Dear Samson,
Summer is truly splendid in Maroma. Each evening, I hear the cicadas call out to each other. Joined by the taste of ripe fruit and the beauty of the natural gardens that make up the landscape, their songs remind me of a home I left behind long ago.
Before anything else, I wish to congratulate you. Word of your recent seminar on protoprismatic essential limiters has reached me even this far from Saint Palmer. Your theories, as I have heard them, are quite sound. Without the necessary furnaces, it would have been impossible for earlier generations to, as Mister Rett suggested, create even a more primitive version of the sort of long-term binding devices in common use today. It is far more likely, as you yourself suggest, that earlier humans used what materials they had available to create dampening wards around their villages. I am confident that further research will only confirm your theory.
I hope that you will forgive me, my friend, as I must follow up this praise with but a small point of criticism. It is being said in Port Grimsby that you proposed an expedition to find the old spirits of legend. I have heard whispers that you even believe you may find the prison in which Liberation bound mankind’s eternal nemesis. Let there be no doubt in your mind that, even as we have spent these long years apart, I still consider you the same friend with whom I shared many a drink in the shadow of Mount Tarpon. Know, then, that I say this out of great affection to you:
Pursue this no further.
As it is told here, your theory is that these immortals’ endless lifespans would make such imprisonment particularly torturous. You claimed that several of the spirits cast down by Liberation so long ago must, by now, have either gone insane, making it merciful to bind them to a prism, or have become contrite, causing them to instead become potential allies against their violent kin. I fear, dear Samson, that you have fundamentally misunderstood what it is to be born immortal. I ask that you not take this as a comment on some personal failing. It is not so much a fault I have found in you, my friend, as it is an issue in how humans view such beings.
I beg that you forgive me if I am mistaken, but it seems that you cannot help but view immortals as essentially…
…like yourselves but longer lived.
…like yourselves but far wiser.
…like yourselves but more powerful.
You imagine that, to immortals, the mundane concerns of the world only matter when something has gone wrong—that their attention is focused far more on events occurring on a cosmic scale. If these immortals chose to fight against your ancestors, you cannot help but believe that the grudge is forgotten, that your civilization has advanced beyond the cause of the initial conflict, or that these beings are nothing more than beasts to put down in the modern day. For whatever reason, you seem to believe that, left to their own devices, such creatures would prefer to spend their days charting the path of each solar ray rather than indulging in so petty an act as crushing bugs.
I must remind you that the bugs, unlike the solar rays, bite and sting and make every effort to preserve their short lives. They react differently to having their homes flooded than to being smoked out of their nests. Even as a far larger threat looms over them, they fight one another. Indeed, if one were to drop a spider into a nest of ants, neither creature would think to join forces against the hand that caused the whole affair. They would only struggle to survive, unable to do anything about the now-bored interloper preparing to pour out a glass of wine over the mound.
For now, I will briefly break with the bug metaphor, as I wish to instead focus on the idea that the length of time these spirits have been imprisoned may have been somehow detrimental to their mental health. I have often pondered why so many people seem to think that the different ways in which mortals and immortals perceive time is merely a matter of scale. How many centuries of immortal life is equivalent to one human year? The answer is, of course, that the two simply cannot be compared in this way. This is not only true of humans. Though it is not alive, let us speak of the sun. Compared to the timespans usually dealt with by humanity, it may as well be eternal itself, for no individual or even civilization on this world has or will ever last a fraction of the time that the sun has burned. Yet, being finite, all of the sun’s years amount to nothing when compared to infinity. Only so many rays will ever radiate from its surface. There is no limit to the amount of bugs an immortal may choose to squash, even if it only takes the time to do so once every thousand years.
You may answer that humans are no gentle little caterpillars. After so many generations, you possess sharper fangs and more deadly venom. It is true, of course, that you may destroy their flesh. You may seal them away in prisons that trap their essences. You may cast them into darkness and build your homes where they once proudly stood. Yet cities crumble and the very materials used to build their cells will decay long before the spirits themselves. Even if it should take them years, they will regain their flesh. Few things can ever truly destroy them. That they live at all means that they have an eternity to exhaust every other outcome and eventually attain their victory.
I am reminded of an old motto used by my own kin. “Every battle in every heart” was etched on every shield and every plaque within my ancestral home. It is relevant here, I believe, for it is this very same philosophy that such timeless beings may use when waging their wars or pursuing their goals. For someone so bloodthirsty as the wicked spirit bound in adamant chains by Liberation himself, there is no soldier so beneath notice that they are not worth pursuing after the battle has seemingly ended. Indeed, why would there be? Time, as I have tried to get across in my rambling, is worth nothing to such beings. For them, there is no victory but a complete victory, and there is no defeat but a total defeat.
I have written far more than I intended on this matter, so I will trouble you no more with this. I hope that you are well and look forward to sharing another drink when I have returned from my expedition.
Yours sincerely,
Zer Manetho