Becoming One
From Zanecorpwiki
It's a story about the divine. Accessing, touching, glimpsing, joining.
Tone: utterly fantastic, but solemn. Internal aesthetic (in my mind) puts me in the same mood as "Shadow of the Colossus". But the fantastical bit is all internal.
Structure: Third person limited, but so much is about the internal perception. We will see world as objective, but juxtapose with world through lens. Internal dialog cued by italics and we just jump into it without marking. The reader becomes a watcher. Allusions to the idea of a divine watcher one sees in supporting spiritual/religious context.
I see this as a novella?
Plot: We follow a low level warrior and aristocrat general who, each for their own reasons, drive towards success. They fight an existential evil, but their existence is not without it's fair share of moral ambiguity.[notes 1]
As the story progress, the two seemingly become one. Specifically, knowledge starts to bleed across. There's always (?) some local reason why they might have realized, but the transfer becomes more and more uncanny. It's never explicitly stated in the narration, but the general is the reincarnation of the warrior[notes 2] though there's no explicit temporal relationship. Never points out which might have lived first. There's nothing in the story to say they aren't contemporaneous, but it's a world of relatively slow development that's been burdened by war for a long time. A land locked in the grip of war, so they could be hundreds of years apart, though they share essentially the same life.
Current conflict has been going on for decades. Basic history of the world: in the early days of the world, two twins were born to the first people. They were the first humans because they were the first to be aware of their own mortality. Obvious similarities to the Adam and Eve story. Not 100% sure how to shade it yet.
"To begin to see time like the gods, this was the price." They marry and naturally (i.e., this is not a proselytization myth) pass this spark to their spouses and children. As the awareness grows, most of these "first children of the divine" (?) turn towards hope and faith, which they actively seek, each settling on his own. But for some, fear begins to grow stronger than hope and they turn towards dark arts, for in this world it is possible to take the life force of another and thus extend your own. But each taking erodes the soul, and the creature that is left becomes more and more foul. You end up with a very standard existential innate good vs. innate bad guys setup, but for me it's important to get the backdrop.
"Now we talk about the children of the divine and the corrupted one who were once our brothers". At first, the children were unaware and naive and this allowed the corruption to spread until the powerful among them began to enslave people.[notes 3] This sparks a war which flares on and off with sporadic cease fires between powerful federations of (essentially) slave owning vampire-esque plutarchs states and regular human states. The temptation is great, though and for generations the tide has moved against the humans as powerful members of states go over to secret corruption and there are always plenty of scared common men ready to betray their state for the possibility of eternal life.[notes 4]
In the present phase of the struggle, the corrupted states hold the bulk of power, but as victory draws nearer, so does the jealousy and fear between the corrupted allies. As the external enemy begins to dwindle, they begin to eye each other for it's clear that victor shall force them to turn on one another. They begin to betray each other and the children begin to snatch victories as overconfident foes destroy their allies before victory is assured. This does not immediately turn the tide, but it does create a terrible kind of homeostasis where the children are able to capitalize on strife and make inroads, but their strength only grows so far before the corrupted briefly join together to push them back and the cycle is repeated over and over.
Both of the characters exist here. Not sure if maybe one is going up, the other going down in the cycle. But that's the backdrop.
In the end, they each engage in a climactic battle. (Same battle or not? I like the idea of leaving it ambiguous.) One is killed (doing something righteous?) and is at that point fully joined with the other who is overcome with a vision of things, and is able to step out of time. "I saw each spear, knowing I'd already seen it knew I would turn it aside with a subtle shift of my armor. I break the weapons of friend and foe alike. Now I look back across the sweep of the field, and mourn the harm I did to those who did did not thereafter submit in wonder. To each I am shouting "Peace!" as I turn to take a charge and am forced to allow a spear to catch my side so I may gain a mount and stop the advance before the line should break."
Maybe pepper these internal, temporally unhinged accounts with a more narrative description of the final battle? Doesn't need to be real long, but halting an entire battle is going to take awhile.
People will say it's a Christ allegory, because in the end, the character--who has become divine--allows himself to amass injuries so as to avoid hurting others. A similar self-sacrifice story. That's a perfectly fair thing to say, and I cannot (nor do I wish to) escape my heritage, but the story is by no means direct. It's a much allegory of other things as well, let's say.
How uniform should things be? Are there those in among the corrupted that exist on the edge? A society where criminals are sacrificed to the most "meritorious", "for the good of all". At the end of the day, I think pretty clear we would always find corruption in the face of such temptation. In this way, the humans of this world, those that do resist the lure are perhaps in that way better than we would be? How many of us would willingly die when it would be so easy and seem so fair that the iniquitous and vile should be sacrificed to the good? This "righteous immortals" model may be the most common form. It's very familiar to anyone looking at what theocracies and monarchies (any "divine right situation"?) most often degrade into.
For the sake of the story, there needs to be a "big bad", though. So maybe they all eventually degrade into petty, degenerate familial feudal estates, with children and cousins living at courts and in decadence while peasants toil and the sheriff's are given quotas, bought off by the promise of extended life themselves. But as families grow, stock is destroyed and they turn on each other, till after generations it is the most corrupt and ruthless (though also shrewd and beguiling) which survive. You end up with something very like a common "vampire lord" conception--sophisticated, intelligent, powerful, with no pity or humanity left. More seductive and dangerous, than the wretches that scurry for favor, but also far less human... seemingly lost to redemption.
Notes
- ↑ I get frustrated with the simplistic existential evil fantasy books sometimes, though many of my favorites are of this kind. By this, I mean the "humans/elves/etc. good guys" vs. "orcs/goblins/etc. bad guys". You might get your traitor from time to time, or, more rarely, a redeemed orc or something, but the fundamental premise of these entities that are "good and bad just because" is in-and-of-itself not very interesting. If I were better at this, I'd try and devise a paradigm not fundamentally based in a martial frame. Though it wasn't my original purpose, the death of the protagonist really has to be a big part of the story. It's the only way you can redeem his life. I need to find a reference for this or point it out as fiction, but I heard somewhere that a macabre joke among the samurai was that they would reincarnate as samurai as punishment for the killing they did as samurai, casting their existence as a Sisyphean kind of damnation. I'm attracted the idea of blending the fantastic transcendence of the character with a gritty pragmatism. Juxtapose the fantastic transformation to divinity with his karmic debt, the wages of his life. He must face death with all the uncertainty and fear as those he himself has killed.
- ↑ I first though the other way round. Still considering both.
- ↑ Note the corrupted one may take on characteristics of some sort, but are essentially human and there's no obvious gross difference the corrupted and uncorrupted. It's 99% a state of one's soul.
- ↑ I want phrasing that makes it clear that the corrupted don't live forever. One just avoids death from old age by consuming the life force of another, you don't gain imortality. So it's really more "fear of dying" than "eternal life" which drives the dark forces. There may be something important there. Like, "To gain eternal life, you must face death."
