Why can I not stop thinking of concepts? WHY??!
Small Mercies
Small: Adjective.
1: Little in size
2: Few in number or little in amount
3: Unimportant, not worth mentioning (Old World Slang)Mercy: Noun.
1: Kind or forgiving treatment of someone who could be treated harshly
2: Kindness or help given to people who are in a very bad or desperate situation
3: A mercenary (New World Slang) These are brave new worlds, and no god ever shaped them for the meek. The endless run of centuries has carved and recarved history, running through the same paths and deep grooves that shaped the endless centuries before. The carvers changed, the tools changed, the audience changed, but the work runs ever on. We live, we love, we strive. We kill, we hate, we die. Small, ugly, misshapen lives, yet they seem to be all humanity has ever sought to carve. Points of beauty, framed by irredeemable flaws.
We left the cradle of one world centuries ago, perhaps tens of centuries ago. Time has become a difficult thing to measure. We flung ourselves into the weft of the universe, relying on pathless tracks jointed by quantum leaps to make our way back home again. Not everyone made it back home, but not all of those who lost themselves to endless stars did die. The sprawl of Earth, the fabled homeworld, grew in size. Those that were once nations of one world began to spread across the heavens, growing endlessly. Growing endlessly even as cancer spread from within. War never really stopped, not when we were so large. Even on fabled Earth, there was always war, always a battle. Even when we were so few that our numbers could be measured to within an accuracy of a few million, there was never a moment undisturbed by the rage of gunfire, never a second that did not hold the scream of the dying. What did we think would happen? Did we think there would be peace when we hurled ourselves into the sky?
If we did, we were fools.
Time passed. Our methods of travel advanced, and we no longer relied on the quicksilver jumps and paths that once were our pinnacle. Lost empires were re-united, and our joyful embrace to see our lost brothers only served to hide the daggers in our sleeves. Nations broke, reformed, burned the skies, and broke again. The years turned, and pioneers continued the march of colonization endlessly while the empires their children wrought decayed and broke apart behind them. Time became fluid, places became fluid, names became fluid. The capital of every great empire was Earth, and every great empire had lasted since the beginning of colonization. One empire might have actually contained fabled Earth, but if they did, they wouldn't have known. We made so much history, the history of a thousand new worlds and a hundred civilizations, that the history of one world, and the meager handful of civilizations that had once inhabited it was lost. It didn't matter. Perhaps it never did. What the most powerful empire said was the truth, everything else, propaganda and deception.
Those that live now are the children of a thousand empires, a blend of old world races and new world engineering. For the most part, they live their lives. Some live as kings, with technology and power unimaginable to the first souls that left fabled Earth, but others live less ably, primitive and backward even by the standards of the souls of old. Humanity as a single race still lives, within accountable deviation, but the great dream of the human race as a single people... That has been shattered, lost forever. It was a very foolish dream.
There have, however, always been those people who sought to carve their own lives, to make their own paths. The stroke that guides the carving of humanity is not the stroke that guides the individual and, if only for a brief time, heroes have escaped the worn groove that has been cut into history. In the old world, there was little room for these people, little freedom for the different. Now... those that would have been criminals and treasonous revolutionaries, they are assets. Mercenaries, smugglers, freelancers, privateers, bootstrappers, a thousand different names for the people who resist the tie to any one empire, to any home but the one they create. They are the bastard children of the stars, and you are one of them.
Author
Topic: Roller's Block (RTD Brainstorming Thread) (HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY) (Derm is 5k) (Read 699477 times)