GENERAL (arkanis) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2017-11-25 09:30:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | star wars: canon: armitage hux |
WHO: Armitage Hux [ narrative ]
WHEN: This afternoon.
WHERE: The Temple of Dendur.
WHAT: What's past is prologue usually heavily edited.
RATING: Low.
The sun stretched through the high, broad slant of windows enclosing one side of the temple chamber, pooling in a thin, watery way, more glare than illumination, on the pale stone floors - on the still, black water encircling the temple's stage. The auditorium at the Imperial Academy on Arkanis had looked something like this, once. It had been larger, he thought, although memories formed at such an early age were prone to distortion; and its windows had looked out on bleak, rocky moors rather than bare trees (when in fact they hadn't been entirely sheeted over with drenching rain, as had most often been the case). It had been a polished place, echoing silence and exuding great ceremony, much like this one. Here his footfalls clapped out to the edges of the room with every step, and he was not a man prone to fancy, or, stars forfend, nostalgia, but had he been - it would have taken little more than closing his eyes, and he could have been traversing an aisle of cadets, stopping to left-pivot at the apse of the room with the squeak of a sole, and climbing to a dais on which he'd never stood. Of course, that room was ruined now, the window trellis a twisted wreck of beams, its black flags littered with shattered glass, its walls painted with the shadows of bombs. It put him in a brooding mood - which he didn't care for. Reflecting on what had been lost to him before he'd even begun his life's work was a pointless exercise in self-pity, and nothing more. Wars destroyed great swaths of history wherever and whenever they went, and that was just the way of them - knowledge, ways of life, and sacred things went up in smoke in every campaign, be it ever so small. Most of it wasn't worth keeping, anyway. He followed the path around the massive, empty room, to the little staircase crossing the temple's decorative moat, and he eyed the whole structure with a look of flat skepticism. It was rather dull, really - dune-brown, small, its edges softened by time and curious hands and, he expected, sand-storms. The only impressive thing about it was the labor it must have taken to deconstruct it and put it back together again in another place. All of that effort - why? For what? The halls leading to this exhibit had given him to understand that the god or gods honored here were no longer worshiped anywhere on the planet. No great event had occurred within its walls or at its door. It was a relic in the most trivial sense of the word - a piece of interest only due to its tangential proximity to something larger. He was reminded of a man claiming to be from Eriadu who had once offered to sell him Tarkin's childhood shoes. Who cared? This entire museum was a portrait of a people gripped by deep, almost crippling indecision - a people in a moral and existential crisis so profound it drove them frantically to preserve and catalogue every little piece of anything they could find. Nothing could be lost. No scrap of fabric, no sketch, no broken statuette could be allowed to slip away. It was a neurosis. It was a symptom of a complete inability to decide for oneself what was valuable. He had seen the same sickness manifested in men who had lost too much family, or wretched gamblers, or spice addicts. They felt an irrational and grotesque compulsion to keep everything, every scrap of paper, every credit chit, every vial, because what if I want to look at it later, what if I accidentally throw away the wrong one, what if I need it, what will I do if I need it and it isn't there? This glorifying of every object as the equal of every other, of a child-like rendering of some woman holding an infant (popular subject, around these parts) with shockingly intricate woodcuts and impossible statues of perfectly-rendered many-armed humanoids and canvases of immense expression and perfect realism - it was moral blindness, plain and simple. So many people refused to allow themselves to understand that some things were better than others, because of course it was a deeply convenient way to live one's life, telling oneself that there were no true standards by which one's behavior could be judged. A thief could tell herself she was no thief. A coward could excuse himself. A traitor could believe they had done right. And so this was an instructive visit, really, even if what he had learned about Egypt and Rome and Augustus and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis only fit together in an abstract jumble he was quite certain he didn't really understand. It gave him no great historical insight into the people he spent his time with, now - no brief pass through a museum could accomplish any task so great as that - but he felt he understood something fundamental about their point of view. And it reinforced for him something he'd always known he'd been lacking. He understood his past, and the past of his galaxy - and he understood its ideas, and words, and how to string them all together to form a compelling narrative and fact pattern. The First Order was awash in no end of rhetoric. It had stories to last centuries. Its texts and its speeches its reason were as solid as solid could be. But its appearance ... Well. He had never understood art above the level of a general aesthetic. No one who had been spirited away to the Unknown Regions at the beginning of the Order's existence had had any sort of expertise in such a field, nor had he been particularly interested in recruiting them as time went on, and the Order grew, and its needs pressed in on him too urgently to think about things like sculpture. There was a reason the Order's public outings relied on things like size, and the grandeur of stark, denuded shapes, and the striking simplicity of one or two easily distinguished colors. Neither he nor the other members of his inner circle had ever had the time or talent to expand beyond obvious evocations of the Empire. There was value, however, in a more subtle approach. There was a sentimental avenue toward persuasion that they had always left unexplored. People had a moral obligation to act in certain ways and to accede to certain powers because it was right to do so, but so many of them failed to understand it in the ways he had been presenting it; so many of them were too self-centered and lazy and timorous to swallow anything that didn't come with a heavy dose of sedative to their own egos. A little flourish of sentiment could go along way toward appeasing such people. And although he rebelled against the prospect viscerally, as he always had at the idea of allowing people to come to the right by their own wrong ways and for their own wrong motivations, he had never truly been in a position to be choosy. If the fate of the galaxy depended upon it, a few little lies might not be so despicable. With the Order's rise at hand, a bit of flattery could be tolerated, if not forgiven. Standing on this stage, gazing into the darkened door of this narrow, hemmed-in, shabby looking temple, he could see that; he understood that he had little choice but to enter. |