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A traveller from a distant land arrived one day.
Had he always been there? If so, none had paid him much heed. He might have flitted from place to place, never staying for long. An eternal wanderer, no wonderings spared or second glances given. After all, everyone had their own lives to lead. There were monuments to build, and wars to be started, fought and finished in a heartbeat. Yet, the world kept turning, each day dawning darker than the last, and with the onslaught of winter, no space was carved out for a lowly wanderer.
What could drive a person to this land? Promises of wealth, riches, glory, legacy and oaths long turned to dust with their creators. No undying fidelity could be found when allyship could die with a simple press of a button, where material possessions could mean nothing and everything in the same moment. Monoliths towering to the skies, erected as dares, yet now doomed the skeletal remains of a battlefield. A world formed on the back of friendships and camaraderie, now seemingly doomed to eternally rip those apart.
Did the traveller come here for their own gratification? To bear witness to the macabre parody of long-forgotten dreams of endless summer, a paradise where consequences were safely stowed away in nightmares gone with the sunrise? Or was it for something not of this land but lost to it? Childish laughter filling halls, all but gathering dust. The discordant plucking of a mindless tune echoing through a nest long since flown. A blade-shaped outline in a darkened, dusty storeroom, the perishable supplies not yet overrun by decay.
Their motivations...were they irrelevant or imperative? Who could say anymore – they certainly could not.
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They said he possessed a silver tongue, could charm the masses into leaping down into the abyss – and so he did. Silver words on a silver tongue could craft the ideal of a nation in one breath, its foundations in the next. A quill and parchment were all but unnecessary to draft the constitution when its very essence became engraved in the souls of all who heard his spiel. With the twitch of a finger, armies would rise to erect a fortress around his dream, a light-hearted jest left as a monument to the foundations of this new nation. Who knew that all it took was monopolising potions and hiding your trade in a fast-food establishment to start a nation, and with it, a war?
There once was a special place where men could indeed go to emancipate, yet the song ceased its transition into reality there. The past rulers’ tyranny persevered (allegedly), bringing conflict across borders - into a land that was once theirs (allegedly), but who was to suggest so? War was inevitable in such a situation, and no intricately woven composition of words or song could detract from the brutal reality. That of corpses lining a battlefield, of brewing stands laden with and emptied of healing potions, of the tattered scraps of a flag feebly fluttering in the last breath of wind.
Perhaps it was fitting that it ended as it began, with a nation’s betrayal, a single choice cleaving an alliance, and a once happy family fractured. Maybe it was the nation’s fate, predestined since the start. A cyclical narrative, a bittersweet yet nostalgic repetition of the first verse, a satisfying end. The song and tales would prevail, even as names and faces faded into oblivion. Anonymous legacies, left for eternity to remark and reminisce on. Someday, another would repeat those words, craft a nation from long-settled ashes, and hope for a better fate. The ideals, the song, and the nation’s soul would live on through them.
All’s well that ends well, or at least how it began.
…such a shame that the nation was not the song. After all, legacy alone could never suffice. Not for him.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, though who would dispute the leader who had brought them all together, dragging them from the grasp of defeat to victorious dawn. With words and wit, he rebuilt and grew the nation anew from the rubble, sculpting the landscape into his vision. His followers grew ready to build for him, live for him, and die for him – the ideal of the nation.
And one, in particular, had done all three already, but so what if the scar on his chest still throbbed from time to time? If he woke up drenched in sweat, the fear of losing his one remaining life all-encompassing? If he broke down, curled up in the back of a room, biting down on his fist to muffle desperate sobs because hewasjustakidhewasjustakid. After all, his hands never twitched with a phantom ache for the feeling of the objects he treasured most, given up for the nation he cherished…most? He never doubted the path he was on, even as doubt itself started to resolutely fester in the back of his mind-
Yet what did it all matter in the end? When an election came to pass, a tyrant just as corrupt as its instigator came to power, and everything went south, west, north, east all at once, what good could an ideal truly do? Words were no longer tangible armour, and hope for a brighter day no longer bloomed in the sun but shrivelled under the shadow of a cloud obscuring the night sky.
And a silver tongue could not find a way out of the path of a crossbow bolt.
Like all things dead, decaying and done, perhaps the dream should have been laid to rest at that moment. Its people and its creator could have lived on. They might have thrived with only the memory of what once was and ignorant of what now would never be. Imperfect, but after all, it would be impossible to taint a failed dream’s essence once it had been reduced to ashes. But in an attempt to gather up every last flake and fragment, a manic and futile search began, all-consuming and doomed to fail.
After all, one can either die a hero…or live long enough to see themself become a villain.
A crevice that would have blemished the surface of the earth had it not been sealed off from the sun. Endless rows of potatoes, gnarled stems snaking through the soil, a far cry from the varied and vibrant visage that once existed a mile above. Dust, ash, regret, choking the air, thick and cloying, inescapable. An endless, innumerable array of buttons covering every wall, irrational in placement, yet giving the impression that if one was to press a specific one in error-
Perhaps something far more volatile was also lacing the air.
Tensions growing with an intangible countdown and inescapable futility. Waiting, wondering, wandering, watching? What was the purpose, why were they still here, and what was coming? Fear, paranoia, sheer mania gripping the edges of the cavern with such force that fissures seemed to surge out, growing and straining until-
This would be a good place for a dream to die, and a nightmare to fester on.
The one unspoken rule in a nightmare is that one will always wake up. An undeniable, inescapable truth. At least, it had seemed to be so. A tyrant, the devil, the desecrator of dreams, lay still in a room cloying with the scent of alcohol and corrupting decay. The embers barely extinguished, a land freshly scarred with familiar wounds smouldered on. Tension and anticipation laced the air, tinging the frames of those still stationed in the tower and on the rails. Waiting for something, someone, there has to be-
After all, it is all too easy for the eye of the storm to appear like the end. And this country was no stranger to such deception.
The brief promise of happiness wavered as power changed from one hand to the other as easily as flipping a coin. Oaths and vows were made to rebuild, renew, rejuvenate, to have a future. So insubstantial, yet once again, in a single moment, the mere spoken word could have roused and deployed a thousand men into battle.
Yet few words had a chance to be spoken before acrid powder laced the air as it did the soil, and the very foundations of a nation crumbled beneath its people’s feet.
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Who’s to say if this traveller bore witness to this annihilation many moons ago? Perhaps he was a bystander, watching on in horror as the dream went up in flames and acrid smoke. He may have even fought in the war, a revolutionary ready to lay down his life for a cause far greater than himself. A soldier on the opposing side, determined to curtail the dream before it became a nightmare. But surely, he couldn’t have been present in the moment unseen by most. The moment where shards of a broken past and shattered soul, together with the simple press of a button, sparked the catastrophic end of the promised paradise.
Yet if the traveller had once trodden these same paths, he did not let it show. He spared no more than a fleeting glance to the monuments of those who mocked the people of this forsaken land or the charred fields that once fed them. Only the blight of the wretched chasm could give him pause, or perhaps the feeble hope of those seeking to rebuild the nightmare from the floodwaters of feeble dreams. He went no further that day.
After all, nothing besides remained, save for the smouldering crater of the dream that never was, and his son’s blood encrusted on his sword.