Albonium

Epilogue - Last Orations

I - The Fell

What are the Fell? What do they speak? What do they say?

They are silent, for they are dismissive of speech, and they call speech that which is unnatural, that which is a sin!

No orator speaks to those which are world-weary and tired of society. To orate is to invigorate. Rather, the men tired of the world looked with their eyes, and saw the destruction and the suffering of it.

Oh! This was suffering! Each brick was made by blood and sweat, and each value and virtue a delusion of Man!

Oh! This was the sun! Great destroyer of all the baneful shadows. Gone was the stricken poverty, gone was the disease, gone was the greed and the evil of Man, gone, gone! And then there was the sun, all-consuming, all-destroying, and it would destroy the soul of Man, and thus destroy his pain.

So this was the dream of those who joined the Fell, and Tharizdun looked to them and looked to his world, clean again!

No evil! No suffering! Pity was nature, and it alleviated the souls of its followers to heaven--silence.

But that was the mission of the little one, to deny life and deny suffering, but what was Tharizdun to do? He could not die, thus he was forever wandering, defeating Man or being defeated, but if he defeated Man, would he not make a new Man out of his boredom?

What was the meaning of this? What eternal return of doing and then collapsing over and over--what would it amount to? Nothing at all-nothing at all! And so Tharizdun could only love his fate while the Fell perished out of their hatred of it.

II - The Elven

And so was the last speech of Ephialtis, while he was starving and dying in Cyprus:

"My Elven! It looks like we have been forgotten. It looks like we will die. While Troseus and Linian march on to the New Elven, unfeeling of pain, unfeeling of suffering, we must suffer, and we must die!

"But it is not a shame to die. We have served the Elven faithfully. We have bought them time while they completed their ritual, while they were transformed, while they made anew.

"Look at us! Are we not wretched? Are we not still like men? We are still greedy, still prideful, still evil! And to the others, know that they have won the battle of Iliusbur in their nobleness, in their selflessness, in their compassion, in their pity, in their coldness to themselves!

"We are rotten individuals, we are wretched, we are poor. We are pathetic! We are a mixture of flesh and bones. But what is the greatest thing that we can achieve compared to the shining might of the collective, ever-great, ever-blissful?

"It is to bring about their existence! That is the only good thing. When the great storm Linian was with us, what were we but small children, unwise in war and oratory? The best thing we could do was to serve him, to help him.

"We hate Man because he is self-serving, but we love his nation, we love his compassion, we love his piety. Those are the good parts of Man, but Man decides to ignore his good parts and instead pursue lust and individualism like the madman he is.

"Imagine a society where everyone works for himself! What world would that be? It would pale to the great organization of the collective!

"But not only is Man weak and useless compared to us, his soul is full of suffering. I ask you, is not every Man and every elf full of emotions? And in a way, these emotions are the people of the city of the mind, and if the Man is self-serving, are not the emotions self-serving?

"The emotions behave irrationally; they will rob each other and kill each other; anger erupts and demolishes the arches of joy simply because he can, and sadness cries and drowns the city in a lake. Then there is euphoria, which comes from the weakened joy, who lets the city fall!