TTyoD-001
“I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”
– The Joker, The Dark Knight
The Ten Thousand Years of darkness seems, in the cyclical stories of the Freepath peoples, to be an optional subcycle to be avoided if possible. The Freepath peoples trace their lineage back long prior to the Freepath name, some two hundred thousand years. They do this through archaeological records of how people lived and point to a model of living that matches there own more recently articulated laws and customs.
The Ten Thousand years of Darkness is depicted as the period where the False King (or the Locust King, depending on the local vernacular) has risen and seized control of the tribe and transformed his tribe successfully into the Hungry Empire, displacing the Five Siblings and murdering his sister to cement his control of the Tribe. Driven by the power of the Locust Spirit the False King then rampages with his Empire across the world conquering the other tribes. His power is eventually also augmented by the power of Falsenight, although that always happens in the final sections of the story.
TTyoD-002
“I did not know when and how much was ended, when I look back from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered along the Crooked Gulch as plain as I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
– Black Elk Speaks
One can see the shape of the Ten Thousand Years of Darkness in rise of Mesopotamia, and the rise of Alexander the Great. One can see it in the Rise of Rome and the Ottoman Empires. One can see it in the rise of Imperial China and the Rise of myriad of Kingdoms across southeast Asia in what is now Myanmar and Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia and Thailand. One can see it in the rise of Russia and Belgium and France and England and every other Colonial power to march out from Europe to carve up the rest of the world with (as Jared Diamond put it) with their “guns, germs and steel”. The Ten Thousand Years of Darkness is not married to a nation or a race, a language or a skin color. The Ten Thousand Years of Darkness is the march of an idea, a contagious and insatiable idea.
TTyoD-003
Feast with us, starve tomorrow.
Fight against us, die today.
The Ten Thosuand Years of Darkness is seen as a short term detour from the primary cycle of the Freepath story. This despite it the time frame being part of the name. The Ten Thousand years of Darkness is also seen as optional, appearing only when the Young Warrior succumbs to the temptation of the Locust Spirit and attempts to take the power of the Locust for him or herself (normally himself in the tales). This is normally done to defend the tribe in some way, from drought, from enemy tribes, from Wendigo monsters or hungry ghosts. The end result is the same. Give in to the Locust and the boy become the Locust King and leads the Hungry Empire to conquer the world and leave it in ruins.
Eventually the the heir to the Locust King: Kudavbin King (could have been?) rejects his father’s throne and he and his sister (the so called Last Princess) escape the Empire before it crumbles in upon itself with a group of refugees who will become the first tribe. The fate of the Kudavbin is generally ambiguous. He is clearly not the later appearing figure of First Hero (who is generally androgynous). And, although the last Pricness explicitly becomes the First Mother, the fate of the Kudavbin King is uncertain and possibly tragic.
The interesting aspect of the stories of the Ten Thousand Years of Darkness is that the Hungry Empire’s collapse is inevitable. The Freepath people do not prophecize a rebellion or a war that ousted the cruel king. The Kudavbin King refuses the Throne, yes. The Last Princess leads refugees out of the Empire, yes. But neither of these case the collapse of the Hungry Empire. The stories are quite clear, it is the decline and impending collapse of the Hungry Empire that awakens the motivations of the two royal children. The Hungry Empire was doomed on its own. The Ten Thousand Years of Darkness are not brought down by some chosen one or a pale messiah, but by the workings of the Empire itself.
Like their King’s namesake the Hungry Empire is a plague of locusts that spreads acorss the land devouring everything until their landbase is depleted and cannot support them. Their downfall is written in the strategy that powers their initial success and they cannot escape it. The only thing that the Freepath tribes must do is keep their stories alive so that when the Empire begins to crumble, and the royal children begin their escape, the Storytellers are present to teach the new tribe how to live in compliance with the old laws.
No rebellion, the Free people will just walk away.
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
TTyoD-004
Leviathan and Ouroborous
There is a glaring problem with the logic of Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes and his seminal work “The Leviathan” to be more precise.
In said work, Hobbes broadly posits that we are all brutish self-interested thugs who would kill our mother for a penny. Hobbes lived during a time of brutal civil war, so this conclusion may be understood as arising from the environment during which Hobbes wrote. But either way, Hobbes starts his thinking from an assumption that we are all monstrous little thugs.
And so, Hobbes concludes, we need an absolute government to keep us in check. Without said absolute monarch, we would descend to what Hobbes refers to as “the state of nature”. That Hobbes has no understanding of what the natural state of ecosystems actually looks like notwithstanding (he was writing long before ecology was even dimly understood), Hobbes has made a glaring error. Or rather, if his assumptions are right, the his theory has an impossible problem it cannot overcome.
The problem is simple. If we are all thugs, and need a government with absolute power to control us, we will then have given absolute power to a group of thugs.
TTyoD-005
It all starts at the critical moment. The moment when the monster comes back from the dead.
The Bonelands has rules. They are complicated and unfair. Because fairness is a function of the Shadowlands and cannot survive the harsh sunlight of the Bonelands. The laws of the Bonelands are. They are not fair, they simply are. The Shadowlands, as one of it’s core missions, takes the laws of the Bonelands and attempts to simplify them in to fairy tales and fables: stories that the human mind can comprehend. As such, the Shadowlands are always imprecise, a crude shadow reflected on the mind of the human brain: Plato’s allegory of the cave built from flesh and bottled lightning.
Thus we have the Locust King. Hints of the Locust King occur in the stories of Genesis with the story of Cane and Abel hypothesized to represent the origin of civilized agriculture- the Hungry Empire. The population of any species is a function of available space and available food, limited by the various causes of death- from predators to miss-adventure. The Kakapo of the New Zealand is a flightless bird on an island that, until recently had none of the typical predators of birds. As such natural selection stopped selecting for wings and began selecting for a lower breeding rate. The Kakapo wasn’t being eaten, and as such fast breeders would have caused overpopulation. Of course now that humans have introduced a host of egg eating predators, the Kakapo faces extinction and natural selection is not selecting fast enough for changes that might give it a chance.
Back to Cane and Abel. Humans are subject tot he same laws of population as all other life forms. Recently one group of humans began an experimental way of life that involved producing more and more excess food and cramming more and more humans into smaller and smaller spaces. This means that more space and more food we continuously and simultaneously available. This resulted in a dramatic increase in the population growth rate of that group. The result has been that human cultures who did not practice or adopt this new experimental lifestyle have been overrun or destroyed outright, and the land has been stripped of competing species, effectively devastating local ecosystems everywhere.
The humans of this story are living like locusts, and like locusts they will leave famine and death in their wake. And like the locust, these humans will find the land unable to support their population after the feast has ended. Hence the name of the idea, the myth that drives these humans (you humans) is called the Locust King: King of the Hungry Empire.
The Locust King offers you a choice:
Feast with me and starve tomorrow.
Fight against me and die today.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 