The Great Game 🎲 Kollarum
Talfar
After Farenn had finished speaking, the banks of the Dark Council guffawed in agreement, and the nexa bugs that hovered above them went from bright red to indigo. They hummed a tune that on Earth might have been from the beginning of Das Rheingold. The Banks of Light remained silent, with only a slight dimming in their ranks. But then the dimming reversed itself and the banks of light pulsed from dim yellow to bright gold, back and forth until the pulse centred on a golden colour that drifted across the hall and then alighted on the forehead of Talfar, the most respected of Vicinese diplomats.
Talfar stepped up to the podium, nodding gravely to his counterpart, who disappeared into the banks of shadow. Talfar gave a wink to this dark corner, where the Demon Priests and their minions were seated. Talfar was not afraid to acknowledge them. Like Farenn, he was notorious for his free thinking. The Illuminists were counting on his support, but secretly feared he might cede ground to the Fallarians. Unfortunately for them, Talfar wasn’t subject to bribes.
“Greetings, fellow Kraslikans! The humans have an English parable that I would like to share with you today. This parable comes from Earth, that planet of rare gems and wordsmiths, and, of course, close proximity to the Soul Star.”
Talfar looked up from his notes and appeared to muse extemporaneously, “Indeed, very close…Perhaps it’s this that lends the human race such intensity. The best and the worst. Where else could Shakespeare and the English language come from? Where else Italian, or Dante’s imaginary, yet as we know, all too real, Malebranche?” Again, Talfar nodded to the dark corner, as if they too played their role on the cosmic stage. For he knew that without the Fallavoid, the Soul Star would suck up all the light in the Kraslika. He knew that Knifestream and his cronies knew he knew this, but he also knew that it was in nobody’s interest to let everyone know. Transparency was a good thing, yet not when it came to the Soul Star. A nod would suffice.
The parable I want to share with you comes to us from the English language, yet has many antecedents in the earlier Ancient Greek language. The English word parable itself is strikingly similar to parabola. Both of these words derive from the Greek parabole, meaning comparison. Both words suggest a line, of both geometry and narrative, that shoots outward yet then curves around and eventually comes back home again to plague the inventor.”
In the corner of the room he saw a tiny purple twinkle. He knew this twinkle was in the eye of his old friend Farenn, who couldn’t resist any chance to play with the meaning of words, those slippery things that tell so much, never more so than when they slip from their meaning and fall back to an earlier meaning, or to another slightly different meaning, thus mirroring the very process of thought.
“In this parable, the Greeks outsmart their besieged enemies, the Trojans, by building a giant wooden horse. They leave this wooden horse on the beach after appearing to give up their ten-year campaign. They leave the horse on the sands, as if it were a votive offering to the god of the sea. The Trojans see the horse on the sands and then pull it up into their city.”
“Any child hearing the story so far would ask, What was in the horse? Did the Trojans check to see what was in the horse? It wasn’t a real horse, so it may have had something inside it. Daddy, what was in the horse? The Trojans, however, go off to feast and drink, completely oblivious to the huddled, highly-armed men in the belly of the beast.”
“The story is of course one of victory: the Men spring down and slaughter the citizens of Troy, the greatest city of the day. Arts, culture, wine, music, and song, all these are embossed on the shield of the great victor by a poet three thousand years later:
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
The story is, of greater course, one of tragedy. The war is bloody and takes friend and foe alike. The horse rides the waves of the Aegean Sea, from Troy, riding the sea like a muddy road, back to plague Odysseus, the inventor of the Trojan Horse.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
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