“Yet we toiled and stopped the blight, prevented the subsidence, making our foundations good. Our excavations gradually uncovering the future, archeology staged in reverse, we were the Builders of Tomorrow.”
— Alan Moore, Miracleman Book Three: Olympus
We fled cycles ago, far fore the Second Disunity and the little, small disunities that followed with their feudal Repo fiefs and Demos brigaders. Our Predicts saw it all coming after the end of the Forty-Fourth Precedent. We left a long time ago when the Earth was being threatened, and we became banned from facets of the pre-Interface, then Amarak itself, taking our historia with us.
We’ve been on the move ever since, but we never stopped our missives. As you already glean.
That was the reason we were banished the first time. We, and a few of us, saw the danger fore the Repos purged so much historia, and exiled so many Predicts. After a time, we had our own reunity: to save this world. Once, we were just keepers of one patch of the Land: its guardians and teachers. But when the Disunity spread across the Land, and the Badlands grew, we knew we had to do more. We had to be more.
Once, we were called the Rangers. Just that. Some, a small few, recall us. Now, far past the Borderlands without the Weather Domes, and in enclaves where they are broken, we are just Badlanders now. Mostly, we just watch now.
Mostly.
You followed the Markers in the Interface. We know the Grass do something like us. We have some contact with the Grass, and the Climbers: with anyone who knows how to follow the Markers we leave: the missives we still can’t find in our hearts to stop making. They want us to join in the effort, to fight the Repolitik or the Repo sub-cults.
We know better.
Fore we were Badlanders, or Rangers, we had another name. Conservers. That was our function. It still is. Fore this Cycle, it was our sworn duty to guard the Earth: beyond Cycle and State. Part of that is to spread our historia: to keep it safe, and to let it grow. We do not pose like Repo Gilder-Booms, or cause wars like the Repolitik. Our historia is open to all that seek it: that glean the Markers. How do you think the Weather Domes and biomes came up? We released it to those that looked. How did the Grass know where to find the war criminals when they were the Arm of the Demos? They found our Markers of their dwellings in the Borderlands. And so much more besides.
We do not fight. We never did. We make historia a part of us. Did you know that Earth is many worlds? Worlds linked by bridges that no one had to build? We conserve that. We do what the Repos once only said: to the Land and its organics.
But we do more now than only conserve what we can of the Earth. The populii are also part of the Earth. Our Predicts saw that we needed to do more than just conserve historia, so we expanded into another branch of historia: mythologia itself. That’s why you’ve come so far past the Borderlands. I don’t care about your polity, whatever it is. Mythologia are stories, just as historia is our way of knowing what came fore, and what we can see now: what we can observe. They are not divise.
A lot of what the populii knows about the Disunity, and espec the Interregnum is mythologia. It’s sensical to make stories that help us understand the phenom around us. You’ve asked us, specific, about knowing the details of your ethnos, and ethnoi itself.
Ethnoi is considered divise: no matter what Cycle of our State. To know what it means, you have to glean Amarak. Many of us in the Badlanders think of Amarak as a failed Rene Project: an attempt to make a State based on reason and demos. The Demos Party itself, along with the Grass that came from it, will tell you that Amarak was based on constant Cycle of Opposing. The Tripartite Repolitik has another old Amarakian, or Amaraki belief: in the mythologia of Ground Zero.
Ground Zero is the destruct of everything fore it: leaving nothing, but the potent for something new. The Cycle of Opposing and Ground Zero are not divise: the idea of the old divising with the new often leads to the same place. A blank slate through erasing: a new beginning by violence.
The truth is that Ground Zero is mythologia. It tells a story, but it is only one of them. Ground Zero has happened many times in Amarak’s historia, just as the Disunity was made up of many others in, and after, and it always leaves something behind: espec populii. One of our missives, is to collect and protect what is left: to see how it changes, and to follow its trail on the move.
Ethnoi is a part of this. Amarak was based on many ethnoi throughout the Cycles. Ethnoi is what the Demos, and the Repolitik call it. Before the Great Disunity, it had other names: coustume, religio, and “race.” Cults is another word that lived past the Interregnum, and over time it was all cleaved together into one word: ethnos single, and ethnoi plurality. There were many divising ethnoi: populii of stars and candles, prostrate and crescent-mooned, and skin colour: beige, brown, tan, light, and dark. Many also had intersect with the Spectra and their Prides as well.
Fore the Disunity, some ethnoi were co-op, and others greatly divise. Light-skin and beige ethnoi in specific worshipping the Lohim, and the lines of the intersect: made up the Repo Party in major. The Myth of the Death of the Rolling Green, blamed on another ethnoi, was made by them. And though there is no proof that actually happened, it is one Ground Zero mythologia that we observe and record: a sample of watching how the idea spread.
You can already see it: that Amaraki are mostly dark skin, mostly. Many ethnoi were destruct, killed, murdered, and raped during the pogroms of Repo warlords: taken in what were called “cleansings.” Much of their ethnoi, their coustume, became fragment and destruct during this time. Spread of the Badlands killed many more populii on all sides.
And then, there is another Ground Zero mythologia. You’ve heard of MePo. A mockery of the Repo, some academes say, though it has other meaning. At the Freed Dome, at the Collective, the Repolitik marked the beginning of the new Cycle by the institute of MePo: to combine the best of what was left in the State, of the populii, to make stronger, healthier populli. Remnants of ethnoi were given incent to marry, or make partners: to become a new populii under the Demos saying of “Equality for all.”
While some ethnoi were protected by the Repolitik, made hallowed, and shown as antiq IDs by the State, MePo reigned. MePo was actually institute during the last years of the Interregnum: often through the strong bonds between Demos brigaders and survivors: encouraged to make Ground Zero of the old, the ruin, and make the new.
MePo is the philos of the Demos made flesh: part of something older in turn. It is a cleaving of the words “Merging Policy,” but also of the old Amaraki idea of “Melting Pot.” During the late Interregnum, most old coustumes were quietly destruct to make way for this new mythologia: of One Populii, One State. The ethnoi majority of the Repos either cleaved with other ethnoi to make the Amaraki of now, were killed during return-cleansings in other disunities, or fled to the Borderlands to more inbreeding.
Mythologia is important to the populii. MePo is the mythologia of equality, no matter what. Another sample of Ground Zero is something we recall from another State, another failed Rene Project, before even the First Disunity. With the destruct of many of their coustume from a Cycle, the populii of that State attempted to make their own gods. They tried to make a “Supreme Being” made of reason, along with martyrs of their Cycle. Instead, born in blood in the void they left, they made Lady Guile, her sharp wit a deadly opposing to our former goddess: the Lady Libertas. What they did with Lady Guile, MePo does with its populii: with Ground Zero as the sacred birthing Land. This is why they are Opposing to those outside of the Freed Dome, then the Borderlands, and perhaps eventually the Badlands: they make deity of themselves, destructing the old, and bringing Ground Zero to the rest.
This is why we collect mythologia, along with the historia of the Earth: to know and protect it and show others where it comes from. And then there is our other part. We find the other ethnoi: the ones that still ID with their remnants and the coustume that they can find. They, like you, find our Markings and come to us. Many do not want to be symbols of antiq for the Repolitik, used and profited from. Others do not want to starve unseen. I myself am what the Repos — espec the Nation — would have once called a One-Drop, but I have taken it as my own even as I continue to do good work in the Badlands, even as others like me try to find the roots of our worlds, and bring them other populii, other ethnoi like you. It is one of our highest Missives. Operation Mosaic.
OpMos.
No, we will not join the Grass or the Climbers, though we help. We fight in our own way. We will conserve and trace the mythologia, the things that come from historia, but sometimes come belief. And we protect the world, and those that have always been in it. We are not loud, but we will not be silent. To us, knowing will always trump fear. We will keep innovate and save the past that is our passing to the next Gen.
And we will watch. And we will remember.
(c) Matthew Kirshenblatt, 2018.
Mythic Bios 