How to Destroy An Empire
An Against the Grain Adventure. Part 5.
5
The sun winked out once it was finished. He'd given one last cry, his blood following the spear blade, spilling on the sand as it exited his side. Fenix didn't catch what he’d said. His last words. Probably something along the lines of, “Ow!” Once he finally died, the sun returned, ashamed it had ever hidden in terror from earthly concerns.
Crucifixion was not pleasant. There was no pontificating from a cross. Speeches were difficult, if not impossible, as the lungs were the first organs to go when one hangs from their wrists that long. No witness or executioner expects poetry, prose, or anything else from the hanging condemned. This man was no different. But he was.
He had been a minister before his sham trial, conviction, and execution. The charge unclear. The local authorities in this place were soft, stupid men in dresses overseen by lazy, stupid Roman magistrates mostly wishing they were anywhere else. They had convicted him just to be done with the whole affair.
They blamed the locals, but it was their call. Romans always claimed to be the adults in every room they stole, after all.
The condemned had been a popular preacher as these things were measured. But a wandering medicine man wouldn't be overly missed in this backwater. Not by anyone who mattered. Beyond a monthly report littered with similarly grisly line items, Rome would never notice or care. No one would. Not for one man so far from anywhere.
But they were wrong. From this seemingly small event would come larger events. It would unleash a tidal wave of change, destroying Rome and all their works alike. Only the name Rome would remain, kept alive by children growing in ruins, making believe they were heirs to its glory. They would think themselves born great but live as slaves.
They would consider the centuries as a blink in their new god’s eye. A plan unfolding along explicable lines, revealed and interpreted by a new class of men in dresses. By a new kind of governance, wedding itself to death, rather than its enemies. The guilt of eight centuries would finally outweigh their virtue.
They would surrender to the mercy of a murdered god. The place was lousy with dead gods under every stone.
Fenix smirked at the thought, his olive skin catching the Levantine sun. Their fall couldn’t come soon enough. His crusade against the hated city had been long but this death on that cross was his first fatal blow. After this, their spirit would chain itself to history. Once their civilizing purpose was snuffed out, all they could do was smother themselves in servility and call it good. They would fight each other over ghosts now.
They wouldn’t even see it happening. Their old competitive natures would remain, of course. They would still struggle against a dark and dangerous world. But what games or competitions could they truly have when their only interest was how best to mourn one’s life in the present. All for a mere promise of a blessed, immortal soul?
Here's hoping that check doesn't bounce.
Fenix laughed. He knew the empire had begun unraveling already, one mind at a time, until everything which made it was gone. All these men, these beasts, would welcome it like stupid children, believing all along it was salvation. They would come to believe they were born unclean. That they even needed it. Salvation from what?
They would look ahead for the day it would all be worth it. When investing the only lives they had would be justified in the end. When the man-god they had murdered returned. When all of their sacrifices, when all the families they broke, and all nations bowed before some undead beggar from a backwater called Judea.
Working to that day would destroy them all. It would take time. Centuries. But Fenix would live to see it. He’d already lived over a century himself. His god granted life everlasting, and you didn’t even have to die first to enjoy it. His own savior had told him so. A god of this world holding power over life and death had promised it. And his god had not been wrong yet.
Well, he’d been plenty wrong. Just not incorrect. Not yet anyway.