Albonium

Volume XII - The Spirit of Man

Book XXII - The Struggle of Sejanus

I - On Memory

"No! cried Libanius to himself aboard his ship, in his private wing. "I have lost to the Elven!"

But then he thought to himself. The Elven were not human, that he knew. They prided themselves in being inhuman in every way possible. Yet they relied completely on human texts for morality! In an elf's library one would find Hycattus, but would also find Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. And too did they rely on human technologies in methods, and so placed value in Alexander and Napoleon. 

What did he think then? The Elven were hypocrites who determined right and wrong in a human way, and so thought with human minds. Even a race that was born in tubes and released at the age of eighteen, then injected with all the information they needed, who never knew the concept of love to a spouse or a family...

The Elven hated men because of their emotion. Did not Man love virtue or power simply because it felt good? Then the Elven were like Man! But they were a naked and confused form of Man, and one that had mutilated itself and believed itself to be separate. Thus it had to be destroyed.

But Illiusbur had been transformed, it seemed. The Elven had forgotten the individual! Where did they place their source of morality now? Not in their feelings, but in their hate. 

He thought of the gods. What did they think? Did they care for the morality of Second Rome? No, but they cared for what was natural. Were humans natural? They were. Were the Elven natural? They were not. 

But then the Elven had realized themselves and lost their hypocrisy, and became the deepest evil that he thought was impossible! And his defeat was impossible as well. He coud not capture the capital, the last city! Of course there was Cyprus, but that was irrelevant. Anything that could be gained from capturing Cyprus was minimal, for everything else had been gained.

It was fate! It was the natural end of things. It was evidence of Rome's rightness! But the Elven had survived, and there seemed to be no possibility of them being defeated anymore. If they had come back in a state like that, when all had been lost for them...

Could there be no innate rightness within Rome? Could the values of Rome be mistaken? But if they were, then could not Rome collapse and be replaced by some other state which said, "The Romans were evil! They genocided cultures and cannot be the successors of the states before the Great War. We are!" And then there would be another state after them, which would denounce them as evil as well!

Was it possible that the state after the Romans would be superior in morality to them, and that the state after that state be even more superior? But clearly the Elven were evil! They were unnatural in every aspect. And so the good or the evil of the state seemed not to matter, but rather their might and the ability to resist change. But if all of this were true, would it not be true that all right and wrong was simply opinion, which was shaped by might? After all, if a wholly evil state conquered the Roman people and forced its ideas upon them, would not all the Romans think evil ideas?

And the most damning thing was that there could be states before him, and that he considered his state superior in morality to the other states and served the Roman government, and so... he refused to think it. It was impossible!

And then there were the Elven! Now those in Illiusbur who had begun their crusade to the devastated lands of Graecia squacked, "The collective! It loves itself beyond everything. No Elven will challenge it! There are no Elven left but the collective!" And they were now not simply humans that were delusional and different in anatomy, but an alien race. There were other values out there, and he was not winning.