If you seek after the origins of the pharaonic Monocracy, do not be deceived by the self serving, sycophantic musings of the imperatorial scribes. It is an old saw, but true nonetheless, that history is written by the victors; seldom do the vanquished earn, or take, the right to tell their side of the story. The only history that exists is in the imperatorial archives. There is not one book, not one data store, not even a letter written with ink and quill that exists in the whole interstellar expanse of the Monocracy which does in any way deviate from the history as it is told. Every new research, every fellow historian’s perusal of the vast store of official documents, every millennia-old record, every last Monocratic shopping list confirms the official story.
And yet, no-one thinks that this is strange, least of the all the subjects of the Monocrats. Not one word of dissent is spoken. Not one word voiced in disagreement. All concur, no other interpretation is possible. Is this not then the truth? Does this not constitute the only truth? The word of the divine creator who speaks through the mouth of his chosen one, the Monocrat? And thence his scribes, his biographers, his analysts, his historians?
Does there exist, can there exist, another path to another truth? A different truth which is not to be found in the writings and transcriptions of the official scribes? Perhaps. However it can only be found in the spoken tales handed down from generation to generation; tales told in guarded whispers lest the Monocrat should come to hear of them. These are the tales told by the vanquished.
However one should be as guarded in assessing such oral traditions as exist, even those of ancient provenance, as one should with the official histories. There is always a reason for telling a story which is other than a mere recounting of a tale, however heroic or mundane. One, as a historian, must be mindful of all the possible interpretations which can be attached to a tale, both intended by the writer or minstrel or unintended by its audience. For is it not so that the truth can mean different things to different men, however much the Monocrat may wish otherwise? And does not the intended or unintended audience give forever new and wondrous meanings to a tale, meanings undreamt of by its author?
You have all heard the tale of Osirisu from whom all Monocrats claim descent. How he sprang fully formed out of the coupling between the Creator and the Queen of Kareliar, a small principality on the planet Ganth. How, by dint of his Creator-given power, he was able to subdue first the continent, then the planet, then the solar system and so forth. A Demi-God amongst men! Destined to rule a vast empire; an empire whose borders would know no bounds.
The fisher folk of Ganth however tell a different story of the rise of the Monocracy.
The fishermen of Ganth tell of how the young Queen of Kareliar became great with child from a adulterous coupling with one Horusui, a retainer at the King’s court. Handsome he was, so it was said, and much in demand for the services he provided for many an unwed maiden; and oft-times the wedded ‘scarce-a-virgin’, both at court and without. The Queen maliciously deceived the old King as to the child’s heritage, pretending it be the contrived intercourse between them both shortly after the adulterous infamy.
She had high hopes of the child and bought (and bedded) the finest tutors in the land to school the child in mathematics, in physics, in literature, in the arts of war. The child, Osirisu, was an apt pupil and most studious in his lessons, mastering all of the arts befitting a king, though in truth that right was not his. The paths of the stars in the heavens, the stately hexameters of the Master Poets of Kareliar, the infinite possibilities of the Aleph cubed; all were imbibed by the child, as is blood sucked by a leech.
However the Queen slowly but surely poisoned the child’s mind with thoughts of kingship, grandeur, conquest. How he would be named ‘Osirisu the Golden’, ‘Osirisu the Mighty’, ‘Osirisu the All-Conquering’.
Slowly, in steps too small to notice, the child, in becoming the man, grew shallow, wanton, cruel, base. Under the influence of his mother, he turned from scholar to bloody warlord, if yet only in thought not in deed, until, finally, he began to plot the King’s downfall and his ultimate takeover of the reins of power.
Little did the Queen realise what she had come to wrought.
When all of Osirisu’s plots had come to full ripening, he poisoned the old king with a draught of antiminium mixed with the King’s favourite wine. Upon the King’s death, slow and painful as it was, Osirisu immediately proclaimed himself King, this bastard son of deception, and took the name ‘Osirisu the Golden’, as his mother had foretold.
After the coronation had taken place and the people of Kareliar had thronged the streets to usher in a new order, Osirisu the Golden had every one of the now dead King’s retainers murdered. All bar one. His biological father! He had him brought to his chambers and, in the presence of his mother, Osirisu, the knife in his own hands, cut off that organ which had been so dear to Horusui and had boiling pitch poured to staunch the wound. The new king furthermore cut off Horusui’s nose and hands, sliced his cheeks many times, to the very bone, and had pitch poured onto those wounds also.
“No more will you father offspring with your debauching, scum! All will look upon you now and turn away with horror at the very sight of you!” Osirisu said. “I banish you to the far wilderness! I will have no rival sired by your seed!”
Yet, still was Osirisu not done with his schemes, his plots. As his mother screamed and wailed at the plight of her erstwhile lover, carried away between the arms of two guards, Osirisu raped and sodomised his mother. Amidst her howls of pain, he silently ripped open her belly. Two deep slashes, one up and down, one side to side. It is said that as she lay dying, violated by her own son, her entrails spilling out on to the floor, Osirisu knelt by her side and gently whispered in her ear: “No more brothers shall I have, I wager. The time of your spawning, my dearest mother, has come to an end. Yet I pity you for you shall not see the greatness of light that will shine from your golden one!”
He later had her corpse, her entrials obscuring her face, nailed by the feet to a tree in the courtyard, her uterus between the palms of her now, limp, hanging hands. Such is the wisdom, and mercy, of the Monocrats!
The truth? Or just the wishful thinking of the vanquished? A sop to the pride of the people of Ganth cowed into submission by the actions of a matricidal, blood-thirsty tyrant? A tyrant that would stop at nothing, even the violation of his own mother; the maiming of his father. How could anyone hope to stand against such evil as this?
To disentangle the truth, if there be any, from the fiction of such tales, that is the work of the historian.
Cicero Subrubreo, anti-prophet and historian, 'On being an historian - the collected essays', CE 110,354.
Interdicted by Monocratic decree, 1.545.453.761, CE 110,355.
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