Written By Shard
July 7, 2019, 4:34 a.m.(6/3/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
I am a citizen of the Compact who grew up Abandoned. The Compact is never going to let that go, so I don't see why I should.
Every one of those things you listed are things the Compact is guilty of doing to the Abandoned in turn. Every last one. And while the Compact works as a whole, while the Compact answers to a single king, the Abandoned do not; but the Compact is perfectly happy to punish any Abandoned for any crime of any other Abandoned, no matter what their tribe or location. To the Compact, they are all guilty of every crime any individual may commit, and to the Abandoned, you are all guilty of every atrocity any one of you have dreamed up. Do you think they don't notice? Do you think they don't talk? Do you think there weren't constant stories told around the fire when the adults thought we were sleeping about what barbaric murdering thieves you all were? Do you think I grew up without being constantly warned about what would happen to me and all the rest of my tribe if I ever, ever did anything to bring your attention down on us? Do you think /we/ weren't afraid of infiltrators and spies?
I don't hold the Compact in contempt. I used to. I used to think you were all the worst possible people, more monsters than men, eternally hungry and eternally greedy and eternally growing and grasping to seize up every last thing from everyone else. You used to terrify me, I used to hate you. There were nights I went to sleep wishing you would all vanish into thin air or die of plague. You tried to kill me and mine, every last one, down to the smallest baby, because we were somehow in your way.
I don't hate the Compact. I hate butchers. I hate baby murderers. I hate people who massacre thousands of other people and then leave them to rot, or burn in a ditch, or nail them to trees. I hate people who drag other people off in chains to work their entire lives under the boot of their kidnappers. You don't need to tell me that's not all of you, or even most of you, because I've learned that. It took me a while, longer than it should have, but I learned it.
If I want the Compact to be better, to live up to what their stories say they are, to what the gods say they should be, to hold on to their honor, why is that disloyal? If I am loudest when something terrible has been done, it's because I want it to be realized, and to be remembered, even if I know there will never, ever be justice for it. Everyone mourns for lost Compact Houses. Everyone weeps for dead nobles, if they were remotely decent, and sometimes even when they were not. No one needs to be told those are sad things, terrible things. They don't need my voice on the pile, saying the same things everyone else is saying. But no one has been crying for dead Abandoned children, because their murderers made sure there was no one left to cry for them. And if the most anyone feels about it is annoyance that some mouthy Prodigal sellsword keeps bringing them up, then at least for a moment they were remembered, and maybe someone felt /something/ about it other than satisfaction at a job well done.
Every one of those things you listed are things the Compact is guilty of doing to the Abandoned in turn. Every last one. And while the Compact works as a whole, while the Compact answers to a single king, the Abandoned do not; but the Compact is perfectly happy to punish any Abandoned for any crime of any other Abandoned, no matter what their tribe or location. To the Compact, they are all guilty of every crime any individual may commit, and to the Abandoned, you are all guilty of every atrocity any one of you have dreamed up. Do you think they don't notice? Do you think they don't talk? Do you think there weren't constant stories told around the fire when the adults thought we were sleeping about what barbaric murdering thieves you all were? Do you think I grew up without being constantly warned about what would happen to me and all the rest of my tribe if I ever, ever did anything to bring your attention down on us? Do you think /we/ weren't afraid of infiltrators and spies?
I don't hold the Compact in contempt. I used to. I used to think you were all the worst possible people, more monsters than men, eternally hungry and eternally greedy and eternally growing and grasping to seize up every last thing from everyone else. You used to terrify me, I used to hate you. There were nights I went to sleep wishing you would all vanish into thin air or die of plague. You tried to kill me and mine, every last one, down to the smallest baby, because we were somehow in your way.
I don't hate the Compact. I hate butchers. I hate baby murderers. I hate people who massacre thousands of other people and then leave them to rot, or burn in a ditch, or nail them to trees. I hate people who drag other people off in chains to work their entire lives under the boot of their kidnappers. You don't need to tell me that's not all of you, or even most of you, because I've learned that. It took me a while, longer than it should have, but I learned it.
If I want the Compact to be better, to live up to what their stories say they are, to what the gods say they should be, to hold on to their honor, why is that disloyal? If I am loudest when something terrible has been done, it's because I want it to be realized, and to be remembered, even if I know there will never, ever be justice for it. Everyone mourns for lost Compact Houses. Everyone weeps for dead nobles, if they were remotely decent, and sometimes even when they were not. No one needs to be told those are sad things, terrible things. They don't need my voice on the pile, saying the same things everyone else is saying. But no one has been crying for dead Abandoned children, because their murderers made sure there was no one left to cry for them. And if the most anyone feels about it is annoyance that some mouthy Prodigal sellsword keeps bringing them up, then at least for a moment they were remembered, and maybe someone felt /something/ about it other than satisfaction at a job well done.
Written By Peri
June 23, 2019, 11:31 a.m.(5/3/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
I can help with your ignorance of matters outside the walls of Arx. I tell you again of your vassals who work without slaves without starving. Let me also make it known to you that your people have asked for charity with much dignity and passion and many slaves were freed due to this.
Written By Shard
June 21, 2019, 5:33 p.m.(4/28/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
I haven't missed that. You've fed yourselves for centuries. You've held lavish feasts in the middle of winter, I'm sure, the same as every other House's nobility. Your problem will be manpower and coin, not food directly. That's why your High Lord worked out that it would be years before Thralldom is fully abolished. That's the point. You'll eventually have to pay the people who hold up your society. You'll have to deal with the fact that at least a few of them won't want to stay with the people who have held their leash. And I'm not pretending that won't be very difficult. But I'm not shedding tears over it either. You'll have the entirety of the Compact behind you, in every way possible. That's more support than most can hope for.
I'm not even touching that laughable bit about Thralls having the choice to be thralls. But again, the rest of the Compact somehow gets along without killing everyone who steals an apple. And I highly doubt you were letting murderers take care of your children or work in your households. If you decide to just start executing anyone who might have otherwise been a thrall, that's you being petulant, not you having no other option.
Other people make this argument better than I do. Someone has already made an analogy. But I'll offer this one: starvation and I are old enemies. Every single year, we would have to prepare for the coming winter. Every year we would have to stow away food, try to predict the herds, and decide where we were going to set camp. Often things would go wrong. Sometimes we would miscalculate. Sometimes we would lose hunters, or the herds would go too far south, or the herds would die, or any of a thousand things. But inevitably, winter was on the way. No matter what happened, winter would arrive. We could not stop it. We could not escape it. We could not argue it away. And there was no Compact to call on when there was no food left.
You have time to prepare. You have years, not seasons. You have others to support you. And there's much more to gain than mere survival. I don't believe Great House Thrax will crumble, so long as you don't spend all the time you have in front of you arguing and fighting over whether you should actually /have/ to repair your foundation, rather than continue to rely on the enslavement of others to prop you up. You're far stronger than that.
I'm not even touching that laughable bit about Thralls having the choice to be thralls. But again, the rest of the Compact somehow gets along without killing everyone who steals an apple. And I highly doubt you were letting murderers take care of your children or work in your households. If you decide to just start executing anyone who might have otherwise been a thrall, that's you being petulant, not you having no other option.
Other people make this argument better than I do. Someone has already made an analogy. But I'll offer this one: starvation and I are old enemies. Every single year, we would have to prepare for the coming winter. Every year we would have to stow away food, try to predict the herds, and decide where we were going to set camp. Often things would go wrong. Sometimes we would miscalculate. Sometimes we would lose hunters, or the herds would go too far south, or the herds would die, or any of a thousand things. But inevitably, winter was on the way. No matter what happened, winter would arrive. We could not stop it. We could not escape it. We could not argue it away. And there was no Compact to call on when there was no food left.
You have time to prepare. You have years, not seasons. You have others to support you. And there's much more to gain than mere survival. I don't believe Great House Thrax will crumble, so long as you don't spend all the time you have in front of you arguing and fighting over whether you should actually /have/ to repair your foundation, rather than continue to rely on the enslavement of others to prop you up. You're far stronger than that.
Written By Peri
June 21, 2019, 8:52 a.m.(4/27/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
Look to your vassals who have freed their slaves and not starved. They prove you wrong.
Read the whites of slavers who wringed their hands last year when presented with Brass's challenge. There you will find discussions of justice.
If your stewards do not know how to manage your lands, beg for aid from people who are stewards of free people.
Read the whites of slavers who wringed their hands last year when presented with Brass's challenge. There you will find discussions of justice.
If your stewards do not know how to manage your lands, beg for aid from people who are stewards of free people.
Written By Shard
June 20, 2019, 11:56 p.m.(4/27/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
No, what I am saying is learn to grow and hunt your own damned food. Work your own damned fields. Make your own damned coin and do your own damned labor. Maybe your kidnappers can learn a new profession that doesn't involve selling people. I get that it isn't as easy or as clean as just snapping your fingers and making things just so, that it's far from it, but I'd also like to point out that the reason you're in this situation is because you decided to build your fealty on the backs of millions of slaves for hundreds and hundreds of years, even after the rest of the Compact outlawed it. If you want to lay blame, lay it at the feet of all the people who year, after year, decade after decade, century after century kept this system going, because it was never going to last forever. The reason people face starvation and hardship /now/ is because they decided to tie your entire economy to slavery /then/. They built this weakness into your society, and every generation afterward decided to continue it. When every other member of the Compact gave it up, surely with the same kind of hardships and difficulties, Thrax chose to continue.
/I/ find it curious that your only solution to the Abandoned is either kill them or enslave them. Those aren't the only two options, they're merely the only two options most of the Compact ever entertains. You're right that as a child I wouldn't have wanted to be murdered in my sleep, or tortured and strung up to die, but I also wouldn't have wanted to be enslaved for the rest of my life so I could 'repay' the 'debt' of having been born to the wrong parents. But if I had to choose between the two, I'll take death over chains. Even when you decide to get especially fucking cruel about it, it doesn't last as long as a lifetime of forced service to the people that would have destroyed everything I cared about.
You have a long time to work this out. No one's taking away your precious free labor immediately. You've got years of 'tradition' ahead of you before the time is up. The rest of the Compact somehow managed, I'm sure you can do it with all the rest of the Houses providing aid.
/I/ find it curious that your only solution to the Abandoned is either kill them or enslave them. Those aren't the only two options, they're merely the only two options most of the Compact ever entertains. You're right that as a child I wouldn't have wanted to be murdered in my sleep, or tortured and strung up to die, but I also wouldn't have wanted to be enslaved for the rest of my life so I could 'repay' the 'debt' of having been born to the wrong parents. But if I had to choose between the two, I'll take death over chains. Even when you decide to get especially fucking cruel about it, it doesn't last as long as a lifetime of forced service to the people that would have destroyed everything I cared about.
You have a long time to work this out. No one's taking away your precious free labor immediately. You've got years of 'tradition' ahead of you before the time is up. The rest of the Compact somehow managed, I'm sure you can do it with all the rest of the Houses providing aid.
Written By Willow
June 19, 2019, 8:12 a.m.(4/23/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
It is such a joy and so refreshing to treat with someone else who seems to have such a similar perspective. There are a good many ways in which I might be considered progressive or unorthodox, and those are usually the product of reflection and careful cultivation and thought experiment. I am reminded on reading his latest musings of why it was that I wanted to try to work with Thrax and the Peerage of the Isles on the most respectful terms possible. When hearing that Thralldom was ultimately going to be abolished, as a Northerner with our associations with and allusions to Skald, I was in truth overjoyed, because that has never been something I have believed was right. But at the same time, my heart went out to a people who were watching their traditions and way of life disappear, because all I could think was what if the same happens to or were to happen to shamanism, and what impact would that have on Stonedeep, its stability, and morale. What would it be like to have someone else take it from us because they disagreed?
Written By Brianna
June 16, 2019, 11:35 a.m.(4/17/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alecstazi
A wonderful host and a stimulating conversationalist. We may not see eye to eye on all things, but I believe we agree on the things that truly matter.
All in all, I am delighted to make his renewed acquaintance.
All in all, I am delighted to make his renewed acquaintance.
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