Chapter 241 - Sisyphus in a Slum
Byzantium’s main office, a lovely one-on-one brewing.
Two figures entered alone. None of the Byzantines celebrating The Tyrant and his tournament outside paid attention as Village Head Walker was followed by what appeared to be an NPC guard.
The office building had been modelled after the real-world Byzantine wonder, the Hagia Sophia, shrunk down to the size of a two-storey house. Its layout corresponded to the era prior to the Turkish conquest and its conversion to a mosque. The recreated Christian iconography shone with the vibrant Greek colours that’d since been excoriated by time's abrasive hand. An image of a haloed Christ stared down from the bowl of the central dome above, whose brim was flanked by six-winged angels designed with a strange, nightmare-like quality. Due to The Slum’s construction prohibitions, these figures were depicted using paint on wood instead of the stone mosaic technique of the originals. The floor-space of the central chamber was dominated by a lounge suite for entertaining guests. At a writing bureau lodged in a corner, the Village Head had whittled through the many dull hours of his admin duties.
“You’re too paranoid, HL,” said Walker, commenting on the guard disguise and shutting the door tight behind him and the teen so none of the other Byzantines barged in.
Henry disagreed. “If you were aware of how many ignored death threats clog my message box, you’d judge even this reckless."
“Hmm...well, by my estimation—and it is admittedly one given from a position of humble ignorance—you won’t find any of that...that species of scoundrel lurking about here. Our scoundrels would only mob you with entreaties to accept them into Team Friendship Forever!”
“Lucky day for one of them; a free slot just opened up.”
Walker smiled wryly, giving no explicit remark upon the implied point.
He'd already guessed the teen would be quitting their Village.
While the newbies might have held to the laughable notion that the quaint episodes hanging out with their buddy The Tyrant could continue, Walker wasn’t so ignorant. Last night’s exposure had marked the termination of any possible further acquaintance. Untold danger faced the teen with all the enemies of The Company lurking about - especially in this lawless, criminal-riddled slum. Here, like the immigrant NPCs, many players had also taken refuge after their own excommunications, many from the civilisation The Tyrant had been building with his militant sword and judge's gavel.
Indeed, as the teen had said, the brief visit to his friends would seem quite reckless - suicidal even. Reports had come in of hit-squads roaming the streets outside, jumping random passers-by in case one of them happened to be that priceless prize in disguise. However, Walker wouldn’t question the decision. This young man knew infinitely more about the risks than himself, having been dodging assassinations by 'Artemis' and other spies all week.
Walker, strolling past him, went to the lounge suite and a knee-height coffee table surrounded by floor cushions in the local fashion. Lights flooded from his Spatial Bracelet to form a brewing set, which he began to work with the deft fluidity of one who entertained routinely, his leadership role forcing him to host multiple random visitors a day.
Henry rejected the tea offer again. “I really can't stay that long.”
While he could play at being a retiree free to waste his hours chatting about art, in the end, he was still an impatient teen. His heart could not resist forever its summons to grander, more exciting things than either that or this dinky Village.
“Refuse after you’ve smelt the delicious aroma,” Walker gave a light-hearted dismissal, continuing with the preparations if only for himself. “I bought a copy of your little book. Digital. Prices for the few paperbacks in circulation have been jacked up by opportunists.”
He meant Infinite Leaves, the Post-Maximalist abomination.
“Oh?” Henry was surprised, the minor ongoings with his literary career failing to register on his radar. “What did you think of it? I don't do refunds.”
Henry guessed that, of however many journalists, fans, and enemies were checking out his oeuvre, most would be overwhelmed, the book even unreadable to regular literati. Due to his gaming fame, some of these newcomers would persist to the last page, plundering its paragraphs and sentences for any coded tips on war strategy. Their search would yield nothing. He’d been a normal type of insane when he’d scribbled that complicated monstrosity.
Walker scrunched his face in mild discomfort. “It wasn’t quite my taste, I confess. But, heck, the Modernists were too experimental for me. I prefer the depth in the ancient simplicity: the mythopoetic, a hero summoned to his inexorable journey against the gods, fate, nature, and himself – or herself. So, whatever you were doing there...” He tried, but couldn’t find a polite way of articulating his opinion. “Still, it brightens an old heart to see a youngster reigniting the torch of belles-lettres, stoking the flame to blaze brighter and brighter. Blaze, blaze, against the dying of the light! Even if it blazes brighter than my tolerance to gaze at, so long as I don’t look directly, maybe I can appreciate the warmth.”
Henry nodded, having no hard feelings on the matter. “I think that specific avant-garde flame’s going to take longer than even my martial art before anyone can stand looking at it. If it ever happens, we’ll both be dead by then.”
He stated this predicted outcome matter-of-factly, without any sorrow or probing for pity. Like his labours in Saana, his literary quest hadn’t been motivated by a desire for fame, nor to entice or educate the common public. These parts of his life dwelled on a plane of importance far above such interests, far above the contempt one feels for those who couldn’t understand them.
While the older gentleman was preparing tea, Henry strolled about the imitation basilica, admiring the dedication of its builder.
Citizen Higgs had poured his greatest effort into replicating this monument. His concentrated will manifested in every lick of the paintbrush and scrape of the chisel. To reproduce a building as complex as the Hagia Sophia while adhering to the material and legal restrictions imposed by The Church must have been a Herculean task - or maybe Sisyphean was the better Greek analogy.
When Henry’d first arrived and beheld these Byzantine buildings, his impression had been largely negative. They were crude, tacky, impractical. The humanitarian in him took offence at their gaudy opulence compared to the shacks circling the Village’s perimeter.
In many deeper respects, this work had struck him as deranged and sad. Tracing its development, one uncovered a convoluted, multi-stepped labyrinth of alienation. An Australian Zoomer using wood to recreate Greco-Roman stoneworks from antiquity in 2050 within a slum within a virtual fantasy videogame - each one of these qualifiers marked a severance from a direct connection to the historical Byzantium. It was preposterous. It was a type of sad madness that Henry's heart strongly related to, one that terrified him, Byzantium's builders running one short leap behind his own insanity.
“Although my eyes were blinded,” Walker continued talking about the novel, “when I offered my ears to the rollicking syllables, I could discern intelligible fragments. Blake, Shakespeare, Spencer, Tennyson. It’s astonishing for a person so young to be so intimately familiar with the men of history’s shut pages. Truly astonishing.”
“Compared with everything else, the ability to read a few books shouldn’t be that astonishing,” Henry replied with a dismissive shrug. “It’s a trivial task compared to conquering a planet. A page doesn’t offer back your hand the same resistance.”
“Well, that’s also a very astonishing revelation, is it not? He who lurked in the shadows on His throne of pilfered gold is a teen. Scandalous! Although...” Walker paused, his grey eyebrows furrowing as he seemed to contemplate several ideas amalgamating in the bubbling tea kettle. “Although, I’m less surprised than I might’ve expected. How curious...HL, the darker of Byzantium's crusaders, these two images mesh curiously well. I wonder why that is....”
Henry, studying a painting, could have explained the old man's feeling, but he held his tongue due to the absurdity and sheer offensiveness of explicating the direct link between them.
Walker, like many of The Slum’s old guard, was a real-life veteran of The AI Revolution, part of the same global cohort as Henry's dead uncle or the minimalist professor he'd met in Australia the other day with a prosthetic left leg, the original probably blown-off in combat. That generational ordeal would give some of them a firmer sense for the quirks in Henry’s behaviour that his younger Roboboomer peers tended to misinterpret as boredom, depression, or autism. These geezers—having lived not simply in the After but the During and Before of their own mountains—might detect at some level what went unspoken in the euphemism of his ‘flatness’.
But Henry, for now at least, had enough sanity not to vulgarly spell out-loud this connection between Walker's real and his own entirely virtual problems. Plus, as a rule, these matters shouldn't be talked about. That was also something Roboboomers couldn't really comprehend, the grave insult in speaking too much on behalf of the departed.
Having spotted an unusual crack in the chapel wall, Henry ran his hand up its length, rising onto his tippy-toes as it extended out of his reach up the roof’s centre, where it connected with several others. Seams, they marked the dividing lines between segments, the whole building constructed to be dismantlable. Before The Empire’s regular expulsions to the savannah during The Cleansings, Citizen Higgs pulled everything down and loaded the pieces onto wagons. Every month, he restored this monument, only to have to destroy it again. When Henry scanned the rest of the church, he noticed that the paint job on two of the segments was brighter, less faded - they must've been replacements for parts destroyed by either rival Villages or the monsters that stalked the plains.
His original impression of the Byzantine architecture may have been terrible. However, it’d improved slightly after his week in The Slums.
Pottering around in this Village and others of their own absurd design, he’d become aware of their individuality, their resourcefulness, their ingenuity, and, most of all, their stubborn resistance. The entire gorgeous folly of humanity could be discovered in that rebellious Suchi spirit. Each tackily-constructed Byzantium, each Achievement Pillar climbing into the sky from unstable blocks placed by drunkards, attested to the resilient part of man that refused to submit, that doggedly scrounged together what short-lived expression of beauty it could even in the most stagnant of conditions.
Walker, studying the teen from afar, caught an odd sorrow in the silent inspection, a note of farewell perhaps. “I hope you'll excuse my forwardness, but, with—”
“Ask anything. If I don’t want to answer, I won’t.”
Walker nodded. “What are your plans with...this part. Will you be keeping it?”
This question had been worrying many Villagers. After The Company had seized control of The Empire, their members wondered which aspects of The Slums would be preserved and which would be discarded and altered to fit The Tyrant’s stricter rule.
Henry smiled, the old man saying ‘Your’ and ‘You’ with a similar self-censorship to Justinian calling him ‘Him’, although Walker’s subtler usage would go undetected by most. “I won’t be keeping anything - although no one seems to believe me, announcing my retirement wasn't another ruse. But my personal recommendation to the guild was to retain most of these Village eccentricities. Fix the potholes, clean up some of the cannibals, that’s enough.” He skipped a point. “Despite Ramiro’s off-putting 'hobby', I respect what he’s accomplished with The Empire. He’s helped this shithole more than I ever did. I can confess to that. I was limited by...by my idealism. It wasn’t in my soul to negotiate with the local realities.”
“Of course. It would be humiliating to bow down and compromise with such a shithole.”
“Humiliating...nah, that’s not it. I have no hang-ups over grovelling. ‘Pride’, ‘respect’, these ideas mean nothing to me. If you picked up that impression from the rant about the Chayokans at Justinian, I certainly don’t share their beliefs. Flaunting your re-attached penis is miserably sad, a sign that you’re still psychically beholden to your domination. True freedom is indifference. It's forgetting. More than forgetting, it's losing the necessity to remember. No...I was just trying to find a middle-ground between two dysfunctional perspectives, trying to spook a kid out of a delusion causing his talents to rot in this place like so many others'.” Henry chuckled at the ridiculousness of the knight. “You know, he’s a duelling prodigy, right? I, The Invincible Cripple, who’s demolished countless souls who thought themselves prodigies, don’t use that word lightly. He's a freak. I invited him to join Saana League. If he can stop roleplaying, he’s in.”
Henry’d taken the tangent to the kid to avoid his real answer for not fixing this place.
In many ways, he’d lacked the ability to do so. It was one of the curses of becoming so proficient at swinging a hammer. If that blunt instrument sufficed to break open most paths, you eventually forgot how to wield the softer options. Ramiro’s reformations, the creation of this strange ‘Empire’ in a slum, could only have been achieved by someone thoroughly immersed in the hopelessness, their standard so abysmal that they reckoned these marginal improvements as worth sacrificing their soul.
Henry couldn’t operate on this scale anymore. His own soul had been conditioned to a life of grander fixes, preferring to skip the small issues by simply using his hammer on the big ones.
Walker was surprised about Justinian’s apparent talents, having never paid close attention to Byzantium’s arena master. “...I believe he was still roleplaying a knight out there.” His eyelids fluttered, the full absurdity hitting him after a delay. “Why wouldn’t he accept that deal?”
The Saana League contracts were massive, on the level of football players.
“Beats me," said Henry. "Talk to him about it. Or don’t. My eyes have shed all the tears they’re willing for one of Suchi’s many wilting flowers.”
Walker, not missing the tangent, decided to withdraw to a lighter topic. “Whether or not that one flower gets plucked, I’m glad you’ll be keeping the rest of the garden we’ve sown. Few here can appreciate the efforts of Higgs and myself with this odd village. They find this classical reconstruction work silly, pretentious. Most boneheads dismiss it as a tourist gimmick, not realising we’d been at it before it turned a profit. They can’t understand the deeper motive.”
Most of the Byzantines, like Henry’s friends, paid real-life money to join the Village, which offered a curated, semi-luxurious alternative to the usual slum adventure - the stylish, cooled housing provided relief from the heat, the guards from thieves and player-killers. This commercialisation, available at a couple select Villages, Ramiro had borrowed directly from Henry’s own in-game tourist industry. The Empire were heavily influenced by Flaming Sun and could be viewed as a deformed replication of it adapted to a shantytown, although more commercial and less humanitarian.
“Hah,” Henry laughed flatly. “No, I understand. If history marks me down as a gamer who sold out, that’s one of the happiest outcomes possible. But, honestly, the profits of my work were always secondary, a complicated benefit accepted after already committing to the labour. No, although it might be hard to see, I was also driven first of all by a desire to protect something like these older treasures, fighting my own lonely struggle against the tragedy in a loss that few others recognise and even fewer would care about if they did. I understand.” He popped his head into the building’s second-floor gallery, which, due to the size-scaling, was shorter than an adult - Higgs must’ve swapped to a kid’s avatar while carving and painting it. “Too well.”
Walker strongly, strongly doubted that. “Who’s understanding? The artist? or...”
The sentence went unfinished. ‘Or The Tyrant?’
Henry used the butt of his guard spear to reach into the upper gallery and prod a carved ‘marble’ column, which replied with a wooden thud, the interior beneath the false surface hollow. While he poked away and listened to the percussive feedback, he sifted through the many angles of attack.
“Maybe both?” he answered hesitantly, wondering if this moment truly called for another insult. “Maybe the Post-Maximalist who embraces the art in every ordeal?"
Chapter 242 - Of Post-Maximalism and More
A conversation in a church, the tea still brewing.
“Maybe the Post-Maximalist who embraces the art in every ordeal? As someone who's—" Henry stopped. "Nah, it's a tediously long idea. I won't bore you with the limp flounderings of my tongue failing to express it. You're right. I probably don't understand what's up with these kooky buildings. I'm just some oblivious, 17-year-old Roboboomer."
Walker—slightly caught off-guard by his doubt being detected—laughed at the false humility. There were hundreds of thousands of people queuing for an audience with this teen, many of whom would literally pay for an opportunity to listen to him waft in such a private setting.
"Please," said the Village Head. "I've always been an old soul from a slower epoch, from before the ADHD of most Zoomers or whatever worse affliction's claimed your spastic generation. And what's the hurry between friends? What's the hurry at all anymore, really? For all these modern advancements might've stripped from us, at least they're restoring the vital space for tedium and leisure from which much beauty was born. Wasn't this the goal? We labour for the sake of leisure."
"We make war for the sake of peace."
"Wise words from a wise man. Here is the peace and the leisure we've sought. Why not take them? Take a seat, HL. Relax. Sing me to sleep."
Henry glanced at Walker and his lounge suite in the middle of the church, a plate of baked goods joining the tea being prepared.
Unable to completely shake-off his pressing sense of time bearing down upon them, he found a compromise. "Fine." Staying on his feet instead of sitting down with the older gentleman, he abruptly tripled his speaking pace, the Village Head intelligent enough to follow him without his usual need to slow down, although he'd still need to continue simplifying the language. "As someone who’s explored thousands of old styles across many forms—literary, musical, visual, martial—one of the bleak insights you discover is that, despite the abundance of historical material available to us today, the present still contains only an infinitesimal fraction of the past. Time is subject to a merciless amnesia, an entropy that retains a few select traces of what’s been and discards the rest, almost everything.
“For one example, regularly, I’ve practised pastiche in order to develop a deeper insight into the techniques of dead masters and competitors, and, in this endeavour, there’s actually a hard limit to how far you can reproduce any individual’s style. You can pick up enough of the superficial idiosyncrasies that the keen-eyed or keen-eared might form a loose association that triggers a sense of recognition. However, the imitation never amounts to anything but an unsatisfactory copy. It's a flesh without bone and meat, a simulacrum whose interior rings...” He used his spear to tap one of the church’s columns again, emphasising the hollow sound of the wood imitating marble. “Even with limitless resources, this hollowness of replication is inevitable. Why? Because the original creation that we’re modelling is itself hollow, a fraction of the creator, a sentence without a thought, a thought without the unconscious, the unconscious without the world that the individual is struggling to pack into their tiny skull. Each of these leaps represents another grand act of forgetful extinction. By the time you reach the final work, you’ve already tossed out most of what went into its production, which includes the ability to produce the work itself. Consequently, if your starting point is this hollow work, your imitation will also be hollow."
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He waved a hand of indication at the virtual universe they were talking within. “Take Saana, this fantasy game, for an example within an example. Right now, we’re inside the latest simulacrum in a decades-long sequence of fantasy RPGs copying each other, which are in turn simulacra of fantasy table-top games and novels, converging back to The Lord of The Rings: the ur-text of this genre, a decisive bottleneck between modern fantasy and what preceded. Well, one of the absurdities of fantasy is that, for a genre so heavily inspired by one author, it doesn’t resemble him at all. The generation of novelists who immediately followed Tolkien didn’t read like him, and those who’ve followed since have continued to diverge. Today, we might have elves, dwarves, orcs, and goblins, but they’re no longer the same species - their shapes are similar but the proportions are alien. And where are the halflings?” He turned with this question to the old man listening to his rant. “Where are the hobbits? Where's Frodo?”
Saana didn’t have halflings.
Walker gave an amused shrug. "And where are the elves?"
The elves had also become strangely absent in Saana III, while the other non-human races were confined to the western continent due to enslavement magic. This was the single biggest ongoing mystery in the game. If anyone on the planet knew why, it would be this teen.
Henry shrugged back. “The vanishing of the hobbit from this genre isn’t trivial. It wasn’t meaningless that Tolkien chose the flabbiest, most useless of his creatures to be his fantasy hero. The hobbit is the core message running throughout his books. Heroes come in all sizes. We are all necessary. In a world incomprehensibly larger than you, even if you have nothing going for you and you never will, you should endure because you also possess a critical role in the conquest over great evil. Any of us could be the hobbit.
"That’s a fantasy, too, but it’s a fundamentally different type of fantasy from what came after, which only pretends at this idea. Book by book, Tolkien’s successors have drifted to the other, more exciting elements of his genre. Series by series, they've subordinated the halfing until it vanished without even having to wear its ring. Our heroes have since shrunken down to Mary Sues with latent superpowers capable of brute-forcing their universe into complying with their Will, down to unrelatable mutants like myself who only provide a moral exemplar if you're delusional. What lesson are we supposed to take from this? Be born a freak or your life is permanently fucked? If you have the ability, you should absolutely brutalise your way to justice because violence was, actually, the answer and the whole enterprise of human civilisation to suppress this ruinous impulse has been nothing but psychological cuckoldry? Maybe Tolkien was wrong about destroying Sauron's ring? Isn't the noblest ideal to collect the whole item set? Some power is good, so why not seize all of it? Sure, it might corrupt others, but not you - you're the good guy, you are the most intelligent, most rational, most moral person on the planet, and everyone who opposes you deserves to be murdered, including the hobbit." Henry snapped his fingers decisively. "At last, having killed Frodo and buried his pathetically weak body in a shallow grave, the descendants of Tolkien can take off their masks. That, too, was annoying them, all this bother they were expected to perform in order to hide their sole desire for a limitless power fantasy.
"But, I'd argue, his fantasist imitators have had no choice but to dispense of the humble hobbit. To have continued making the message of such a small creature so monumental and compelling would've required something they simply never inherited from him. The difference between Tolkien and his successors is this: unlike them, he was not just a fantasy writer. He didn’t read The Lord of The Rings. Most of his influences were outside this genre. He was born from a greater European tradition of classics, from Germanic folktales, from 19th-century philology and 20th-century linguistics, from medieval epic poetry, from adventure novels, from Catholicism, from the tragic, pointless war he served in. Every one of these experiences is necessary for the genesis of a story of such minor magnitude. However, it also turns out that the transmission of Tolkien into his story was unbalanced, the fingerprints upon the page insufficient to recreate the hands that’d made them. The many, many sentences that Tolkien has left us contain almost nothing of himself or what constituted himself. Or, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, we might remember his words but we do not possess the harp in his voice. The work left to us is always hollow. Hence, those fantasists who merely began with the work, they were destined to never repeat it, to eventually reverse it.
“That’s part of the story of fantasy’s evolution, the story of all artistic evolution. Each new generation, having access to a present that recalls little of the past, begins from a point of hollowness. If they’re diligent and ambitious and lucky, they get to fill in that space using their own unique experiences amalgamated from life and history’s unforgotten fragments. If they’re not, they stay where they believe they are while declining; they decline to such a point that they can't even recognise their decline, losing their discernment in the myth of a pure artistic subjectivity. Either way, things change."
Walker smirked. As a classicist, he was obviously aware that art movements had historical apogees and nadirs - Greek theatre had been worthless for two whole millennia. However, this was a controversial take in 2050, an era when most people were radically egalitarian.
“And that change, that hollowing change," continued Henry, "is part of the cruel story of change in everything human. The continuity of us through time is also this fantasy. We're the droplets in Heraclitus's ever-flowing river. We're a series of pearls stringed on a necklace, each bumping against what precedes and follows but still being intractably separate, incapable of transferring to each other the contents that shine most bright inside. Once our moment passes, that’s it, that's us. That was us. This includes you with me now. In the milliseconds that expire during the transmission from your thoughts to your utterances to my hearing to my thoughts, I’ve already lost the majority of you, and you of me. Forget forgetting; I will never even be aware of who you are in full. For as much as I detest solipsists, one struggling to imagine a worse philosophy to base your life around, they do accurately identify one of the main roadblocks in the human exercise. I can only ever touch the surface of your being. What is the richness that I feel inside you but a projection of my own? The magnitude of your perceived interior is determined by how fully I've fleshed out myself and my willingness to take the leap of faith that chooses—against everything standing in rational opposition, against my own selfish interests—to share with you my holy interior, to breathe back into your nostrils the collective breath distinguishing us from a soil without life or significance.
"So, in that sense, it’s impossible for me to ever fully understand why you and Higgs have built this homage to the Eastern Roman Empire in a videogame slum. But, filling in the gaps with my own experiences, I believe I can understand some of it. My heart likewise stirs with the many reasons a man clings to a thing, choosing the hard path of resistance against the defacements of time's hollowing chisel.
"A mournful, terrified part of me, foreseeing my own doom in my hollowed predecessors like Tolkien and his vanished hero, wants to reverse the entropy. I burn to restore their disintegrating monuments, to unearth their skeletons and present them to the next forgetful generation. Whether by love or by horror, I want to force upon the youth the tradition of classical recollection in the hopes that the same honour might one day be extended to myself. If I am to vanish, then at least allow me the dignity of vanishing slowly, of remaining in a sentence or two quoted on occasions like this of tedious leisure.
“A bigger, less morbid, more courageous part of me, the lover of the art in the struggle, understands the practical utility in conserving the fullness of the past, if only for the sake of myself in the present and beyond. Critics slander us Post-Maximalists for our obsession with what we call ‘The More’, this drive to always push for something greater; we’re portrayed as pretentious futurists with no respect for our influences, constantly attempting to one-up each other in an effort to churn out the next most unreadable doorstopper – and this assessment is, somewhat, accurate. However, once you’ve recognised the hollowing out of time, our thirst for More attains a much higher significance than mere progress. Besieged by entropy, each new generation restarts at a lesser position than our predecessors, as babies tasked with regrowing ourselves into adults; and, since our image of the past is degenerated, if all we amount to be is what we currently see, then we will fall short and backwards. Conservation, properly ascertained, demands an active, relentless struggle for progress. As we must continually feed our bodies to reach adulthood and sustain our weight thereafter, we must also feed our minds and our souls to overcome our intellectual and spiritual decay. Continually, we must repair the invisible cracks in our inheritance by seeking to improve it. Likewise, in a reverse of the exchange, progress also calls for your own stubborn struggle to conserve, because the more we manage to retain of the past, the more we have available in this never-ending task to recreate ourselves in the present, to maybe—just maybe—improve upon ourselves in the future – 'the branch cannot bear fruit of itself'; 'a fool builds without a foundation'; 'you are neither the start of history nor its end'. Post-Maximalists rise beyond these false chronological oppositions. We perceive the future and the past to be synthesising in a mutually-beneficial trialectic within the present, the More we have of any of them expanding the capacity for More of the rest. Thus, if your own More happens to be directed at the restoration of crumbled monuments, fantastic. We approve. Rebuild them and stand them proudly beside the existing ones and ours that will use yours and More as inspiration to tower even taller. Our only enemy is whosoever, denying the future for the supposed sake of the past, destroys all time. Him alone we judge with contempt, the short-sighted man who concedes the fight and declares, ‘There is nothing More to do here; what has been is Enough’, and who unwittingly thereby concedes to his amnesia and his downfall into a Lesser creature. We declare that, like the forgetful children he rightfully despises, he also profanes both himself and his ancestors in his failure to recall their most fundamental strength.” Henry gestured at the trappings of the Byzantine church around him, at the dead civilisation that’d erected the original. “They, too, were yearning for More when they made this. They, too, adored the beautiful struggle. You are the love child of a billions-year tryst with More culminating in the gift of your flesh made perfect for its exact purpose. We declare that when you take your turn in struggle’s embrace, it is then that you perform your highest duty and ancestral oblation. Whatever you might choose to be, just be More of it.” He shrugged – that was Post-Maximalism in its spirit, the ethic of everything and More, although a true expression of the philosophy would never be so succinct or obvious, requiring a grand creative homage like a spectacular clean-swept 15-tournament arena victory or a several-thousand-page-long highly-digressive novel with confusing levels of irony, post-irony, anti-irony, and neo-ironic-sincerity struggling to mimic a fraction of life's bewildering but gorgeous multiplicity.
"Even a roleplayer," Henry half-joked in reference to Byzantium's resident Crusader. "If you're going to be a clown, don't half-arse it. Aim to become the greatest clown, the most ridiculous. Aspire to amuse the stars. Make the universe's final breath a joyful laugh." He laughed. "Hah.
“And a part of me, a part above these artistic drives of terror and courage, senses the higher humanistic value in this war against the hollowness. I have this silly literary dream—one amongst many—with some of the insane romanticism of these buildings. If I had infinite time to not worry about outracing my decline, I would read every book in history, I would consume every thought exalted and low that’d managed to bleed through the tip of a pen, I would combine them to recreate within my soul the forgotten humanity that’d once flowed between the fragments, and I would allow them to borrow my vocal cords to sing in unison the missing beauty of us all.” He paused for a moment, sighing at the impossibility of such a dream.
“And then another part of me, a part which I can’t decide is the wiser or the more naive, appreciates time’s hollowing amnesia. Some things that didn't make the page should have been forgotten, and the emptiness waiting to be refilled contains the eternal possibility of a positive change, each generation being gifted a chance amidst their blunders to not repeat our own. Including mine, hopefully. There’s much of me that deserves the worms of oblivion...” He recalled the parts he’d played in many forms of change, the mountains he’d flattened, the mountains he’d failed to flatten. “When I, too, collapse upon the icy slope, remember of me what was useful, and discard the rest as you climb beyond my frozen corpse. That’s my declaration. That's my resolve. And that is my end.
“And that, Walker, is—or was—my 17-year-old understanding of such artless things, whatever fraction of them left in me was capable of surviving the latest leap across time to a distant soul.”
Chapter 243 - Sailing From Byzantium
Byzantium's replica of the Hagia Sophia, filled with a floral scent steaming from a hot pot of tea.
Henry's last word, 'soul', echoed for a second within the wooden walls of the hollow church, dwindling beneath the sounds of the Villagers partying outside.
Walker had been meditating in silence during the monologue, thinking about entirely different things to art. “...Hah. I’ve never heard it expressed that...” he wanted to say, ‘accurately’, but that wasn’t the word, the message approached tangentially through the laboured literary metaphors, “...truthfully? My mistake. How strange.”
He didn’t elaborate on ‘it’. However, they both recognised the reference to a conflicted, hard-to-express resentment at the teen’s generation, who carried no memory for the troubles necessary to reach today.
This seemed strange to Walker because the person expressing it was the epitome of the forgetful youth. One could not find a Roboboomer more stuck online, more out of touch than this. His rant had itself exemplified their insulting desecrations, even talking indirectly about such matters liable to disturb ghosts best left sleeping. Walker supposed the teen’s half-understanding arose from the artistic pursuits immersing him in ancient traditions with a dying mode of thought, or from the grief of retirement, The Tyrant maybe not speaking falsely with his morning announcement of quitting.
The Village Head, finished with the tea preparation, brought the teen a cup but was refused again.
Henry explained that he couldn’t linger much longer. After all, he had fifteen tournaments to win and only a week to practice.
Before he left, Walker insisted on one last departing gesture, that he add his name to a patchwork of graffiti scrawled on the ceiling.
Around a mural above them of Mary and a child Jesus had been carved almost a thousand names. Each denoted a member of the extended Byzantium Village: newbies who’d passed through in previous months and were now adventuring in other areas of Kanaru, and veterans from before The Empire’s reforms when this had been a weird street gang called the ‘3-23 Westside Boyz.’ Before each monthly Cleansing, it’d become a Byzantine tradition for the transitioning group to scratch their names among the others.
Walker assured the teen that, while he might only have been a member for a week, his name belonged alongside the rest. Others might forget him, perhaps, although that seemed unlikely given that he'd become one of the most identifiable faces on the planet overnight; however, whatever happened, their small group of weirdos would definitely remember him.
Henry, again, refused this second offer, holding out a palm of rejection as he had for the tea. “The artist in me has too much respect to desecrate another’s work.”
Walker, beside him with the tea, laughed at the absurdity of the second rejection. “My friend, it’s already desecrated.” He gestured towards the mess of graffiti that’d thoroughly spoiled the holy image. “I can’t see how Higgs would mind one more scratch.”
“I can.” The corners of Henry’s lips curled towards a smile of absolute confidence.
There were many names that might be fine up there, but not one.
Perhaps, if he’d met these two nerds sharing his obsession with past things earlier, he might have befriended them over a few longer, less one-sided conversations. The three of them might’ve bonded over a mutual appreciation for a lost antiquity, over the senses of alienation, tragedy, absurdity, and hilarity in possessing a heart made ridiculous due to being stuck in a time before this flattened present. Alas, meeting now, that very same point of similarity stood between them, this moment taking place after their labours in the heights, after the events that’d frozen the blood in their ageing veins. The very fact that they were too old, that they clung to the past, destroyed all possibility of a genuine comradery.
Henry’d chatted with Citizen Higgs even fewer times than this Village Head. Nevertheless, he’d observed enough to know that the carving of His name in particular would be a horrible offence. Any last doubts of Henry's about that conclusion had been purged while wandering around inspecting this replicated church, raised from the loveless soil in an act of proud, mad defiance. The architect was the type of person who hated Him, 'The Tyrant'.
The architect probably hated The Tyrant almost as much as Walker, who for the past days had been spying on The Tyrant at Ramiro’s behest and who’d invited The Tyrant here alone to serve him a poisoned cup of tea.
“Don’t worry about it,” the Village Head insisted, the cup in his hand tipping slightly at the realisation of failure. “I promise Higgs isn’t that petty. You can use this.” He pulled out a dagger from his belt for The Tyrant to carve his name with.
As the weapon was drawn, the pair’s eyes crossed.
For an instant, the world descended into that chilling quiet before heartfelt violence.
Their muscles locked into readiness.
Their breaths stilled with control.
Their unblinking eyes refused to miss any fraction of the decisive milliseconds to come.
Henry—a part of him accepting the invitation through his effort to change, wanting to push his paranoid soul through these uncomfortable tests—recognised the ancient flame igniting in the old man’s locked gaze, the fear of being caught blending with the thrill of vengeance.
There it was, he thought, that old, forgotten look, the all-too-familiar stare of a man who intended to murder you.
But Henry, calm as always in conflict, wouldn’t take the hostility to heart. In the spirit of moving on, he would also embrace this type of struggle, adding it to the list of meaningless 1v1s in a videogame.
His confident smile morphed into one of sadness and pity. “An old man is but a paltry thing."
He repeated a line from Yeat’s Sailing to Byzantium, which he’d spoken when he’d first walked into this Village and met its leader.
This time, Walker would not complete the stanza.
The rest would have to unfold without such words. There would be no further poetry as the two were returned to that bodily union from before man’s isolation of himself from his brother and the universe with the divisionary abstraction of names. Now, they discarded language's fraudulent clothing and stripped down to the naked ape-truth of feeling.
And action.
Both lashed out, the tea and other niceties between them tossed aside.
The faster of the two attempted to grab his foe by the collar and stab him in the throat.
The slower, allowing the dagger to glance off his jaw, grabbed the faster and brought him down to the floor.
Along the floor, along the church’s hollow stonework, they rolled, two souls conjoined in the descent of blood, the heaving, twisting, and grunted flailing of their vulgar merger witnessed by Christ the Saviour and his mother staring from the ceiling with a lifeless judgement.
Within seconds, one had pinned the other in a mount, sitting on his enemy’s stomach.
The one pressed beneath fought with frantic desperation to free himself, to toss the other off, to block with his arms the dagger plunging again and again into his heart.
These efforts of separation failed. The one could not detach from the other’s superior weight, and, bound together, the climax of their union was reached a few panting breaths later.
The one on top, leaving the last thrust of the dagger buried in the one below’s chest, stooped down to caress his cheek and planted Death's wet, emasculating kiss upon his brow.
Into the loser's ear, the winner whispered a tender goodbye. “Good game; easy.”
Henry, the victor retaining his right for now to the hollow memories of personhood and name, rolled off the sad old man and rose to his feet.
Behind him, the defeated foe lay on the cold floor, his face locked in a wolf-like snarl, his features consumed by the rage and shame of his subjugation. His body was bleeding out slowly. The last stab had avoided the heart to prolong his corporeal decay, to deliver him a final humiliation of waiting out the minutes for his character to die or, in another defeat after his defeat, pulling the plug on himself.
“I won’t kiss and tell if you don’t,” said Henry, wiping his mouth and the rest of his face on his sleeve to remove a sticky mask of gore. “I’ll let you keep your monuments if you can control yourself enough to not harass my school friends. But, you have to know, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings either way. I hate today's kids even more, and nothing more would I love than an excuse to stab them, too.”
Such an attempt on him outside of war-time would once have mandated the most severe of punishments. In the case of a player like this Village Head, he'd have been permanently blacklisted along with everyone else here, and all their assets, including this recreation architecture, would have been confiscated or demolished.
However, Henry, retired, saw nothing material to be gained from pursuing the issue further. He wouldn't strip a starving man of his rags.
While offering this deal, he’d adorned the Legendary wind-transformation cloak acquired from Karnon. The artefact could have been used to slip from Byzantium unnoticed, but then Henry might’ve missed out on this enlightening videogame one-v-one.
A videogame one-v-one – that’s how he would try to view it, forcing the toxic feelings surging from his muscles into that sanitising light. This type of one-v-one drifted in between those of the arena and those of his past. It contained both history’s darker sentiments—the meaning, the grudges, the emotion—and the arena’s pointless deathlessness, this man he’d ‘slain’ simply destined to respawn his character once it croaked. Henry focused on this one duel as a bridge between these two poles, of death and fun. Through it, he tried to unite them, to allow the meaninglessness to flow throughout and annihilate everything within the greater meaninglessness of a videogame.
Was it working? Had this videogame duel moved him another step down towards fun, friendship, and The Plain’s other highest goals? Henry, who had a very long journey to go either way, couldn’t tell, but it had sure felt pretty fun stabbing this wrinkled cunt.
“Yes, Walker,” he smirked, consciously employing the gamer’s name and discarding the false morbidity, “you get to live on unchanged. You can keep your titles, your monuments, your profits, your memories. It’s not as if you’ve committed any crime, losing a duel to a teenager in a videogame.”
Walker, enraged further by the flippancy and, more than that, by the gesture of pity, used his waning physical strength to turn and hack up a glob of bloody spit, rejecting it. “Here,” he replied, “here at least we shall be free...the almighty hath not built here...for his envy, will not drive us hence...here.”
The old man’s voice came to an abrupt halt, his lungs too feeble to complete the phrase. He’d been quoting Satan in Paradise Lost after the archangel’s banishment to the underworld. A few lines later were the epic's most famous words, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’
“Please," Henry scoffed, "I was not as much a bitch as God." He swept his own defiant glance at the fake church around them. “I never feared to descend to hell to hunt my enemies. 'Here'...this place isn’t hell, mate. This is just the trash heap outside my castle, and even it no longer belongs to you. Get rekt lol. Hahahaha!”
Actually laughing—genuinely laughing this time—he gave a salute of farewell to this one former enemy, to whatever incident lay buried in their hollow past that might’ve caused the grudge. Then, forgetting them both, he activated his Legendary videogame cloak to dissolve into air, and he slipped weightlessly through one of this holy building's many cracks, sailing out into the peaceful quiet of the night.