22. Alexandria - 1770 Paris
Paris…
(“So many centuries forgotten, are they not important?”)
No.
In the moment, they might have felt important. The Antonine Plague, the political instability, the Crisis of the Third Century, and the fracture of Rome. Once the most powerful force in the known world, it shriveled and died before our eyes.
Then came the Christians.
Perhaps this was the most pivotal of all. A powerful man had a dream that a cross upon his shield would lead him to greatness, so he turned slaves into priests.
The Christians destroyed everything they touched. Temples defaced and defiled, ancient knowledge thrown into the sea. Had your temple survived that fateful morning, it would have fallen now.
Or would it have gained favor first?
I will never know, and you never bring up Alexandria or the cult formed in your image. You never cry or speak their names or lament their loss.
We move through the world with its new religion.
They sack Rome.
They try to build it again from the ashes when another plague hits.
You and I walk through villages of dead. It is easy during this period, no one wants to be seen. For a blissful decade, we drop our bodies into rolling carts, passed off as a dead relative. We linger in abandoned homes, we collect the treasures they thought would bring them meaning.
Yet they died, and their treasures become ours.
It is much like in the early days, when we’d clear temples to pay for our housing and transport.
“Why do we not just coerce?” I asked you once.
“One day there may be a barrier,” you say. “A reason for our gift not to work. We must always be prepared.”
Prepared.
Prepared as I was for the other faction to find us and dispatch of us, like they did the acolytes. Prepared for Theon to not truly be dead, but biding his time so he might torture me as I did him.
Another religion rises and conquers northern Africa and Spain, and then Alexandria. The city burned, the libraries destroyed, its center of knowledge little more than ash.
The world expands and shrinks, the continent as we know it ever-changing.
We head north until the Vikings raid.
We head south until the Crusades.
We head east when the Black Death settles on Europe. We stay east as the countries fight, countries that just a few centuries ago meant nothing. Now we are to care about England and France.
A sailor gets lost and finds a world we didn’t know existed, and claims it for his country.
“I wonder what that world is like?” I ask.
We are somewhere close enough to watch the religious wars, but far enough to avoid their toll. We are stuck once more in a village that no longer exists, watching the soldiers march in and out.
“They will ruin it,” you say. It is your way to dismiss my attempts to move again. You think I want to see that world with my own eyes.
“Who?” I ask.
“Humans,” you scoff. They are a curse to you, and our food.
You see, this is why I cannot bring myself to tell the tales of that time. They are endless boredom, the same recycled story time and time again.
The humans make war, they claim things, they pretend to know more than the others. They destroy and pillage and rename as if anything is permanent.
I begin to wonder many things during this time.
Do you and I move this way? Centuries of a dance with the same steps, just in different ballrooms? One where you lead strongly, and I follow, and when I step on your foot I am thrown away until I can prove my worth again. Then the dance begins anew, until I err in some way I don’t understand.
Begging worked, until it didn’t.
I think again of the box I built to sail away from you. I told myself—and you—that I would never go without you.
Yet I only had one box made.
I wondered if you would let me go.
Would you long after me? Or would you stare at me as you did the ashes of the acolytes—like my departure was inevitable, so you prepared yourself for it from the start?
Am I destined to leave you?
The humans called this time Enlightenment. It was just another turn about the dance floor, circling near Alexandria again. Now they separate their gods from their science, and the seaside empire is replaced by the northern one.
I follow you still—from plague-ruined villages to empty caves in the hills to budding cities. Our treasures are traded for coin or whatever else is important at the time. They are held in banks and books in your name.
And all at once, I realize I never escaped the box. All this time, I’d been drowning…but not in water. In you. I was buried beneath your greatness, choking on the bits of affection you flung at me.
(“You pulled away first, psiche mou. I knew the harder I held on, the farther you’d run.”)
You can say that all you like. You can act as though you weren’t tired of me, bored of me, disappointed in me. As though you were waiting for me to get up the nerve to leave.
But how could I? All our money was in your name, and your loaded words about our gift of compulsion failing haunted me. Had it before? You spoke only from experience. When had it failed you? What circumstances?
If I asked, you pushed me aside.
I was not your equal, as I had thought. Otherwise you would have spoken to me as you did the acolytes. No matter how hard I begged or pleaded, I was still a subordinate to you.
I wasn’t worthy of your debate, of your knowledge or experience. I had to form a cult around you to get any answers! To serve you and praise you, yes, but to get answers I deserved, answers I was owed!
We headed north still, and with every march something festered in my heart. What would we find in this enlightened Paris? Would it be Alexandria again? Another cult to follow you, to feed your ego, to replace me?
This is an interlude because the only interesting thing that happened, happened within me. Centuries of being trampled on by you, of your give-and-take affections, of your silence and refusal to tell me what I wanted to know…
I was sick of being trod upon.
When we made it to Paris and our beautiful new home, I was placated…for a time.
But the rot had already set in, waiting not to consume me—but to consume us.
Paris would be the last city where I followed without question.