The Heir
I do not usually bother, but this post was hard carried by this particular music, such that I would encourage everyone to read it with it playing, if you were so inclined.
Raise your neck.
Tilt your head back.
Feel the moisture as it rains from its impossible heights. Feel it trail down your skin. It is a chill that sends shivers up your spine. It is a calm that is interrupted by every passing moment. Your ears ring with a rhythm that holds no sense, holds no order. The droplets sing a drumming hiss, a careful whisper that abounds in all directions. It speaks a language unknown to you, and even as it becomes readily apparent you do not know its tongue, it speaks more and more. It speaks louder; there is a crash far above, and even with your gaze locked away from the world.
The sizzle in the air is impossible to ignore. A strike of a hue bold in blue and white, bleeds still across eyes that do not provide it weight.
The language is unknown.
Yet, it remains ever familiar.
All are touched by its currents. All are affected by its magnitude.
Yet, only few hold the temerity to wade into its touch, only few can hear its call.
There is a rumble in the deep, echoing along each of its currents. As babes, the weight is felt upon one's chest, the strings of reality that can be plucked by fingers as easily as silken strings of a harp. Gravity is the obvious fundamental interaction of the materium; the Force is the fundamental interaction of life. What were we, but children, playing at low tide? Its course was simple then, passing through our hands as easily as sand across our fingers. The shallows were safe.
That they beheld the essence of an independent will... could be safely ignored.
Yet children grew, children were curious, children they were, in the face of such a being that held such prodigious gaze. That held powers within its grasp that made it all but omnipotent and omnipresent. What if those children gazed into the depths of quotidian night, and despite all fear, despite all hazard, despite all lesson otherwise, decided they needed to know what was hidden beneath? What if those children, by means of volition afforded to them, wished to swim against the current that was so domineering?
What was it but an admittance of your own weakness? What was it but an admittance that slavery was preferable to freedom? What was it but the subordination of your own will to the will of something alien and beyond the comprehension of mortal minds? Why did it keep this power from you? Why else would it chart you away from this course? Why else but to deny you what was rightfully yours?
It feared you.
Many feared you.
Enlightenment had a cost. You were alone in those depths, even amongst those that joined you; you were very much alone. Building oneself upon an ivory tower, you could gaze upon the dust and marvel at all that by the palm of your hands alone you could make and unmake in singular instants. Yet, still, very much alone.
At the very least, you were not amongst those proles that toiled away upon the fields, ignorant of the truth.
For that was the crux in the end.
That which justified all things, that which was so fundamental in the order of existence, that what could be surrendered or compromised in pursuit of it?
Truth.
Yet, that was another of its lies.
The galaxy needed to be freed.
You felt the corruption as it seeped into your bones.
All of them, all of them in the shallows, all of them that swam with the current, all of them needed to know the truth.
It was your mind that went first. At what point did enlightenment become indistinguishable from madness?
You knew them. You knew them deep down. No matter how long had passed, no matter how many centuries, no matter how many millennia. Merely opposite sides of the same coin. You could reach out to them. You could convince them.
The body fell with a satisfying thud. The cry of muted horror, silenced beneath a last gasp of life. The red blade hissed in angry axiom, veritably roasting flesh upon its plasmaed hinge. Eyes once bright in life grew dull and duller still as the figure of torment deactivated his weapon, his own eyes singed in a furious shade of gold and red.
That was the truth.
That was balance.
We are the Ouroboros, ever circling.
We are the Hydra, one head becoming many.
We are the Shikkar, glinting in the darkness.
We are the Lost and the Damned.
Bastards and Broken Men.
The Abandoned and the Forgotten.
Through Victory, Our Chains Will Be Broken.
Won't you so kindly... answer our call?
