Apocalypse: the Last Liberations of Waqt Almashaqa

[Erudiche]

APOCALYPSE: the Last Liberations of Waqt Almashaqa

The Age of Ash

The Sages have prayed that we would not see the first sparks of the Fire Which Bleaches. Yet turning our gaze to the blood-stained horizon as Pra'raj emerges to scorch the land again, to the streets full of disorder, to hearts moved only by lucre and hatred, it is clear that we have taken upon the pyre. The fire will come, such is inevitable, the Path of the Wheel. So, we, who saw the dreams and knew the names, and do not expect hearts with love to blossom, are left wondering: what is to be done?

Only which is virtuous shall survive the coming flame, and virtue is the product of wisdom. Such wisdom shall I impart to you, dear reader, based on the contemplation of the Wheel. The Wheel encompasses all worldly things, it is the present state of man and existence. All things, the stars, the seas, the nations and fortunes of individuals, move according to its Providence, in patterns which are as obscure and unerring as the patterns of the stars. Souls are drawn in its dance, around the Celestial Disc, and returned to this life in an order which is inscrutable and unchangeable. In one life, a man light live as a lord and find himself burdened with so much gold that he might as well eat it. In the next, he might scrounge the gutters for worm entrails, fester in disease, and die a nameless wretch amid the citadel's excrement.

No one exists outside of Providence or the Path of the Wheel. No one is immune from it. No one may escape it. To assume otherwise is madness, an illusion of the Pra'raji and the atheist. The world is suffused by fate. What rises must fall, what falls must rise, and so on until the end of time, for as long as the Wheel turns in its inexorable course. Even within the life of a man can this be seen, within the lives of nations and empires, of ideals and beliefs. To be proud that the Wheel has carried one to great wealth and prestige, entirely of its own accord, is ridiculous and wrong. So too is it wrong to despair and grovel at a pitiable allotment of fate, and languish in misery and idleness. The Wheel's Path rejects constructs of class and station and lays low all which people, in their vanity, maintain to be eternal. We all experience the vagaries of fate as equals, and the Wheel calls men to a higher purpose: solidarity, fraternity, and love. Love which persist despite the capriciousness of fate, through trial and tribulation, through whatever ordeal has been ordained or boon which is delivered. And hitherto men have failed to heed this calling.

The Wheel encompasses the entire world, and yet like the world it encompasses it is inconstant. Warad's guidance does not find all who venture the desert, Izdu leaves many in squalid ignorance, the Warrior leaves many weak and pitiful, Urazzir leaves thousands unavenged, and so on. The one constant in this world is the Mother's Grace. For it is her Grace which permits daily the persistence of life in the desert, the reign of the Sultanate, the movement of the heavens and earth. It is the Mother's waters which propel forward the progression of history, and turning of the Wheel. The constancy and tirelessness of her Grace and love are divine, and it is the duty of all who walk in the Path which she has realized to emulate her example. For she looks down, from a tremendous height, upon the Wheel. Where men are tortured with illusions of height and value, that one should ascend and descend, the Mother sees that all movements are, in truth, lateral motions, across its plane of possibilities. She sees the outline of the universal brotherhood of all people, and so propels history forward towards its inevitable conclusion for its sake.

Yet, in thrall to the falsehoods of the world, we have instead built altars to illusion. We hold, above the Mother and her beautiful sacrifice, the false idols of money, of race, of false discernment. We mistake the differing conditions of our brothers and sisters for their worth. We mistake the movements of fate as the accomplishments of pitiful, weak souls. We erect walls in our hearts, to denote ourselves and our enemies, to separate and cleave the bonds of love and friendship in which all people are born. We have built a society which not only ignores the Providence of the Wheel, but rejects it entirely, with all the same calumny and vainglory of the Zojhiri of Qa'im. We have put the children of the Mother into chains and bound them deep within a prison of hypocrisy, of greed and deceit, of pride and sin. And this imprisoned divinity, Ephia reborn, struggles and tugs at her chains, within this fell prison.

Know that illusions, as all things of this world, are temporary. As the Wheel turns, and the Time of Flames approaches, already all the false idols have begun to singe and smolder at their edges, their first embers spark in the streets. When the end has come, all of these things which you hold so dear, which have misled you, will burn, and you will be left with nothing, not even their ashes, or the ghosts of their ashes, for your comfort. And in your misery, shall you be left, too, to burn? Shall you be left to weep in the great ash-pit and die? No. For, as the earth quakes and the skies are replaced with vaporous flame; as the quilt is sundered and the seas boil; as the sand shall turn to glass and the very Disc cleave in twain, so too shall this prison be broken. And, springing with renewed vigor, Ephia shall rise, her chains broken and cell destroyed, and proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

All shall be remade in these end times. Our citadel, once a place of war, treachery, and greed, shall become a place of healing. The waters shall flow, bursting their banks, and the desert sands, long parched, shall grow black and rich, and offer life to all the fruit and bounty of the world. The Wheel shall continue to turn, but it shall not be a breaking wheel, which shall produce the groans and anguish of all in its tread. No, it shall be a place of friendship, where love shall be the whole of the law. All that is false shall be purged. All that is true shall emerge in full bloom. All that was evil will burn. All that is good shall be in us.

[Erudiche]

The Age of Renewal

Providence calls us all to our purposes, to seek and speak the hidden signs of fate. Present in our time are the appointed speakers of the end, worldly prophets whose words will feed the apocalyptic martyrs and warriors of the approaching gloaming. These worldly prophets of our time are many, yet possessed of one of the greatest insights, channeled through him by divine will, is the Magus Asterabadi. Although not possessed of the entirety of the charisma of truth, nor without fault as a mortal vessel of divine will, it is in him who has thus far been first, best, articulating the ideals of salvation and the new age: respect, friendship, solidarity. A love profound, all-encompassing.

Yet Asterabadi's works have been until now, unrealized, untested. They exist in the mist of illusion and ambiguity, Gellema's twilight. It falls to us, the free people, to put to practice his noble ideals. The Sultan in His Sublime Garden did task the citadel of Ephia's Well to carry out this experiment, to act as a proving grounds for all the great ideas and schools of thought of our age. It is His will that we should see a hundred schools of thought contend, and the greatest triumph. I eagerly take up this task, and seek now to chart a course of the future for the Well and the world, based in obedience to the Mother, in love for my fellows, and in the words of the distant Magus. The art of politics has produced nothing but monsters, let it now produce miracles.

The first task in building a democracy is first developing a demos. All the rights and liberties in the would would avail the people nothing, or perhaps worse than nothing, if granted to a population unfit to make use of them. Democracy and solidarity are new ideas in the world, and their meaning must be impressed upon the people of the citadel. A system of popular education must be established beneath a government of convicted and professional administrators, who are fit to carry out the General Will to its complete extent on behalf of the people. This education is not merely of facts, but of culture, of process, of a new manner of living and thinking. In the whole people must be inculcated fraternity, sobriety, piety, and a living desire for liberty. In the whole people must be extinguished factionalism, vindictiveness, greed, and the hunger for power. To build Utopia, one must first build Utopians, an ennobled people freed from the sin and corruption of this world.

To this end, a program of social regeneration is to be applied, utilizing every aspect of society to reforge, as by the crucible's flame, a new and tempered race. This task will require labor, a great deal of labor, from all members of society. Thus, idleness, which tortures and imprisons great swathes of the productive capacity of society, must be ended, and all people guaranteed useful employment, so as to remove from many the temptations of crime. Production Armies must be organized, formations of laborers under military discipline, and put to work on vital projects of construction, fortification, and civil service. In exchange, these forces shall be provided food, water, and shelter. This will open the path to the end of unemployment and thus the idleness which the toilers of the city so curse.

What manner of projects might these Armies embark on? The construction and maintenance of roads, the development and staffing of mines and farms, the digging of canals and aqueducts to distribute the Mother's waters, the expansion of the citadel's walls to provide for the people, and the building of Phalansteries. A Phalanstery is to be the structure of the future, an arcology intended to house between some five-hundred to some two-thousand souls in blissful harmony. The communities shall be organized with their own social contracts, allowed to govern their habitation cooperatively, and pool their resources and labor to their common enrichment. It shall be furnished with a central hall of quiet pursuits: dining halls, libraries, studies, and studios. To one wing shall go communal workshops, where tools and spaces might be held in common and used freely by the residents for the common welfare. To the other, a community garden which the residents might toil for food and beauty. All throughout let there be ballrooms, dance-halls, and places of public joy and leisure.

Life in these structures will engrave the principles of democratic and pious life into the very fabric of the being of the residents. Godliness shall be baked into the very brickwork of our city. To those who shall not be plied to morality so easily, to those laggards and enemies of peace, I offer another structure: the Panopticon. Picture, if you would, a prison, arranged in a circle around a single watchtower. The interior of this watchtower cannot be seen from outside, yet the watchmen within can look out unimpeded, and are permitted full views of the entirety of each cell's interior through their bars. Each prisoner, who is to be kept in humane conditions, would at a given moment have no knowledge of if they were being observed, but would know at all times that it was entirely possible that they were under scrutiny. Thus, malefaction would, at all times, come at great peril. The prisoners would be tasked with a program of education and self-improvement, and to model a noble and productive life, and over time would begin to internalized the logic of this prison, to be changed by it, to be made into that which they are made to emulate at all times. Thus, even the most intransigent criminal might be reformed.

The process of educating and improving the condition of humanity undertaken within the citadel, we might move to the next phase of social development. A system of Guarantism, where the basic needs of the citizens might be guaranteed; food, water, and shelter would be provided to all. A system where the interests of labor would be protected, and the interests of capital safeguarded in turn. A system based on respect and solidarity between all. From such a position, the full democratic faculties of the people might be developed, honed, and an expansion of the Asterabadian principle to more elements of society might be undertaken. A Well nourished by the free waters, fed by its own darkened soils, and populated by a burgeoning fraternity of Utopians might serve as an example first to the Sultanate, and then to the world. Such a model might be employed by the noble and wise Sultan in Baz'eel, to nurse the ills of the great city, and might inspire the chained peoples of all the world to take up arms against their gaolers in emulation of such an experiment, to join ranks with a rejuvenated and renewed Sultanate, and restore to the Maribid the rightful title of Caliph. And all the world might be returned, through the time of crisis and flame, and the long end of the Age of Ash, to the lost paradise of Bel-Ishun, only this time without boundary and without end.