From the Journal of Jonas Griffon

How did we get here? How did we go from whatever came before us to wherever
we are now? Those of us who ask these questions don’t have an answer, at least not yet. The past is too indistinct, the hows and whys too unformed for us to really understand them. We keep trying though; what the hell else are we going to do?

It started with victory, most of us agree on that. The end of the War. That was when it all catalyzed into something concrete, when names and places started appearing our memories. Before then, there was just a fog of half-remembered dreams; half a million dead has a way of bringing things into focus.

The warlocks lay at the root of it all. Not all of them, of course, but enough to let us blame them for the whole damn mess. Magic use was a big problem overseas even before it cropped up here, and about twenty years ago the number of warlocks increased tenfold. No one liked sorcerers much, but the power they offered proved pretty tempting to the young intelligentsia overseas. And power breeds fear, which in turn breeds prejudice. Got a problem? Blame the warlock. Lost your job? Blame the warlock. Want to get elected by finding a scapegoat for all your country’s woes? Blame the warlock. It made for a nice dynamic: a powerful minority which the rest of the world took great joy in kicking around.

Things got pretty tense there for a while — an ugly situation just waiting for a match — and then in the middle of it came something new. I suppose you could call it a disease, though it never killed anyone. People would fall ill, and in the course of a couple of weeks their bodies would… change. They lost their hair, their skin turned all leathery, and their strength went up like a bodybuilder’s. Some of them could see in the dark; others could jump like an over-sized frog. Furthermore, their bodies had a weird draining effect on those around them. You felt tired and listless if you spent time near them, and prolonged exposure cause serious problems. The change was permanent and irreversible; those afflicted with it could never go back to normal lives. They were called “gaunts,” a term at once endearing and repugnant to its subjects. And it seemed that their appearance amid the populace almost perfectly matched the rise in magic use.

Naturally, people blamed the warlocks. No one’s entirely certain if magic was behind the gaunts’ creation or not, but since when does rationality play a part in these things? There were no gaunts on our side of the ocean, and we only had a fraction of the warlocks that they did overseas. That was proof enough. What had been passive harassment slowly turned into active persecution. Anti-magic legislation was passed. Warlock “clubs” were raided, their members thrown into prison. Books were burned. Sorcerers went into hiding. And through it all, the number of gaunts slowly grew larger — proof, they said, that the warlocks were up to something.

The Commonwealth was happy to ignore the whole thing. Like I said, we had no gaunts over here, and our warlocks were too thin on the ground to really spook us. We even offered refuge for some of the persecuted magicians out there. Not a whole lot, of course, just enough to show everyone how tolerant and enlightened we were. Other than that, it looked far away and insignificant from here. Like somebody else’s problem.

But then something happened which nobody expected. The warlocks fought back. At first, it was just sporadic resistance — a few showdowns with law enforcement, an underground movement designed to keep arcane texts intact, and the like — but some of them had bigger plans than that. One group in particular had connections to the ruling elite of a major country (magic can do wonders for making political problems disappear) and one dark night, they seized power in a coup. The men they deposed were hardly well-liked, and the populace, though shocked, couldn’t muster the will to oppose the new order. The warlocks seized the industrial base, took control of the army, and proclaimed themselves the head of a new government. The Order of Nu, they called it, a place where sorcery could flourish unmolested and warlocks could practice their arts without fear.

Their neighbors declared war within a week.

A “Coalition” of nearby nations was hastily assembled with the intention
of forcibly deposing the leaders of the Order. They thought it would be over lickety-split — they had the resources and the manpower to overwhelm the fledgling government — but the Order was ready for them. Magic has a nasty way of evening the odds (do you have any idea what a kinetic warlock can do to artillery shells?) and the people under the Order took umbrage at foreign troops trampling all over their turnip patches. It got ugly. Fast. Nu units were tougher and stronger than their Coalition counterparts, and Nu factories poured out supplies quicker than anyone could have imagined. Though outnumbered and surrounded, the Order soon brought the Coalition offensive to a halt… and then launched one of their own.

When it became clear that normal forms of warfare weren’t going to get it done, the Coalition changed tactics. They began using magic as well — “loyal” warlocks who enjoyed legal immunity in exchange for their services — and even began drafting gaunts into their units. Gaunts had strength and endurance that made them superior to ordinary troops, and they hated magic like a cat hates water. The Coalition stopped the Order’s advance in a series of hellish battles. They couldn’t do much with it, though. The war settled in to a series of ever-moving fronts, see-sawing across the continent and eating up anything in its path. Men, machines, towns and villages all fell into the maw. It seemed to take on a life of its own; every time one side got the upper hand, the other side countered with some bold strategy or innovative piece of hardware. It made for a hell of a mess.

And more gaunts kept cropping up. The increase in magic use saw an astronomical increase in gauntism, enough to form a new minority all their own. It became increasingly clear that magic had something to do with their “condition”, and that the more magic was used, the more gaunts would appear. That’s what brought us into the fight. The Commonwealth had stayed out of it the way we stayed out of everything over there. We sold some raw supplies to the various factions — we’re nothing if not good capitalists — but mostly we were content to take the high road, plead for peace, and pretend that none of it really affected us. And then, in the third year of the conflict gauntism appeared on our shores. Out of the factories, up from the slums: lost souls mostly, those with little affluence or clout. But it was enough to get our attention. No one wanted it to get worse; no one wanted gaunts afflicting our populace. The Order of Nu became our prime target. We asked them to scale back their use of magic. They refused, and the rumble was on.

The fight quickly took on the terms of a holy crusade. We weren’t going to war to defeat a traditional enemy; we were going to war to destroy the forces of evil forever. The Order of Nu encouraged the spread of sorcery, instigated gauntism, and violated every law of man and the Universe in their quest for power. By destroying them, we would ensure that our good land and free people would never again suffer the wickedness they represented. Go fight, they said, and turn back the tide that threatened to swallow us all. It sounded pretty damn inspiring at the time.
I was one of the first Commonwealth soldiers on the ground over there — at least I think I was. I have memories of a beach landing, of fighting my way through row after row of enemy troops before seizing the high ground and pushing them back. I can remember the inland battles, the house-to-house fighting, the do or die stands. I remember the first man that I killed. He swore at me in a language I couldn’t understand and spat in my face when I drew near to finish the job. I remember all these things as clear as day, so I have to believe they were real. My nightmares of that time sure feel real enough.

The surge of Commonwealth troops re-energized the Coalition attack. They scaled back their sorcery operations — warlocks were no longer permitted to participate in the fighting — and tore into the Order with new vigor. Commonwealth citizens who didn’t fight went to work in the factories, and with all the menfolk overseas, lots of women found new opportunities riveting steel or walking a beat as cops. Meanwhile, we soldiers gritted our teeth and hung on. For two more years, we fought and clawed our way across the continent. Victory drew nearer, but the cost kept rising. The bodies piled up, gaunts were becoming more and more common… and the Order just wouldn’t go down. They had tricks up their sleeve, all right, and they played every one of them like a card shark closing in on a make. The worst of it came during a push across their territory — our best, most ambitious effort to finish things once and for all. The Order used fifth columnists to cut our supply lines, then hit us with a barrage of new magic, forcing us to retreat less than a dozen miles from the capital. Our army was battered and winter was coming on. There would be no victory, at least not without a bigger chunk of blood and treasure.

As the troops pulled back, depleted and exhausted from the effort, the powers that be in the Commonwealth decided to take drastic steps. They were going to use sorcery, like the rest of the Coalition had, but this time, it was going to be different. The government secretly contacted a small cabal of local warlocks— some native, some immigrant refugees — and asked them to come up with a final solution. Many of them were rivals of the men leading the Order, and had been chomping at the bit for years waiting for the chance to unseat them. The national government in Nova Roma gave them all the money they needed and told them to do whatever it took.

They holed themselves up somewhere in Central City, studying, debating, and arguing amongst themselves. For six months, there was no word. The troops in the field entered an extended holding action, hoping — praying — that the big brains could engineer an end game. And then the orders came. A secret cable was sent from Central City to Nova Roma, then across the seas to the generals and the colonels and the captains. “Fall back from enemy territory. Leave all that you can spare behind.” The devil was coming for the Order of Nu, and we did not want to be on the property when he rang.

At first the Order, thought they had won — that we were retreating for good and would presumably sue for peace. Then it came. To this day, no one is certain exactly what it was. The term used most often is “White Light,” a swath of magical energy that dropped out of the sky and laid waste to everything it touched. The Order’s capital city vanished in a flash of energy. Buildings were disintegrated, streets disappeared, and 500,000 soldiers, civilians, and innocent bystanders were obliterated in an instant. The White Light’s power sucked the life out of the earth itself, rendering the soil ashen and inert for hundreds of miles in every direction. Its brilliance lingered for weeks after the initial blast before finally fading like a photo-negative. Not a single member of the Order of Nu survived the blast. The remaining elements of the army surrendered within a few days.


The Peace

After a little mopping up, we left our allies to rebuild their shattered countries and returned home heroes. We stepped off the boat to cheering crowds, ticker tape parades, and the fruits of victory waiting to be enjoyed. That was the first date I can remember. April 13, the day of the big parade in New Eden. The earliest event in my life I am absolutely certain took place. It was a glorious day, full of hope and promise for the future. We should have known it couldn’t last. It never does.

In the first place, we now had gaunts to worry about. They didn’t vanish with the Order like many had secretly hoped, and their status in the Commonwealth became an uncomfortable question. New ones still appeared every now and then (though not with the frequency they had in the war), and the ones who already existed were bitter and resentful. No one wanted them around; they gave people the creeps, and prolonged exposure to them caused dizziness and fainting spells. Slowly, gradually, they were shunted aside. Opportunities dried up for them. High-end jobs were no longer available, forcing them to become coal miners, janitors, ditch-diggers. Gaunt ghettos sprang up, lower-end neighborhoods where “their kind” could congregate away from the “normal” people. Legally, of course, they still had the same rights and privileges they always had, but in practical reality they were second-class citizens.

It’s not surprising that so many of them turned to crime. Their condition made them well suited for it. The stronger ones could throw men through brick walls, and even the weak ones were tougher than most normals. If they couldn’t make money at straight jobs, and the notion of social power was a bad joke, what was left but crime? Within a few years, most of the major cities had gaunt street gangs. A short time after that, combines and large-scale gaunt syndicates spread through the underworld like wildfire.

Then there were the warlocks, practitioners of the same magic that helped win us the war. The Commonwealth never had the huge numbers of sorcerers like the rest of the world, but that didn’t mean we trusted them. The White Light bought them a little reprieve, a few legal outlets where they could practice their art under controlled conditions, but nothing more. The Anti-Sorcery Act was put into effect, making it illegal to work magic without a strictly defined license. With the rise in gaunt activity among the underworld, normal criminals turned to illegally-operating warlocks to even the odds. Sorcery became a “gray market” pastime, a dirty little secret that everyone condemned but no one really had the nerve to stop.

Both the gaunts and the warlocks were only symptoms of a larger problem, however. There was something wrong with the world, something that spread beyond the crimelords and the back-alley spells. I think maybe it’s always been that way, and the war was just an excuse to forget about it. A big victory meant a shiny new coat of paint on our souls: redemption for all our sins. But redemption never comes that easily.

The national government has weakened over the last few years, withering away like a dead tree. Most of the power now lies with the cities: huge metropolises whose populations soared during the war. Civic councils dictate the law and local police enforce it. Big businesses choose the players, buying elections like they buy stock. And while the feds still have the clout to smash some toes if they want, they’re not the unifying force they were during the war. We’re still one nation, but the individual pieces mean more than the whole. Nova Roma is a fading capital, falling into obscurity even as it pretends to hold onto its authority. The scavengers have risen to fill its place. Victory was just a hollow shell, curdling into a darker, more permanent condition. Corruption and hypocrisy thrived beneath the veneer like a hidden disease.

Pick up any newspaper and it screams at you from the headlines. Walk down the street and you can feel it beneath your shoes. In the shadows lie desperate people, willing to kill to make their pain go away. In boardrooms and courthouses, power turns men into clawing abominations. Sin leaks out into the corners of our mind, offering pleasure and bliss for an oh-so-easy-to-pay price. We line up for it. We beg for it. And then we go back into the light and tell ourselves that we’re still good people. The ideals are still there. We pay our taxes, vote in elections, speak our mind without fear. But it’s all just a façade, a fairy tale we tell ourselves so we don’t have to look at what we’ve become. The gaunts and sorcerers become easy scapegoats — if it’s their fault, then it can’t be ours, can it? — allowing us to live a lie without thinking twice.


The Past

Memory’s a funny thing these days. The further back you go, the harder and harder it gets to remember any details. Anything after the White Light is fine: some have better recollections than others, but the concrete details — the reality of what you’re recalling — feels right. It’s the years before the Light that cause people problems. Childhood memories, pre-war events… all of it’s gone, nothing more than vague images and emotions. Even the war itself is hazy. I can’t remember the names of battles or the places where we fought. Only general memories, nightmare flashes of combat devoid of context or circumstance. And it’s not just me. Everyone I talk to is the same way. A lot of people can’t even remember why we went to war in the first place, or if they do, it’s in generalities like “the enemy had to be stopped.” It’s like we’ve all been afflicted with a case of amnesia.

And it extends to more than just the people. Books and newspapers, plaques and treatises, anything referring to the world before the war is hard to come by. Libraries are stacked with recent texts, written in the past ten years or so, but anything before that is out of stock, or unavailable, or never came across the ocean. Statues and landmarks have nothing commemorating their unveiling; buildings have no date of foundation. I can’t find any maps or history books detailing events before the war. Not one. Before the White Light, nothing existed that didn’t need to, and even those details trail off the further back you dig. The world before then is a great empty void.

Most people out there never question that. They just go on about their lives, looking after their day-to-day concerns, and not giving a second thought for the past or their place in it. Like the drugs they buy. The hookers they use. The debts they incur and the shady deals they make. The past gets forgotten like all the rest, a dirty secret that no one ever thinks about. The here and now is all the world cares about; the rest slips imperceptibly away.

The scary thing is, I don’t think any of it’s an accident.


The Deal

I can remember the first time I thought there was something wrong, when all of the pieces of the puzzle stopped adding up. It was one of those scorching hot nights that are never supposed to happen in Gateway, when the air itself feels like a pile of bricks. I opened the window to my apartment and looked out across the city with its siren call of corruption and complacency. I heard the sounds of dirt and sin, felt the hum of deals being made and trust being broken, and all of a sudden, it hit me like a wave of ice. We’re not the victors. We’re the spoils.

I don’t know how the thought popped into my head, but once I had it, I couldn’t
let it go. It felt solid. Real. It had more weight than the ocean of half-truths and justifications out there. There was no victory. Only the illusion of one.

The most obvious sign goes back to the war and the White Light that ended it. Do you remember that sorcerous cabal who got together and unleashed the Light on the Order of Nu? I’ve done some looking into them, or at least I’ve tried. There’s nothing out there. And I don’t mean a conspiracy or some active effort to suppress the information. I mean there’s nothing. No one can remember their names. No one can identify their faces. No one can say where they lived. Everybody “knows” the facts of the matter — of their deal with the government, their efforts in Central City, and their final solution. But if you try searching for concrete evidence, you’ll end up chasing your own shadow. There’s no radio broadcasts, eyewitness testimonies, or newspaper reports of their accounts — or even of the day the White Light struck the Order. No records. No announcements. No words praising or condemning their deeds. But for our hazy memories, it might as well be a myth. And the world seems okay with that. No one questions why they can’t be found, where they went, or who they were in the first place. Hell, they won a whole damn war for us; you’d think there’d at least be a statue or something.

The more I thought about their little vanishing act, the more it fit in with everything else I’ve noticed. The warlocks unleashed the White Light, a spike dividing the here-and-now from the hell and gone. Before that point, it was all muddled and indistinct, and after that, everything seemed clear. They touched off an explosion that defined us, set this world ticking like a watch wound for the first time. They gave us what we wanted — what we thought we wanted — and then bit-by-bit, the victory we asked them for fell away, leaving empty dreams and ashes in its wake. The world slipped into the shadows, robbing us of the peace and idealism we thought we’d won. And now, our valiant saviors are nowhere to be found. They just vanished like ghosts, and no one knows who they are, where they went, or how to find them.

Any con artist in the world can tell you about that game.

They suckered us. They played us for marks. They sold us out, and then they split before we got wise. No evidence to connect to them, no names to leave a trail. Just a collective shrug and a great big fog. The biggest snow job in the history of the world, and we swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The question is, why? What did they hope to accomplish, and what did they gain in return? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does. But have no doubt. Those warlocks brought darkness in with their Light and left us to pay the check.

That’s the best answer I can come up with to explain the whole damn mess. You can see it out there, beneath the skyscrapers and the stormy clouds. People give themselves to it willingly, selling their souls piece by piece in exchange for money, power, sex, what have you. It takes and takes and takes, and we keep asking for more. Because we believe the lies. Because we think we’re entitled. Because we won the war, which is enough to excuse any sin, and because we have hope for the future. Hope is the bitch of it, the force that keeps us going through all the pain. “Just one more score,” it tells us. “Just one lucky break. Just one day of sunshine to make up for all the rain.” As long as we believe it, nothing will change.

You might think I’m crazy for telling you all of this, and I know it sounds insane. But I’m not the only one who’s come to this conclusion. Other people out there have put it together, repeating the questions that no one wants to ask. There’s not a lot of them: maybe one in ten thousand, maybe less. But each and every one of them knows there’s something wrong with the world. You can see it in their eyes, in the questions they remember, in the answers they refuse to accept. They know. They know. And they just can’t let it be.

I call them the Few, and I’ve met enough of them to stop questioning my own sanity. They sure as hell aren’t on the side of the angels. One guy I met, he’s a loan shark, and another’s been taking kickbacks since the day she joined the force. Most of the time, they just try to survive, which is hard enough these days. But they keep chasing this notion, this idea that we aren’t who we’re supposed to be. It eats at them the way it eats at me, and if there’s enough of us out there, maybe — maybe — one of us can find some answers.

Our inquisitive natures have another side effect too, one a little more immediate than fumbling with cosmic riddles. You see, when you feel that the universe is wrong somehow, then there’s naturally an urge to put it right. Maybe not the whole thing, but some small part of it at least. Every now and then, they’ll see a chance to do something — get somebody out of a bad situation, say, or stick it to some bastard who dearly needs to be stuck. And when that happens, they don’t hesitate. Not for a second. It’s just something they have to do. They know that it will have a price, and they also know that nobody’s going to throw them a parade if they pull it off. The junkie they help might go back on the needle, or the corrupt politician they bring down might be replaced by one just as bad. No one will notice their efforts. No one will care. But that doesn’t matter. They care, and for that brief moment, it lets them remember how things are supposed to be.

How much difference can the Few make? Not much. Maybe nothing at all. Heroes went out of vogue a long time ago and like I said, the world isn’t interested in the past any more. The Few are grains of sand on a huge beach; the waves will keep coming in no matter what they do. On the other hand, sand has a way of getting into places that it shouldn’t. Bit by bit, the Few worm their way into the shadows, and sooner or later, one of them will start asking the right questions. The answers might just give the world a hell of a wake up call.

In the meantime, the Commonwealth goes on much as it has since the end of the War. Leaders come and go, the newspapers blare their headlines, progress marches forward… though towards what no one wants to say. On the Gateway docks, the Patterson brothers are making their move against that new gaunt syndicate. Down in Paradiso, the Angel Eyes killer has taken another victim and the cinema’s brightest star just turned up dead in a dingy hotel room with enough drugs in her to kill a thoroughbred. The deputy mayor of New Eden is fending off questions about a “sorcerous” past and 35 people died last night in a Central City tenement fire started by their landlord, who hoped to collect the insurance money. We stand at the cusp of an abyss, doing what we can and knowing it isn’t enough. So it is and so it’s been every day since the world began.

Whenever the hell that was.