k'Tacha - Prelude to a Storm

Prelude to a Storm

Throughout time and the Planes there are legions of women, men, and Others who have changed the course of history.  Some have changed history only insofar as it pertains to themselves, yet others have changed the course of things for entire cities, nations and even existences.  Amongst those hordes of noteworthies, the number who meant to do what they did can be counted on the paw of an accident-prone leper.

For every brave, intelligent and noble soul there are countless more craven, stupid and low ones who will strive to bring them down, to trip them at every turn and make sure their course most certainly does not run smooth.  For every saint filled with good intentions and the betterment of their fellows at heart there is a horde of sinners who would spit in their eye.

Fortune does not favour the brave.  If anything, Fortune looks upon the Brave and sees them as a challenge; the harder the Brave strive, the more adversity they find in their path because as much as people like to see someone who succeeds, they far prefer to see plucky losers.  The almost-champions are what we judge our lives by.  We look at them and say to ourselves – “Look at them, look at how hard they tried, how close they came, how they never gave up!  And still they failed…”.  Hard-trying losers make us feel good about ourselves; after all, if they can’t do it, why should we even try?  Whereas those who actually succeed just make us feel bad about our own failures and our low, base meanness. 

Hence if you wish to bring out the best in people, you must first bring out the worst in them.  Only once a person has hit the absolute lowest point they can is there any kind of guarantee that they will try to better themselves.  And even then there will be a few who somehow manage to simply move sideways, who will gleefully kick the teeth of their fellows while they are down and then pick their pockets while they’re at it.

How then does one better an entire people, an entire nation, change and improve an entire way of life?  By turning everything on its head.  To those who have nothing, you give everything; and those who have everything you leave with nothing, not even their pride, especially not their pride.  For hubris is what convinces the downtrodden that what they have is good enough, and allows the wealthy to believe that anything and everything they do is right or at least acceptable.  Acceptable to whom, you may ask?  Why, to themselves, of course; who else matters?

Betterment of oneself is seen so often as a last resort except for those who are pure of heart, soul and mind.  But as discussed above, they have their own problems to worry about.  So if you want people to change themselves for the better, first you must remove every other option available to them, save those that remove them from the problem altogether.

You must do what needs to be done.  A phrase so glibly bandied about – “I did what needed to be done” so often boils down to “I took the only path that I liked the look of after discounting everything else as being too tiresome, unrewarding or morally difficult for me”.  Heroics are so often selfishness wrapped up in silk or, more often, blind luck.  Those who truly do what needs to be done so rarely get remembered well or at all.  The fortunate ones are forgotten, the rest vilified and remembered forever for the “evils” they committed, rather than the change they wrought.  At what point does the cost for a better future become too great?  When someone dies?  When scores die?  When everything is burned to ash?  Or when a perceived moral code is breached?  Morals are crutches for those too weak to know their own minds and to know what needs to be done and how to do it.  The clear of thought care not the cost of progress or how many bodies are strewn behind them because they know that what they do is... good?  No.  …Right?  According to whom?  Necessary?  Ah, now there is the rub of it.  Many would look upon this and assume them to be the words of a madman, a maniac, a tyrant or a mass-murderer, feebly trying to justify their actions and all the blood they spilled.  I say to you now that I need no justification.  I need nobody to look at what I have done and tell me that it was right.  I care not how history judges me for history is nothing but propaganda that steals away our memories and supplants them with what its writers want us to remember.  There is only what was and what will be.  One event, after another.  The glory will go to those who follow in my blood-stained footprints, who see the path that I have trodden for them and follow it without knowing, thinking only how tough the way is and not realising how before me it would have been utterly impassable.  History remembers only the people who make things happen and forgets those who make them possible in the first place.

Mother, I understand now why you did what you did and the “gift” that you gave to me, even if you did not understand it yourself.  You will be forever remembered for your penchant for conquest, your blood-thirstiness and the spiked, iron fist with which you ruled.  And I will be forever remembered for appearing weak in the face of rebellion and for allowing our nation to fall.  But if we never fall then we will never learn how to pick ourselves up and sometimes the only way to make someone appreciate what they have is to destroy it.

I regret not one drop of blood that was shed, not one life lost, not one tear that dampened the dry soils. Everything that happened did so for a reason – it needed to be done!