Chapter Text
There was once a kingdom. Of course, there always is, and we know there was a kingdom because a kingdom does everything in its power, great or small, to announce itself to those who skirted even its furthest reaches, including those on the other side of time that has passed. Even at its edge, in the contested lands, there could be no doubt that there was a kingdom, and at its center, a flourishing city, the likes of which could not be heard from quite so far away, but seen from the peak of the ancient ruins of Yavin, once the vines were cleared away from its crumbling windows. Sometimes they were parted like curtains, just for a chance to see the fine, sharp points of its tallest structures from a safe distance and confirm if they truly pierced the heavens open, though they were mostly slashed down with haste to better aim bows as hooves and sour fragrance poured over the hills, thundering down, down , into the deepest wells of the land to claim even the grounds furthest from God Himself.
That is how we know there was a kingdom, because all lands enriched by blood shed were made holy by it.
Alnusana in Latin, Alorongeon in Old English. To scholars of both, and popularized by academia, Alderaan. When broken down, the principal word starts the same. In Latin or Old English, it all begins with the alder tree, which the first human was born from in Irish mythology. Now, we use it for exemplary works of carpentry. Its even-textured grains are perfect for molding, of moderate weight, and capable of remaining intact even under the high pressure of nails. It smells light and sweet to the nose, particularly when burned.
There was debate among scholars for years the preferences of the Old English and their naming. Ana can mean ‘up,’ ‘back’, and ‘again,’ whereas ongeon only relies on the ‘again’ in translation. ‘Again,’ the alder tree. ‘Again,’ the floral smells that spill forth as it chars. Those that prefer the Latin insist that it was named for the great hill the city center sat on, up above the surrounding lands, and the forest at the edge of its defensive walls. Medievalists argue that ‘again’ is more loyal to a medieval conceptualization of time. That it exists inside the story of it that will be told generations later, and how we are always molded by human experience, over and over.
Academia chopped up ana and made aan , because to them it is all in the past, and we will not relive it in our futures. Relocate the vowel, determine our trajectory, ignore our propensity for failure. What goes up will stay up, and will end its tenure there. Instead of falling, it catches, and burns to ash.
There was once a people. They did not shout in circles of stones the fact of their bodies, that they once lived a life. They left children behind for that. Except, there were times when children died at birth, or in plague, or for what later became their country, so in that case, they left art behind, too.
And weapons. Naturally, since they do not take quite so much care as ink and oil to preserve, so a sword sits beside a pen in a locked and gilded case, and we call it ‘great innovations of mankind’. The maw of a canon the size of a whale sits unobstructed in the same wing of some museum, any of them will do, a yawning cavern waiting to be excavated, because even though hands once sought to achieve reducing one of the most thriving kingdoms of its time to less than rubble, there is no one willing to construct a case big enough to contain its failure. So, now, we look at it naked, as a people once did, staring down the dark barrel, waiting.
The failure in question is that the people’s canon did not work, because all studies and ballistics analysis have concluded that the canon never in fact launched the ball it was intended to. No point of impact at the base, no traces of high speed or velocity of an object shredding its insides. The studies now show that the design was flawed, and the large iron disc that rested between the gunpowder and the ball prevented the ball from flying. The combined weight of them both was too heavy. They were lucky if the thing could manage to launch a bouquet into a crowd of waiting bachelorettes. To give the people credit, it was one of the earliest cannonballs, though not the first. They modeled it after the Mamluks, but details were lost over distance and lack of details. It was a valiant attempt, despite being unsuccessful, and perhaps that is why we have so little physical evidence of any destruction it might have caused.
Though, this is not the most intriguing aspect of the empire they’d left behind. What we now have filtered through the lens of genetics, and any traces of these people thereof, there was once a most interesting anomaly of human biology. Or, presently, we would call it an anomaly. At the time, it was what made these people a people, and the natural order that it impressed upon them at large, a society. Diluted over hundreds of years of travel, trade, migration, invasion, our evidence of their difference can only be accredited to lineage, family history, dominant traits, passed down from a father’s father. Their bodies in their art are bizarre to some and the great, hidden shame others, but either person may find themselves pausing before a medical manuscript in a language that may have once been their own, detailing a body, a human, a people , because they find themselves in it, flanked on one side by a pen, and on the other by a cannon.
There was once a kingdom and a people. Even of these people, they were separated by unchangeable differences, ones that chose the ideal moment of coming into adulthood to blast the delicately constructed human they’d shaped themselves to be off of its hinges with one word. One that we now use to distinguish. If we were to rewind time, we’d say that the word ‘designation’ had lost part of its meaning as it landed on this kingdom, this people, but we amble forward, and instead, it is gained.
Choice. We designate each other, we designate ourselves. We determine that the pen should go on one side of the human diagram, and the cannon on the other. We do not, as they did, barrel into designation divorced from our own free will. Not in the same way, with the same consequences.
Which may have nothing to do with ‘us and them,’ a gaping distance between people now and a people then, and instead it could have everything to do with time, which, in the body of a clock, looks suspiciously like the barrel of a cannon when blasted open. Or, with its face swung forth revealing the gears inside, which then could be dislodged and cleared to leave you with only a hole in the shape of a circle, a perfect barrier containing nothing.
Nothing but.
Nothing but something we don’t have words for anymore.
Strange, then, that they borrowed from the Greeks to put words to designations, as if foreseeing the demise of their necessity. The first, A, to mark its beginning. The last, Ω, its end. The cycle is contained in its very construction. In Christianity, these two letters establish ‘the comprehensiveness of God,’ unbound by end or beginning, like humanity, still ambling forward, ever-shaping.
Still, we have the words ‘kingdom’ and ‘people’ regardless of this and these specific ones’ disintegration, and we also have ‘traces,’ ‘war,’ ‘choice,’ and ‘art.’ And time, which is neither a word nor a thing, but both once in combination.
There was once a man, too.