The Great Game 🎲 Fallar Discordia

In the Forests of the Night

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Farenn looked down at his fractal orb, at the miniature version of the cosmos, and simply couldn’t believe the complexity of it all. He remembered the line from William Blake: “What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Did this mean that some distant Power, immortal and invisible, had created it all? Or were the Demon Priests of his home planet right: it was all Chance, all a giant Game, the outcome of which was always up for grabs?

Farenn was what you might call an Anglophile. He loved all the great writers of the cosmos, but he was most fond of the writers from England. They took flights of imagination, yet always landed their craft on solid ground. In this Farenn was very much a Fallarian: while Vicinese writers would leave their spaceships rocketing through unknown heavens, and while Blue Dream writers would find names for each of these unknown heavens, a Fallarian writer would sooner or later ask how much fuel was left. In this sense the Vicinese and Blue Dreamers were like Poe and Lovecraft, whose ships took such long and fantastic flights that they eventually crashed on some forlorn icy realm. There, amphibious monsters hiding in the swamps eventually sniffed them out and tracked them to some gruesome end.

But, Farenn would note after a short pause, Poe and Lovecraft were American, not English.

No, for Farenn the English were the heirs of the genius of Shakespeare and Chaucer, heirs of the fierce groundedness of Swift, Keats, Byron, Dickens, and Forster. All of these writers sought truth, yet they never forgot the most fundamental truth: truth comes in many forms. Even Milton, who imagined he’d found the Greatest Truth, had principles that led elsewhere: his Christian Truth didn’t trump his belief that we should read permissively, that we should understand all sorts of evil things, so that we might better understand the meaning of holiness. Yet as the Demon Priests are so quick to point out, if we read all manner of things, we’ll think all manner of thoughts. And then, inevitably, we’ll do all manner of horrible things.

And then there was Blake, who Byron called that madman. In his longer works, Blake created worlds so convoluted that most people gave up on him. If these works were grounded, they were grounded somewhere else. But Blake could also be clear and simple: “Opposition is true friendship,” “The lust of the goat is the glory of God,” etc. In his short poems, Blake used simple language and dealt with apparently simple concepts like love, meaning, and charity. Yet what difficult questions he asked! With Blake echoing through his mind, Farenn asked himself, Who created this awesome cosmos, when “the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears?” Who created the lamb? Did this Force also create the tiger and the Demon Priests?

Farenn looked out the window and saw the black and infinite sky. From where he was now in the Aatari Lok universe, he imagined the ten trillion galaxies of the Black Pulse, sextillions of parsecs to the sood. And within that distant star-cloud of Terror, Lightning, and Light, he saw the red eyes of the Demon Priests. He asked himself, Who created the tiger, with his eyes “burning bright, / In the forests of the night? … In what distant deeps or skies. / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?”

Farenn looked down again at his fractal orb. Perhaps the most striking thing about the cosmos wasn’t its perfect ovoid form, or its perfect symmetry — with the Black Pulse at one end and the Purple Pulse at the other. Perhaps its most striking feature was its lack of purity.

Everything from language to genetics was a mix. The reason this was striking was that on the surface it seemed the exact opposite. Theoretically, the Vicinese and Fallarians each have their place firmly on the moral spectrum: the Vicinese were angelic and the Fallarians were demonic. Yet in practice the spectrum collapsed into a line, the line curved into a ball, and the ball rolled away. The proof of this was that the supposedly angelic Vicinese had some of the dirtiest, rottenest scoundrels that ever walked on two feet. Likewise, the supposedly demonic Fallarians had some of the most valiant heroes that ever lifted into the air.

This same mix was found in languages and cultures throughout the Kraslika. The Vicinese vaunted their purity and wrote long books on the sub-dialects of Tuscany, and yet a quarter of their words were Fallarian. Likewise, a quarter of Fallarian words were Vicinese. Another quarter of their languages were an inextricable mix of Slavic, Turkic, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Quechua, Guarani, Swahili, Malay, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese.

Farenn had just started reading E.M. Forster’s book on the novel, and was trying to imagine, as Forster imagines, a circular room filled with writers from everywhere. Each writer is writing in their own language and special dialect. Each is writing about their way of life, their thinking, and their civilization. Each thinks their language is precisely what’s needed to get at the truth of things.

One of the writers, catching a vague melody floating through the air, imagines a place beyond differences and hatred, and feels the gulf between that place and where he is. He imagines a bird flying into the forest, and writes the following sentence: “O for a beaker full of the warm Sood, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim! Oh, that I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim!” He looks up from his pen and paper, and notices that the other writers also have pens in their hands. All of them are writing on paper, and everything they write about seems to be the truth, a final capping or articulation of their finest brains.

From somewhere outside the circular room, beyond and perhaps above, he hears the song of a nightingale.

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