Very Fun Distractions

Something to keep you entertained while I try to stabilise the rift

Friends, my greatest internal debate, one which has been raging for quite some time, is whether I want to share the story of my world through a series of novels or a tabletop wargame. Honestly, I’ll probably do both eventually, but given my lifelong proclivity for visual arts and model-making combined with a certain severe handicap when it comes to storytelling, the wargame will undoubtedly come first. But I’m not going to talk about that today. Today, I’m going to waffle on about conspiracies, power, and squirrels. Yes, squirrels.

You may have heard the old expression that sheep live their lives in fear of the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd. Usually this is used as an analogy for tyrants oppressing their own subjects in the name of protecting them from foreigners, though if history, of your world or of mine, is anything to go by, tyrants actually prefer the foreigners. It is indeed true that every farmer is a killer, but not always in this manner. I, for one, am not particularly fond of poultry, instead I raise chickens just for the eggs, and I have lost count of how many would-be chicken-slayers I have shot. In fact, it’s easier for me to keep track of how many I’ve shot right between the eyes from a distance of five paces or more. A few days ago, a grey squirrel was added to that list when I caught him stealing corn right out of the chicken coop. My word, the bollocks on that rodent! Literally, as well as figuratively. Even mink have not been so bold, though raccoons have been.

Speaking of coons, I was, as you say, “today years old” when I learned that they are sometimes called trash pandas. Giant pandas, red pandas, fake ass pandas, and now trash pandas! Is it even possible to escape these ersatz ursines?! Evidently not, as I consistently shoot more of them than anything else every year. So many skulls, enough that I started using them for decoration!

Were I in the habit of keeping deer bones instead of feeding them to the neighbour’s dog, I would make something like this for real.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time before rumours begin to spread that my lodge is home to none other than Baba Yaga. My neighbour’s kid banging her head against the wall at odd hours of the night only adds to the eerie atmosphere. Relax, I’m talking about a goat, though I suppose that makes it worse if one is particularly worried about the devotees of the goat-headed god. At one time, that was a fairly common concern, incidentally, as the people of sparsely-populated areas have always kept to the old ways, very much unlike the cities constantly obsessing over the latest trend. Within a generation, the old ways are seen as completely alien, the old gods seen as foreign and strange. Sometimes the cities go through two or three latest things before the country folk finally catch on. Now the latest trend is “no gods, no kings, only man.” One wonders how long that will last; godlessness is known as the death knell of civilisations for a reason.

But enough tidings of doom. No glass candles are alight that I know of, and though Furbies may be a menace to society, they haven’t yet begun to cry blood, much less fill a room with 666 litres of it. Actually, that first one isn’t really an accurate analogy. When my brother told me that I should read A Song of Ice and Fire, he told me that in the story, magic had gone and was returning, but upon reading it for myself, I discovered much more to it than that. There are some similarities which I will get to momentarily, but by contrast, in the world which he and I come from, magic never really left, it was simply forgotten, save by a small handful of isolated occultists who kept knowledge of the old ways alive, despite their obsolescence. Only with a particular invention did the old ways find new life. Ask me about the character-driven narrative leading up to the Great Rossberan War, and I will tell you “it is a cross between Final Fantasy IX and Game of Thrones.” Ask me to describe the war itself, and all I can say is “Warhammer 1917.”

There is a quote from Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian that stuck with me: whatever exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent. This is where I am left to wonder if, perhaps, magic in the world of Ice and Fire is truly as my brother described it, and as plenty of the people within also believe, or if it is more like my own world. And so we enter the realm of conspiracy. Forget the pedestrian fan theories along the lines of R+L=J (everyone is secretly a Targaryen), might I posit that the Order of the Faceless Men destroyed Valyria, and the maesters killed off the dragons? You might ask how this relates to Judge Holden’s hobby and the answer he gave when queried about it, but it is remarkably simple when you think about it. The maesters devote themselves so completely to the natural world that they insist there is nothing else. They want to understand everything, and so whatever they cannot understand, they cannot abide the existence of. Necromancy is one such magick, and given that it is not only a defiance of the natural order, but of the god of death which the Faceless Men worship, it should come as no surprise that they and the maesters share a common foe. Alas, if you’ve ever read enough words of the learned, you will know that they frequently mistake natural magick for daemonic magick in their denunciation of technology, whether it be the suggestion that John Harrison’s marine chronometer was a daemon engine or the proclamation that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. I laugh, for I have actually built daemon engines, and unlike purely technological contraptions, they are extremely unpredictable.

The great paradox of power is that true power is frequently invisible, whereas the greatest conspiracies are hidden in plain sight. If knowledge is power, then whoever controls the flow of information truly holds the reins of power. A certain spider once suggested that we are ruled by swordsmen, but that is no longer true, if it ever was. In truth, we are ruled by telegraphists. When communication is monopolised by a guild, that makes way for the guild to issue their own communications instead of honestly informing the king and propagating his decrees. For that very reason, it should come as no surprise that kings have always been at odds with guilds. But when a king dissolves a guild, he merely takes away its monopoly on its trade; the guildsmen themselves don’t go anywhere, and instead find a new purpose. Most secret societies, if not all, are descended from or otherwise related to guilds. There are a couple of exceptions, including one that I have intimate knowledge of, which, curiously, is not mentioned in An Incomplete History of Secret Societies, not to be confused with The Incomplete History of Secret Organizations. But enough about the backronym that is the title of this piece.

I’ll wrap this up with my own take on the silliest conspiracy theory I have ever heard: squirrels secretly rule the world. Don’t be ridiculous. Squirrels aren’t organised enough to rule the world, but they are definitely clever enough to make it seem that way, hence all the memes. Now then, squirrels are the world’s greatest eco-terrorists, with their suicide chewers responsible for more power outages than any other cause. Some are less ambitious, and simply chew through gas lines to get high off the fumes. And now, with one of my cats dead from cancer and his sister getting old and slow, the squirrels have come for me. They know not with whom they mess; I have killed hundreds, and if selling a gun to a murderer is no different from pulling the trigger oneself, then I have killed millions.