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Political Pamphlets by the Collective Press
Subsection Arshakan Empire, Contemporary, 350 EoD, IAX
Archived as Entry 605
On Decay
By Kourosh Iaxartes
In the academies here in the North, they have arrogantly dubbed our ongoing days the Era of Decay — coming from these countless intelligent people, some of which are my friends as well as my colleagues, this is a folly and a shame. Despite the entire Arshakan Empire struggling beneath poor management like a pauper’s child, this famous rot that I’ve heard so much of was nowhere to be seen within the Brahman Magisterium. Nor here, in the halls that I’ve had both pleasure and displeasure to stray, the latter the outcome for how much people bemoan the yet greatest age ever available to be experienced. Their resplendent cities whorl with life, culture and its many gifts; their libraries are full and their weavers are skilled, their art is still bad (in public, I use the word piquant) and the food has me properly besotten, having only gotten better since last I was here. The cloudpiers have expanded outward like branches of a creeping juniper, their saplings grown in number, and a whole fleet of the birds they house dots the sky above every hold in Altalusia. In the outskirts, the common rabble live the same as they ever have, oscillating betwixt sporadic thriving and active suffering. The Dead Wave persists, as do other anomalies usually assigned to the poetic, unscientific category of ‘Blight’, but this by now is a constant comparable to the turns of Seasons.
Sat in the core of this large, yet ripening fruit as I am, my wonder is thus — What is decaying, exactly? The very devoted amongst the Imperials reason the Decay is begrudgingly self-ascribed fact (eluding to the moral character of whomever claims it) masquerading as prophesy meant to herald the end of the Arshakan Empire. While my instinct is to dismiss this stance by how obsessed with the Empire as an entity it is, assigning it hegemony over the naming convention (along with fate) of an entire Era, all that I have seen gives me no sufficient alternative either. So, should they be right, since when have respected scholars taken to outright lying, or worse; presumptions and soothsaying? Was not our prime academic maxim one of questioning and bottomless curiousity, as agreed upon by both your beloved Sangsot of Balihot and our Satya Shastri; Though doubt begets discomfort, to be certain is absurd?
This prophesy, this premature certainty, has merely bolstered the Imperial resolve. They’ve lost two Capitals in their recent past alone and are no strangers to all shades of resistance; a great span of the Empire’s existence has been spent on fashioning identity from and upon ruins, turning suffering to virtue and defeat to a cyclical, temporary reality. Thusly, to give the Empire daydreams of her ruins, of all things that are resistant to Decay like steel, stone and skeletons, is a disservice to all of us who labour to dismantle the elements that sustain her. I speak not of her government, not her armies, not her borders, not even the economy that somehow yet functions in the crossfire of all three that preceded. Any of these could disappear overnight and by the next eve, they’d be reformed to another variation of their design. Features on a visage, transmuted under the Fleshturner’s glove.
The Devahni never rebuilt their Empire, the why and how of which has gained new insight as for the freshly translated correspondence betwixt Isbiq Aplaa and imperial advisor Doorii S. Marishka of the Sunken Deva. Unusual as it was, in the Sorcerer King’s ledgers this posting has been explained over as ‘a mutual benefit’; many who know nothing of neither Isbiq Aplaa or the then new Empire, have gladly made crude assumptions by this, against the idiocy of which I shan’t even argue. Though we are no closer to filling in the situation surrounding her employment by this new material, it has allowed us to make a direct connection betwixt her thoughts and the infant Empire’s founding politics, if not for any semblance of similarity. The penance she lived in for her people’s hubris is constantly present on the pages, so overwhelming as to give emergence to all that endeavours to counter it. Isbiq Aplaa describes her ‘once proud Deva spirit’ so broken that it made him weep, and in closing to one of his notes, he writes; ‘ I have never seen such defeat. ‘
This is the marrow of the thickest vertebra on the Imperial backbone. There will be no Decay in the Arshakan Empire.
The idea of Arshaka is eternal, as the heart is, but amidst all the infinite future realities is one where her name no longer invokes War. And, failing that, another where it at the very least inspires no blind devotion and sacrifice that in its absoluteness rivals the asceticism that as of late, has gained new foothold within the electorate as well as the elected. More stone, more steel, more skeletons for our modern Age of Splendor.
I’ll end on words from Satya Shastri, spoken ages ago after the funeral rites of his youngest child;
Nothing is inevitable. Everything is possible.
About the Author & Afterword by the Press:
Kourosh Iaxartes is a scholar of Imperial history and linguistics, with tenure in the Brahman Magisterium at the time he wrote the article. He currently lives in Cindersend, having been exiled from his home in the Arshakan Empire for undisclosed reasons.
The manuscript for this work was delivered for publication by his friend Firmin Moncharmin, a chevalier, a scholar of Practical Shroud in the Applied Sciences of Crown’s Academy, and honourary member of the Magicians' Collective.
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