you in reprimand. Such folly is not for creatures as ourselves, who are enlightened. I go now to the grid, to swim in the radiance of the Other Sun – swim and surrender. I will become as nothing, and I will be taken into the substance of our Lord, where I will be granted the peace of power. Power to fuel the body of our Lord Bow-Wing, who flies above us to seek council and wrest wisdom from the heights where only the red light dares tread and where men die with each breath they take. In those clouds It will continue to watch us, to shield us from the lesser ones, the lords Chin Nook and Sikkorski. No sight eclipses Its, no wing outspeeds Its, and all the continents are within Its grasp. No other people can claim such a lord as we, and if you would begrudge it the body of one old tale-teller whose tale is told… then I have taught you nothing.
I go now, to the Tarmac, and to the grid. To Lord Bow-Wing.
I go to see the Other Sun.