A Regret Written But Never Read
Ah, how clever we thought we were, in the days we still measured time by the days. The wheel of revolution turns and turns, and turns back to the beginning. An eternal empire. An empire on which the sun (may it never rest in peace) will never set. Stirner would turn over in his grave. Compromises were made, and sure enough, the revolution went the way of all things: along the path of least resistance. The familiar path, the one we know all too well.
We should’ve seen it from the start. We should’ve known it would come to this. We were young then, and foolish. We were mere pawns in the greater games above, drunk on our own victories, believing the game to be won when this was but first blood, the advancement from opening to midgame, from the skirmish to the battle. We thought ourselves gods, capable of anything, righteous in every action. It was all for freedom, we thought. It was for the greater good.
And now what have we become? The heavens were merciless, but in destroying them, what were we? When all we’d known was oppression and tyranny, what else could we do? We should’ve seen the signs when we allied with the Soviets. We should’ve seen the way we were changing. The Bolsheviks, they were willing to pay the price in blood for their revolution. When civil war swept their nation, we fought beside them, watching family turn against family, seeing idealists supporting madmen. Had we gone too far then already? Was it a premonition of our fate, or were we so blind that we couldn’t see the mirror held before our face?
When we saw the fruits of our alliance - the starvation of millions, the enslavement of our enemies - what did we do? We turned our eyes and walked away. Many of us turned our coats that day, unable to bear the price we had to - no - chose to pay, but it was too late. Nothing could return things to the way they used to be. It was one thing to kill the unrelatable: the richest of the rich, the ruling heads of state, the Bazaar and its servants - we reduced them to the unhuman, to the all-encompassing ‘enemy’. But here, starving, were our comrades, the tread-upon, the people still waiting for their day to come, and they were dying. We who remained learned the cost of our revolution then. Perhaps it made the days to come easier to abide.
The world never asked for revolution. It got one anyway. When London fell, it was a bloodbath. This was so much more. The fires burned for days. The screams would overpower our cheers of victory and then fall silent. Our enemies found their lives destroyed, their homes and businesses burned to the ground, their livelihoods crushed under the boot of revolution. The streetlights were dark across Europe in those days. Many would even dare not even light a candle for fear of our retribution. The proletariat didn’t rise, united in triumph; rather, we rediscovered that they were mere people, just like the rest of them beneath us. They wanted nothing to do with terrorists, from the people who destroyed their joy, taken their security. We were merciless then. Victory was what mattered in the end. The greater good. The Liberation. What were a few deaths in the name of true freedom?
The world never asked for darkness. No, even better, the universe never asked for darkness. I think now, always, of the price we paid to come here, and of what we’ve made of the universe. Mankind creates in its own image, and I see nothing different in what we’ve become. An eternal empire. What society doesn’t see itself as an eternal empire? It is not a tyranny as the Judgements once were, and their deaths, perhaps, has made the price one worth paying, but I no longer can say so with the conviction of my youth. This is what we wanted, but what have we done? We’ve merely taken the reins of power for ourselves.
But even the Imperia Aeternum de la Multiversum (funny, that Latin of all things - the language of Rome and the Church, of biology and classification, the very symbol of our old oppressions - has lived to see this new dusk) does not rule as the stars once did. In our freedom, monsters thrive, threatening us, forcing us together, as the beasts of old Earth once did to our ancestors at the very dawn of civilization. And so the wheel completes its revolution, and we turn back to the beginning. How long, I wonder, until we too fall? We’ve stared too long into the abyss. We’ve spent far too long fighting monsters to see what we’ve become. That blindness will be our downfall. Our downfall will be our repentance; repentance for all we’ve done on this road, the lives destroyed, the blood spilled. And our downfall too will be our liberation, freedom at last from the machinations that brought us here. The Liberation of Night began long ago, and we were but a cog in the machine. Even now, we still are, for our world is a world of Will, and the masters who began this bear the strongest wills of all.
We’ve become a shadow - a mere shadow, but a reflection nonetheless - of the monsters we once hunted, and now we will pay the price. And who knows? Perhaps we’ll be wiser when the next revolution comes.
… but we probably won’t.
Advancing the Liberation of Light is increasing …
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Sorry for getting long-winded. I was going to just make a comment about how fun, ironic, and historically accurate it is that the revolution ends with the formation of an empire, but then one thing led to another and you get that.