The Tanah–Migrations, Chapter Four

[The following is the sixteenth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, and here is the fifteenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Years went by, and the Luminosians enjoyed themselves in their new, stolen homes. They kept using their magic for their own selfish purposes, much to the dismay of the elders, who never kept quiet in their complaints.

Not only did they use their magic to deter the hungry Zagans from fishing in the nearby lake or eating the fruit of the trees surrounding the city, but the Luminosians also used it to create more wealth and abundance for themselves, as well as other physical pleasures.

Some Luminosians used magic to create alcoholic drinks and narcotics for themselves, which of course were used to excess. Others used it to seduce women, or to force themselves on women. Love as a mutually shared experience was growing rarer and rarer.

And still, the Zagans starved and starved.

There is one story of a young Luminosian man who ached over the charms of a beautiful girl who lived in the house next to his. He’d look out his side window into hers, and steal glimpses of her undressing, to see her beautiful figure, creamy skin, and long, wavy black hair. He had to have her.

So one day, standing by the rear window of his house (where the starving Zagans could be seen at a distance–not that he bothered to notice them), he lit a small fire and invoked Nevil. He closed his eyes, took several long, deep, slow breaths, and allowed himself to be relaxed enough to be in a trance and be receptive to the Crim of fire and passion.

In that special, mystical language, he chanted, “Nevil, make her want me,” over and over again.

The heat and the smoke wafted from his small flame, through the side window, out and through the side window of her house, and finally to her bed, where she was napping. She breathed the heat and the fumes through her nostrils.

She woke up and coughed. Then she looked through her window and saw him through his. Her eyes welcomed him to come over, which he immediately did.

He had her aggressively on her bed. When he was finished with her, he looked down at her nakedness, and found he hated her for having been so cheap.

She’d woken out of her torpor and trance, then screamed to see this beast on top of her. Now, he hated her all the more.

He started to beat her like an animal. When he was finished hitting her, she was dead, all bruised and bloody. He put on his clothes and walked out of her house with a haughty pout on his face.

Another story is about an older man sitting by his rear window, where he could see, far off, the starving Zagans. It grieved his heart to know that the home he’d acquired came from the loss of those who’d lived in it before him. Did he repent of his wrongful gain, though, and strive to give it back to the original Zagan owners? No.

He tried to ignore his sin by magically conjuring up narcotic and alcoholic pleasures. He turned his head away from his window.

He took a small plant in a pot of soil and watered it. He breathed in and out, slowly and deeply, with his eyes closed, until he was in a deep trance. By the window, he waited for a gust of wind. When it came, he chanted in the mystical language, over and over, “Drofurb, Priff, and Weleb, give me euphoria!”

After chanting this enough times, the plant grew into something leafy and exotic. He used a knife to cut off some of the leaves, then diced these into tiny pieces, and put them in a pipe that he then lit. He now invoked Nevil with the chant, “Nevil, give me euphoria!”

After chanting this enough times, he smoked the pipe. A foggy blur passed before his eyes. Now, the plant that he was using already had narcotic properties; but the invocation of the four Crims was meant to build a much more powerful euphoria…and it did just that for him.

After the foggy blur, he saw a wavelike movement all around him, as if he were in the sea. A tingling, massage-like sensation went all through his body. He closed his eyes, grinned, and leaned by his rear window. Then he opened them and looked outside.

He could see the starving Zagans way out there, a man, a woman, and their three little children. The drug was not making them look human, though. Instead, they all looked ugly, deformed, monstrous, and threatening.

He scowled at them and raised his fist in a fury. “Crims,” he said in a raspy voice. “Destroy them! They are a danger, a threat to us Luminosians!”

He looked up in the sky and saw a large ball of fire dropping over the Zagan family. It hit them with a blinding blast of white light that shone everywhere he could see, making him squeeze his eyes shut. When he opened them, the family was no more. He saw only a large, black spot shaped like a star on the ground where the fireball had burned it. He smiled.

The next day, after his euphoria was over and he could see and perceive everything normally, he looked out that window again. The black spot was not there.

The emaciated bodies of the Zagan family were there, though, lying dead–not killed from a fireball, as he had hallucinated, but from hunger.

He hated the family even more for having made him feel so bad. “I’m glad they’re dead,” he hissed.

After a month of this kind of Luminosian debauchery and wickedness, a heavy rain fell on Zaga, lasting for days and flooding the city with water that went up to a man’s waist. The elders emerged and told all the Luminosians that the flooding was a sign.

“Did we not warn you?” one of the elders said. “We are to be punished for our sins–all of us!”

“Oh, be quiet, old man!” a young Luminosian man said. “If Priff had wanted to punish us, the flood would have gone up much higher, drowning us all. We need only reroute this water over to the lake and sea.”

“We never said this flooding was in itself the punishment,” another elder said. “Only that it is a sign of future punishment.”

The young man laughed at him.

A week later, as the rerouting of the water was underway, and many Luminosians not participating in the work were in their houses enjoying magically-enhanced sex and narcotics–similar to the stories of the two men related above–the footfalls of many horses could be heard in the distance. As the sound came closer, the heads of the Luminosian workers turned to listen and look.

On those approaching horses was an army. Each mounted man had either a spear or a bow and arrow ready to shoot. The leader of the army noted how defenceless the Luminosians, now knee-deep in the water, were. “Hold your fire,” he told his men. “As long as they don’t resist us, we’ll take them without need of violence.”

The army descended from the very cliff that the Luminosians had descended when they took the city from the Zagans. The army entered Zaga, their horses wading in the water, and their men pointed their arrows and spears at the helpless Luminosians. “Continue your work,” the second-in-command of the army told them. “Finish rerouting the water for our city, for it is ours now. Then we will find new work for you.”

The Luminosians were in such shock and disbelief that they seemed no more sober than those in their houses using narcotics. The elders looked sadly at their fellow, sinning Luminosians with a look telling them that they had been duly warned. Any surviving, starving Zagans watching from afar felt some comfort in knowing their tormentors were now about to feel a similar torment.

The leader of the army had his men search the houses of the decadents indulging in fornication and narcotics. When he learned of their sin, he ordered his men to have the sinners rounded up, dressed, sobered, and taken away to be slaves in the country from which the army had come, Zoya.

Commentary

The manuscript breaks off here, and no subsequent chapters relating the fate of the Luminosians, in their new state of slavery and drudgery, have been found. It is clear, though, from the next set of writings, ‘The Laws,’ that the missing writings must have commented on how the Luminosians had learned, the hard way, that their magic should have been used for selfless, not selfish, ends.

As was mentioned in the commentaries of the previous chapters of ‘Migrations,’ one can see how the ancient world had its share of people who decried the evils of settler-colonialism and decadent indulgence in sex, drugs, and alcohol to the point of disregarding the political evils of the world. So many today, among the wealthy and famous, could learn lessons from ancient writings like these.