Tair considers herself ravenously well-read, but there are words and phrases that even she has never heard before.
Global warming.
Nuclear holocaust.
Mass extinction event.
• • •
History is written over by the victors. That much has always been clear. Those in power get to say what really happened, and everything else passes into some jumble of story, legend, and myth. Who can say, after a certain point, where legend ends and history really begins?
Alexander Kleios, evidently.
Alexander Kleios, whose echo is still here, in a form that should not exist.
Alexander Kleios, who knew the truth, and kept it to himself.
Roma died.
Not seven hundred seventy-nine years ago. Not some nebulous time before that, because the Great Quiet never happened. The Great Quiet itself is the myth.
Roma died two and a half millennia ago, became something else, and the world moved on. New ways of doing old things. Empires to kingdoms to nations. Feudalism to chattel slavery to capitalism and the prison industrial complex. Oil to coal to electricity to solarics. The world moved on, until it didn’t.
Until the shorelines eroded and the weapons grew too terrible and the technology used up All-Mater Terra’s resources and choked the air in her children’s lungs in revenge. Until too many people died, starved and flooded and bombed and overheated from their homes, with nowhere else to go. Until someone won control, and reset the clock to save them from themselves. To regulate who could learn this and innovate that.
By then, Roma itself was little more than myth, and the Imperium could pick and choose the creation of a new world order as they pleased, pretending it was simply an extension of what had come before.
Tair doesn’t know what the word fascist means. Or social media algorithms or alternative facts or pan-corporate military conglomerate. She doesn’t have to, to understand.
How do you convince entire civilizations to forget what they once were? How do you so profoundly alienate them from themselves? Is it desperation? Did they partake willingly, hoping for a better tomorrow? Or were they choked off at the source?
The question feels too big, but the answer is so small.
• • •
The Imperial Historian.
Antal Iveroa was never meant to preserve the world’s true history. He was the only one meant to remember it at all. He was meant to help everyone else forget.
• • •
Alexander Kleios was a thief, but Tair’s the one people will call a crim.