#Tribal unity

[ooahanjs]

Batal Stone: Hongik Ingan

The Philosophical Roots of Batal stone Hongik Ingan (弘益人間), meaning “Benefit all humanity,” is a foundational philosophy derived from Korea’s ancient Dangun myth. This principle transcends individual interests, emphasizing harmony within communities and the broader world. It serves as a central inspiration for the Batalstone series. The Definition and Origins of Hongik Ingan Hongik Ingan,…

[townpostin]

West Singhbhum: Tribal Communities Prepare for International Tribal Day

Tribal communities and social organizations plan for a unified celebration of International Tribal Day. A meeting of various tribal communities and social organizations was held in Jamshedpur to prepare for International Tribal Day, emphasizing unity and detailed planning for the event. CHAKRADHARPUR – In a collaborative effort to celebrate International Tribal Day, a meeting of various tribal…

[blackbrownfamily]

Set Shakur

[frombehindthepen]

Pick a Seat or a Side?

Pick a Seat or a Side? #Togetherness #Humanity #Unity #Family

Image Credit: Chapin Jones When I saw this photo, it was for a wedding, but it made me nod my head in agreement, and smile. Yet, when you reread it without the purpose of a wedding in mind, it makes you think about how we sometimes get caught up in our tribal associations and connections, and leave the “others” on the outside or the other side. Such actions pit “us vs. them” and leads us to…

[smiteworks]

🎲On Sale this week April 8-14, 2024 in the Fantasy Grounds Store

[miniatdetective]

Tahuya è una comunità non incorporata nella contea di Mason, Washington, Stati Uniti; si trova sul canale Hood alla foce del fiume Tahuya, un sottile e profondo fiordo di acqua salata che scorre dallo Stretto di Juan de Fuca.

Tahuya, il cui nome deriva da un termine 𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑎 che significa quello fatto, presenta una serie di aree ricreative.

Il primo sabato di luglio segna l'annuale celebrazione del Tahuya Day, che include una parata, bancarelle e venditori di cibo e altre attrazioni. Secondo il sito web ufficiale del turismo della contea, la gente del posto riconosce ampiamente il Tahuya Day come una celebrazione del luogo bizzarro in cui i residenti vivono per scelta.

La nautica e la pesca dei molluschi sono popolari qui in primavera, estate e autunno. Il Rendsland Creek di Tahuya è designato dal Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife come una spiaggia per la pesca di molluschi potenziata, dove i visitatori possono raccogliere vongole sei mesi all'anno e ostriche di Hood Canal tutto l'anno.

Nelle vicinanze si trova la Tahuya State Forest, che comprende diversi campeggi e oltre 100 miglia di fuoristrada (ORV) e percorsi per mountain bike.

Il Rodney White Slough a Tahuya prende il nome da Rodney White, un pioniere nero che aveva una fattoria nella zona.

Twana è il nome collettivo di un gruppo di nove popoli Coast Salish nella regione settentrionale-centrale di Puget Sound. Gli Skokomish sono il principale gruppo sopravvissuto e oggi si identificano come Twana. La lingua parlata, chiamata anche Twana, fa parte del gruppo linguistico Central Coast Salish. La lingua Twana è strettamente correlata a Lushootseed.

I nove gruppi che componevano i Twana erano Dabop, Quilcene (gente di acqua salata), Dosewallips, Duckabush, Hoodsport, Skokomish (Skoko'bsh), Vance Creek, Tahuya e Duhlelap (Tule'lalap).  

Nel 1860 c'erano 33 insediamenti in totale, con gli Skokomish che costituivano la maggioranza della popolazione. La maggior parte dei discendenti di tutti i gruppi ora sono membri della Skokomish Tribal Nation e vivono nella riserva indiana Skokomish a Skokomish, Washington.

Tahuya

[sankofaspirit]

Why Black People Aren't Taken Seriously Globally: A Garveyite Perspective

Marcus Garvey’s teachings offer a powerful lens for understanding why Black people globally face challenges in being taken seriously or respected. His philosophy of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism highlights systemic, cultural, and internal factors that have contributed to this struggle. Let’s break it down:

1. Lack of Unity: Garvey said it best: "A divided people are easily dominated." Without unity—whether due to tribalism, classism, or national divisions—the global Black community struggles to assert collective power.

2. Economic Dependency: Garvey emphasized that respect comes with economic independence. Black communities’ reliance on foreign systems and industries perpetuates cycles of exploitation and disrespect.

3. Colonial and Mental Enslavement: Centuries of slavery and colonialism didn’t just take land—they took minds. Many Black people still internalize inferiority, adopting Western standards over their own heritage.

4. Political Powerlessness: Without strong political sovereignty, Black nations and communities often end up subject to the whims of external powers. Garvey’s solution? "Africa for the Africans!"

5. Cultural Alienation: The erasure of African traditions through colonization leaves many disconnected from their roots. Reclaiming cultural pride is essential to earning global respect.

6. Scattered Identity: Black people globally lack a unified identity or voice. Garvey’s dream of Pan-Africanism sought to unite Africans and the diaspora under one banner.

7. Over-Reliance on Non-Black Leadership: Garvey criticized dependence on external leaders, emphasizing the need for Black-led solutions.

8. Propaganda and Negative Perceptions: Global media often perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Black people. Controlling our own narratives is key to countering this.

9. Weak Institutions: Without Black-owned banks, schools, or hospitals, dependence on external systems undermines the community’s autonomy.

10. Internal Resistance to Progress: Garvey noted that some resist self-improvement due to fear, ignorance, or complacency. This, he believed, holds the community back.

11. Western Cultural Dominance: The dominance of Western values marginalizes African contributions. Assimilating into these systems often comes at the expense of Black identity.

12. Educational Shortcomings: Garvey championed education in African history and achievements. A lack of this fosters ignorance and self-doubt.

13. Reparations Neglect: Failing to demand reparations for slavery and colonialism signals a lack of seriousness in addressing historical grievances.

14. Charity Over Infrastructure: Many African nations rely on foreign aid instead of building infrastructure, creating a cycle of dependency.

15. Exploitation by Foreign Powers: Africa’s wealth is drained by foreign exploitation. Regaining control of resources would shift global power dynamics.

16. Assimilation into Eurocentric Ideologies: Rejecting African traditions in favour of Eurocentric systems weakens collective pride and fosters division.

17. Poor Leadership: Garvey stressed the need for visionary leaders who prioritize collective progress over personal gain.

18. Passivity in Oppression: Accepting injustice without resistance only reinforces oppression. Bold, decisive action is required.

19. Loss of Spiritual and Moral Foundation: Materialism and individualism have replaced communal values. Garvey believed spirituality was central to empowerment.

20. Fragmented Diaspora: A weak connection between Africa and its diaspora prevents global solidarity and shared progress.

21. Neocolonial Borders: Artificial colonial borders foster division and conflict, undermining unity and progress.

22. Lack of Strategic Alliances: Garvey urged the Black community to form alliances with other oppressed groups to amplify their influence.

23. Complacency and Fear: Fear of change and comfort with familiar oppression prevent the risks necessary for progress.

24. Neglect of Garvey’s Vision: Without institutionalizing Garvey’s principles, the movement for unity, self-reliance, and African pride remains fragmented.

So What’s the solution?

The Honourable Marcus Garvey’s answer was clear: Unity, Economic independence, Reclaiming African identity and Building global solidarity.

The road to respect lies in pride, self-reliance, and unwavering determination. His vision remains a blueprint for global Black empowerment.

“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life.” – The Honourable Marcus Garvey

[azspot]

The commodification of affect (by television) and engagement (by digital media) created empathy without unity. It retrieved the emotional involvement that was typical in an oral—tribal—society, but on the technological basis of a new medium that provides distant empathic involvement without any real personal connection and without any physical limitations of space and time. Social media tribes are virtual—most members have never met one another, never really liked one another and never needed to like one another for any practical purposes of interaction. Their fictional need for tribal integrity is induced by the medium that extracts their tribal identities for commodification and makes people think that their identities matter more than their deeds, that their identities are their deeds (as for social media business, they are). Empathy without unity amplifies animosity. People attack one another with their requests for affirmation, causing an empathy race in which empathy gets inevitably weaponized.

Andrey Mir

[daphnefisherofficial]

bugna: TAKIPSILIM | destiny's twilight

PROLOGUE

Pairing: MCU Moon Knight System (Marc/Jake/Steven) x Avatar Fem!Reader

masterlist | next chapter

PROLOGUE - A KISS OF INTERTWINED DESTINIES.

YEAR 900 circa, FIRST NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON. Tribes of Maynila - Archipelago of the Philippines in the Pre-Colonial Period

The night was draped in a silver shroud, illuminated by the radiant glow of the full moon. Its ethereal light cascaded down upon the tribal lands of Maynila, casting long, sinuous shadows that danced in the gentle breeze. This territory rich in culture and ancestral heritage was the heart of the Philippine archipelago, where the lush green canopy of the rainforest embraced the emerald waves of the sea.

Amidst the crickets' serenade and the leaves rustling in the balete tree, you lay in your mother’s bosom, so tiny and fragile. Haliya held you closer as your small fist closed gently around her forefinger. The dark brown eyes of your iloy (mother), the punong babaylan (head priestess), were filled with both love and a profound sense of protectiveness. Beside her was Rajah Bagani, your baba (father) and the leader of your tribe, his face etched with a mixture of pride and hope.

As future folklores will soon tell, your birth was no ordinary one. You emerged into the world not alone but accompanied by a twin unlike any other - a small serpent of silver and gold coiled around your small arms, its scales glistening like stars. The people of Maynila saw the kambal-ahas (snake twin) as a great omen, a symbol of true unity between the terrestrial and the divine. 

Yet, destiny, like the shifting tides, has not always been kind. 

On the eve of your first birthday, as the moon ascended to its zenith, you were taken ill. A high fever surged through your tiny body like wildfire, threatening to extinguish the light of your young life. Your father’s loyal uripon (servant) found you in your fevered state and rushed to inform your mother, Haliya, who had been tending to her sacred duties as the head priestess.

She and Rajah Bagani immediately rushed to your abode and abandoned their duties, all accompanied by a group of your mother’s alabay (priestess apprentice). The tribe's handmaidens watched over you with a mixture of sorrow and helplessness, for no remedy concocted by your mother’s apprentices seemed to quell the relentless fever. Panic immediately gripped your parents' hearts as they found and watched you wither away in your crib.

Desperation finally drove Haliya to her knees as she knelt and raised both arms to the sky, turning her gaze to the full moon above. With tears streaming down her face, she started whispering fervent prayers to their pantheon gods and goddesses residing in the heavens above. She beseeched them to spare your life, her precious daughter, in exchange for your eternal servitude. As Haliya's words filled the night air, the heavens themselves seemed to respond. 

Among the celestial beings who heard Haliya's desperate plea, none held more sway than the Philippine pantheon goddess of the moon herself. From her celestial perch, Mayari beheld the heartache of a mother's love and could not help but take pity. Her ethereal beauty was matched only by her boundless compassion. With a resolute look, the goddess then knew what she had to do.

The moon, glowing brighter and more radiant than ever before, began to descend from the sky. It hovered above the tearstricken Haliya and her ailing little girl, its ethereal light bathing them both in a gentle, silvery glow. The villagers and the leader of the tribe were seemingly frozen in time as Mayari herself finally descended from the heavens in a cascade of silver beams. 

The moon goddess was a vision of divine beauty, her luminous form casting an otherworldly radiance upon the gathering. Her silver and black hair was flowing freely with the night breeze, and her luminous right eye casted a curious look around her surroundings. Her left eye may be scarred and blind, yet it still held the same powerful gaze as its counterpart.

“Mahabaging Bathala”, Haliya managed, her tears even more prominent as she almost prostrated herself before the moon goddess. “Diwatang Mayari, ako ay iyong matapat ng lingkod”

By the grace of Bathala! Mayari, my goddess, I am your most loyal servant.

“Narinig ko ang iyong pagsamo, Haliya”, Mayari’s gentle voice spoke as both her eyes fell to you this time, the child whose bugna (true destiny) is yet to be seen. “Maging ang mga umalagad na nagbabantay sa iyong anak sa pamamagitan ng kanyang kambal-ahas”

I heard your pleas, Haliya. Even the ancestor spirits watching over your child through her snake twin prayed with you.

“Isang tagna ang nasisilay ko sa mga guhit ng kanyang kapalaran”, Mayari continued, addressing the head priestess directly. “Kaya’t tumahan ka na, Haliya. Hindi pa ngayong gabi magwawakas ang buhay ng iyong anak”

I foresee a prophecy written in the lines of her fate. So do not weep no more, Haliya. Your daughter’s life will not end tonight.

With a soft, tender kiss, Mayari bestowed upon your small forehead a gift beyond mortal comprehension. Your eyes, previously dimmed by illness, now glowed with a radiant white light, a symbol of Mayari's life force and divine power coursing through your veins. You had been reborn before your tribe’s eyes, fully transformed into the living proof of your mother’s divine oath - a promise of eternal servitude in exchange for your life.

"You shall be called Mira," Mayari declared, her voice a soothing melody. "And as my avatar, you shall serve me for all eternity until I release you. Until you fulfill and answer the calling of your bugna through my lead and my guidance"

Word of this miraculous event spread like wildfire in the neighboring tribes of Maynila, and even in the outlying territories. Little did your parents know that the trials you have surpassed in your infancy were only the beginning of your journey towards spiritual growth and enlightenment.

With Mayari's divine blessing, you grew into a child of exceptional abilities. Your very strength, agility, and durability surpassed that of any mortal. Your skin becomes impervious to harm, making you nigh invulnerable. 

You underwent rigorous training in the ways of the babaylan (priestess) under your mother’s tutelage, serving as an alabay (priestess apprentice). At Haliya's guidance, you honed your abilities in spiritual guidance and mediumship. You also practiced with the tribe's babaylan (priestesses) elders in the art of healing, herbalism, and divination. With each passing day, you felt more of the moon's power coursing through your veins, its silver light guiding your path.

With unwavering dedication, you slowly climbed the ranks of the babaylan order, eventually assuming the mantle previously occupied by your mother as punong babaylan (head priestess) in your own right. You have then stood alongside your father, Rajah Bagani, as his right hand and equal in the protection and guidance of your people. Your entire family ruled with wisdom and compassion, and under your watchful gaze, your father’s banwa (tribe) prospered as your lands grew and prospered with each passing season.

But time, unrelenting and inexorable, took its toll. Like all mortals, your parents, Rajah Bagani and Haliya, succumbed to their mortal limitations, leaving you as the last vestige of their once-proud lineage. As you mourn their passing in their deathbeds, you then realize the true magnitude of your mother’s divine oath. 

As the avatar of Mayari, you were untouched by mortality. You now share the immortal life of your patron goddess when she breathed your second life into your lungs that fateful night. At this discovery, you know that your life has then changed forever.

You left your late father’s banwa (tribe) to the rule of your siblings and lived as a nomad. In your solitude, you became more attuned to the celestial rhythms that governed the world. Drawing strength from the moon's luminous embrace and Mayari's guidance, you slowly unlocked the secrets of moon sorcery, mystical arts, and witchcraft. By harnessing your newly discovered powers, you managed to cast a strong illusion spell on yourself, concealing your true identity through the ages of the world that will come. 

Time flowed onward like a river, carrying you through centuries and across continents. For over a thousand years, you fulfilled your duty as Mayari's avatar, protecting her travelers of the night. Your presence was a beacon of hope in the darkest of nights, guiding lost souls to safety and warding off malevolent forces that sought to harm your people - Filipinos - both faithful believers and non-believers of the old pantheon faith.

But your bugna (true destiny) wasn’t written in the stars yet, until a thousand years later.

YEAR 2025, JANUARY 13TH, FIRST NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON.

Guildford, Surrey - Carter Family Estate.

The year was 2025, a distant time far removed from the world you once knew - your humble beginnings. The world has changed beyond recognition since the days of your youth, yet you remained an unwavering presence in the cosmic dance. An unchanging constant in the ever-shifting tides of history.

You stood upon the weathered balcony of your late husband’s ancestral house in Guildford, Surrey, the centuries-old stone beneath your feet a testament to the passage of time. The old chateau was a far cry from the tropical beauty of your birthplace, but you will never trade it for anything else. After all, Darius Carter was the only man you’ve ever loved.

And he has and will always be your home.

Your thoughts swirled like the distant constellations, memories of a time long past. Centuries have passed, and you have witnessed the rise and fall of empires, the ebb and flow of civilizations. You even witnessed the world welcome all forms of life outside its circular corners, from distant galaxies and realms stretching out to the cosmos. 

You stood beneath the same moon that had watched over you since your first breath. Casting its silvery glow upon the world, today marks a moment of celestial convergence.

A tagna (prophecy) waiting to be fulfilled. Your bugna (true destiny) is finally being written.

Clad in your ceremonial robes from your olden days as the punong babaylan (head priestess), you’ve made the necessary preparations to perform a spell. One that would reveal the hidden location of the ushabti of Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife. You started chanting the incantation, allowing Mayari’s celestial powers to flow through you as your eyes glowed white.

But just as you began to invoke the moon’s magic, an ancient and powerful celestial presence intruded upon your thoughts, abruptly interrupting your focus.

"Mira, Avatar of Mayari and daughter of the moon. Hear my voice”

Your glowing white eyes faded slowly as the Egyptian god of the moon started materializing before you. A towering figure dressed in white ceremonial robes of his people, Khonshu’s large bird skull head looked down on you with his hollow eyes. You closed your eyes for a moment, trying your utmost best to gather your thoughts before acknowledging his presence. 

"Khonshu, you old bird" you whispered, your voice carrying a weight of barely contained anger waiting to be unleashed. "After your betrayal, I’m surprised you’ve still got the balls to seek me"

“I will let your insults pass, you insolent wretch”, Khonshu’s voice boomed, but you stood your ground and merely smirked at his outrage. “The only reason I did seek you was because I have been left with no other options”

“I’m the very last resort, I see”, you raised a single eyebrow before folding your arms as if waiting impatiently for his next words.

“Enough! There’s no time, little one”, Khonshu impatiently bellowed, prompting you to stick out your pinky finger before him to rub your ears clean. “I swear that by enlisting your help tonight, I will make it worth your while”

“Speak then”, you sighed heavily, surrendering to his plea. “What do you require of me?”

“You have the power to move the heavens, Mira”, Khonshu said as his next words sped up your heartbeat. “Lend me and my avatar your power as a fellow wielder of the moon’s prowess”

“Why would you need to move the heavens, Khonshu?” you inquired, shaking your head slowly as you finally sensed the gravity of what he’s truly asking of you.

“Arthur Harrow leads a cult that follows Ammit”, Khonshu explained, his tone growing heavy by every second. “They seek to release her from her thousand-year exile, and we need to move the heavens at the very night where the very stars pointed at her last resting place. I need to find Ammit’s tomb first and prevent it from happening. At any cost”

You slowly connected the dots, realizing the implication of aiding him in a task of cosmic proportions, one that would shift the very heavens themselves. Khonshu’s plan would incur the wrath of the Ennead, the Egyptian pantheon of gods, and they would punish him by trapping his ethereal form in an ushabti—a god's divine imprisonment that would render him powerless.

“The Ennead will punish you”, you couldn’t bring yourself to utter the rest of the words, the painful memories of grief and loss surging in great waves. “They will imprison you in –”

“The ushabti, Mira”, Khonshu finished the thought for you. “And Moon Knight, my avatars, will then lose their lives. The same way he lost his”

In the recesses of your mind, you saw the face of Darius Carter, your late husband, who had been the avatar of Anubis. You saw glimpses of your shared memories together — his smile, his laughter, and the tragic day he was taken from you. His death had been a consequence of the very ceremony that Khonshu is now doomed to repeat and subject his own avatars to, and the memory of his sacrifice weighed heavily on her heart.

“Lisanin mo ang aking lingkod, lapastangang diwata!”

Leave my servant alone, you disrespectful god!

Mayari’s powerful voice echoed as she descended at your side, her eyes blazing as she eyed the Egyptian moon god distastefully.

“Huwag mo siyang pakikinggan”, Mayari warned as you felt the weight of your own goddess's disapproval. “Mayroon na tayong planong nabuo, kaya’t di mo siya kailangang sundin”

Do not heed his words. We have already formulated a plan, so you don’t need to follow him.

“My avatars”, Khonshu spoke, his voice resolute as he addressed you directly. “Are intertwined with your destiny closer than you think”

“Kasinungalingan!” Mayari bellowed, attempting to shield you from Khonshu’s view. But his words intrigued you greatly.

Lies!

“Hayaan natin siyang magsalita, mahal kong diwata”, you said, breathing heavily as you looked inquisitively at the moon god. 

Let him speak, my goddess.

“What do you mean by those words, Khonshu?”

“Before Anubis was imprisoned by Set, he tasked Taweret to perform a ritual and allow his avatar’s soul - his essence to be reborn into this world”, Khonshu confessed, his revelation rendering your eyes wide with disbelief. “His soul may have long passed the Field of Reeds, but Taweret succeeded with reincarnating Darius Carter into this life once again”

Tears immediately fell from your eyes as the overwhelming emotions of pure longing threatened to overwhelm you. Your patron goddess, Mayari, watched you sadly as you struggled to form your next words.

“It can’t be”, you shook your head as it filled up with even more questions left to be answered. “Your avatars?” 

“See them for yourself”, Khonshu said before placing his large hand over your head, casting a spell of his own before disappearing from your sight. 

Your eyes glowed white once more as the combined powers of Khonshu and Mayari flowed through your veins, your consciousness traveling with the Egyptian moon god as he commanded. 

He resurfaced once more at the familiar deserts of Cairo in Egypt, with your astral form landing elegantly at his side. You swiftly scanned your surroundings for any sign of Khonshu’s avatar, your eyes trying to find evidence of his preposterous claim of them sharing fragments of your beloved’s reincarnated soul. But when you finally laid eyes on Khonshu’s avatar, his Moon Knight, your knees almost buckled.

His face - every facet of it - is an exact carbon copy of Darius Carter. Your long lost love buried beneath the sands of time - literally and figuratively.

Although, the man standing before you carries himself very differently. His white aura shines like a halo swirling around him, and he was situated beside another young woman of Arabic Egyptian descent who you do not recognize. You notice his eyes were directed at where you stand, but you realize that he couldn’t see you. He was currently looking at his patron god, his master.

“I remember that night”, Khonshu spoke, addressing his avatar’s latest words. “I remember every night”

Steven Grant eyed the god inquisitively, wondering what he was on about. You, on the other hand, couldn’t help but hear your own heart thundering inside your chest as your beloved’s reincarnation neared.

I beseech you, Mira. Khonshu’s celestial voice now echoed in your own head. Lend half of your life force to them. Save my avatars.

Huwag mong gawin ito, Mira. Mayari’s own voice resonated as she implored you. Hindi magugustuhan ng mga kapwa diwata ni Khonshu ang gagawin mo, at tiyak kong hindi na nila nanaising tulungan tayo. Hindi ba’t gusto mong maipaghiganti ang pagkamatay ng pinakamamahal mong si Darius?!

Don’t do this Mira. The Ennead won’t like you aiding Khonshu, and they will no longer be keen to help us. Don’t you want to avenge the death of your beloved Darius?!

Mayari’s vehement protests and Khonshu’s urgent pleas fought valiantly in your thoughts, one vital decision being analyzed and weighed against another. Yet as you stood at the precipice, you couldn't help but see your beloved’s reincarnation closely for the first time. A deep sense of responsibility welled up within you, and you knew you couldn't stand idly by and let history repeat itself. 

You could not bear to see Marc Spector and his alters—Steven Grant and Jake Lockley, suffer the same fate as your beloved late husband.

With resolve in your heart, you made your decision.

“I’ll help you, Khonshu”, you spoke, much to Mayari’s disappointment. “I will help you move the heavens and share my life force with your avatars. And upon my aid, you will owe me a celestial debt”

“Thank you, Mira”, Khonshu nodded. “I will let you collect when the day comes”

“Khonshu?” Steven spoke, reaching out to his god. 

“With your help, I can turn back the night sky”, Khonshu said, speaking to both you and Steven Grant.

“How?” Steven inquired.

“It will come at a heavy cost, and I cannot do it alone”, Khonshu explained, repeating his previous words to you for Steven to hear. “When the gods imprison me, tell Marc Spector to free me”

As Steven’s ceremonial suit enveloped his body, you summoned your own powers as Mayari’s avatar. Your astral form started to slowly ascend as your eyes glowed white, your moonlit robes trailing behind you. 

“Do what I do”, Khonshu said, demonstrating to Steven how they will move the night sky.

You also extend your hands towards the moonlit sky, waving it around in sync with what Steven Grant and Khonshu is doing as the celestial skies start to dance at your command.

“Whoa, this is mental”, Steven spoke in awe at the swift shift of the constellations above him. You allowed yourself a small smile as you continued shifting the skies, his child-like wonder greatly reminding you of Darius. Your connection to Mayari surged, and the power of the full moon flowed through you as you aided Khonshu and his avatar. 

“This is the night”, At Khonshu’s command, you finally stopped at the night sky that the Egyptian god was seeking. 

“It’s surprisingly painful to hold, Layla”, Steven grunted, feeling the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. “Now I understand how Atlas must have felt.

“It’s working”, The Arabic-Egyptian woman who Steven Grant calls as ‘Layla’ gasped, pointing her electronic tablet towards the sky. She then attempts to scan it on her app to find out the location of Ammit’s tomb.

I can feel it. Khonshu whispered in your subconscious. The Ennead is starting the ritual.

You started to panic at his words, your life’s worst memory threatening to resurface once again as you saw Steven’s mask dematerialize before your eyes. Khonshu then knelt as he felt the ancient Egyptian spell taking its effect.

Taking a deep breath to calm and recollect yourself, you allow your hands to rest on either side of your body. You then summon every bit of strength you can muster as small beams of moonlight start to collect at your palms.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this”, Steven gasped, his own strength from Khonshu’s power draining from his body as he tried his might to keep the night sky on hold.

“Tulungan mo ako, Diwatang Mayari”, you pleaded to your patron goddess. “Ipagkaloob mo sa akin ang iyong lakas at kapangyarihan”

Help me, my goddess Mayari. Lend me your strength and power.

Sa pagkakataong ito lamang, Mira. Mayari spoke, her motherly love for her avatar winning over her divine anger. 

Only this once, Mira.

You then felt an immense power surge through your astral form like you haven’t experienced before. It was like Mayari herself channeled her divine energy and prowess directly within you as the front strands of your hair turned white as a result of the goddesses’ power residue.

“I’ve got it”, Steven’s companion, Layla, exclaimed as she finally pinpointed the coordinates they needed. “29 degrees North, 25 degrees East”

Steven then collapsed with the last of his strength, his hands planted firmly in the desert as Layla tried to catch him to support. Khonshu’s form, on the other hand, was slowly withering away like sand swaying with the strong wind. The last of his divine essence left his avatar as he foretold, prompting Steven Grant and his slumbering alters to lose consciousness.

Layla was panicking at this point, repeatedly shaking Steven Grant and Marc Spector awake to no avail. You then shook your head as your own powers briefly subsided, witnessing the gut wrenching scene unfold before you.

“It cannot end like this” you whispered, determined to fulfill what you were meant to do that night. “I will not let you die - any of you” 

Summoning your moon powers once again, one wave of your hand rendered Layla El-Faouly unconscious, their bodies then floating lightly upon your command as you tried to get them to safety. You enveloped them in a protective shield using your magical talents as bullets started to fire from oncoming vehicles headed towards your direction. 

Your hands slowly raised in midair, your eyes glowing bright white once more as your magic commanded the blasphemous vehicles to float. You crushed them with your fist in a terrifying grip, the moon’s power surging through.

As your astral form descended, the auras of Khonshu’s avatar swirled before your eyes. Hues of white, gray and black enveloped the unconscious body of your former lover’s reincarnation as you took a few steps near. Finally kneeling before him, your hands hovered directly above the unconscious form of Marc Spector who lay on the ground, his alters Steven Grant and Jake Lockley locked in a fragile balance. You began to chant in an ancient, melodious language, your words carrying the weight of centuries of moon magic.

Whispering a silent prayer to your patron goddess, you pressed a gentle kiss on Marc’s forehead. And as your lips slowly hovered over his, an oath was sealed beneath the full moon's watchful gaze.

"Arise, Moon Knight," your voice echoing as a soothing lullaby in the deep corners of Marc Spector’s shared headspace. "With the power of the moon, I grant you half of my life."

With the magic that flowed through your veins, you breathed life into his lungs as your lips finally connected. A surge of energy coursed through Marc's prone form, his eyes fluttered open as it glowed white like yours. A crescent moon tattoo then slowly inked itself into your respective jugular notches, symbolizing your intertwined destiny with Khonshu’s avatar. 

You then opened your eyes to see Marc looking directly at you, seemingly recognizing his other half even in your astral form. He sees you - they all do.

And as the events of that night finally took a toll on your body, your astral form was pulled back to your waiting body in London. Your eyes then felt heavy as a powerful sleep spell overtook your being, collapsing in the arms of your patron goddess. The last whispers you’ve heard were of a heavenly voice, seeking your forgiveness as she places a spell before you surrender your mind to the promise of good dreams with Darius Carter and his reincarnation, the Moon Knight, beneath the full moon’s eternal light.

“Patawarin mo ako, Mira, sa aking gagawin” Forgive me, Mira, for what I’m about to do.

END OF PROLOGUE.

masterlist | next chapter

[telelli-writes]

new chapter posted of my 1940s tomarry time-travel fic!

in this one, we absolutely peg the “slytherin politicking” meter. on a manipulation scale of one to ten, we achieve “machiavelli.” bonus features: romantic eye contact felt with the force of a punch to the solar plexus, tom fixating upon an inkstain as a metaphor he doesn’t care to examine too closely, and the joys of tribalism (also known as house unity). now with more blood loss!

[themakeupbrush]

Miss Universe Pakistan 2023 National Costume

The name of the National Costume is Pehchaan or in English 'Identity' Meaning: the distinguishing character or personality of an individual: INDIVIDUALITY Everyone has their own Pehchaan (Identity Miss Universe Pakistan message on her national costume is 'Unity in Diversity by celebrating its own Identity' Erica aims to celebrate the rich and diverse culture, history and lifestyle of Pakistan through her outfit. Pakistan is home to multiple ethnicities based on region, religion, language, and culture. Few of the existing ethnicities include Baloch, Brahui, Sindhi, Punjabi, Muhajir, Saraiki, Memon, Kalashi, Balti, Wakhi, Afghani, Kashmiri, and Hindkowan. This costume is a vibrant celebration of Pakistan's diverse cultures, seamlessly weaving together its distinct beauty and the profound love and unity embedded in its people's hearts. The intricate patchwork blends the rural and urban elements, paying homage to the rich crafts and heritage of Pakistan. The handcrafted fan, a major part of Pakistan's tribal lifestyle, is a symbol of power, and elegance and an ode to its roots. Meanwhile, the grand silhouette serves as a powerful visual testament to Pakistan's remarkable growth and evolution over time. It embodies the nation's journey from its roots in tradition to its strides toward modernity since gaining independence.

[mezzopieno-news]

Negli Stati Uniti, in California, la tribù Chumash ha raggiunto un risultato importante dopo nove anni di grande impegno: sarà il co-gestore del Santuario Marino Nazionale, una riserva di quasi 12.000 chilometri quadrati di acque costiere e offshore che si estende lungo 187.000 chilometri della costa centrale della California. Mai nella storia degli Usa era successo che venisse concessa la gestione di un’area protetta a una tribù di nativi.

Un traguardo storico importante che ha le sue radici nel 1969, anno a partire dal quale i Chumash hanno iniziato a sostenere la conservazione di questo ecosistema costiero che da sempre li ha accolti all’interno di un delicato equilibrio di coralli, alghe, squali, delfini, balene e foche. Per i Chumash il santuario non è solo la loro casa ma rappresenta soprattutto il loro legame con la propria storia: “Per preservare qualcosa, per proteggere qualcosa, le persone devono amarlo – ha dichiarato Violet Walker Sage, capo del Northern Chumash Tribal Council – e questo traguardo vuol dire darci l’opportunità di condividere le nostre storie e la nostra storia”. Il valore aggiunto rappresentato da questa co-gestione è dato dal fatto che adesso vi sarà l’opportunità di proteggere, gestire e tutelare in modo collaborativo le ricche risorse ecologiche e culturali dell’area, attingendo dalla conoscenza ecologica tribale generazionale, dai diversi input della comunità, e dalla ricerca accademica innovativa.

___________________

Fonte: Chumash sancturay; foto di Pexels

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[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter 5: Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City

Growth of authority in Barbarian Society. — Serfdom in the villages. — Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts. — The guild. — Double origin of the free mediæval city. — Self-jurisdiction, self-administration. — Honourable position of labour. — Trade by the guild and by the city.

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatever to impose it. It has deeply impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of common descent had been loosened by migrations on a grand scale, while the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle — the village community — was called into existence by the social genius of man. This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries, permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social institutions, several of which have survived down to the present time. We have now to follow the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid. Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the mediæval guilds and the mediæval city.

Far from being the fighting animals they have often been compared to, the barbarians of the first centuries of our era (like so many Mongolians, Africans, Arabs, and so on, who still continue in the same barbarian stage) invariably preferred peace to war. With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours — apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds. The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with each other. These barbarians covered the country with villages and farmhouses;[156] they cleared the forests, bridged the torrents, and colonized the formerly quite uninhabited wilderness; and they left the uncertain warlike pursuits to brotherhoods, scholæ, or “trusts” of unruly men, gathered round temporary chieftains, who wandered about, offering their adventurous spirit, their arms, and their knowledge of warfare for the protection of populations, only too anxious to be left in peace. The warrior bands came and went, prosecuting their family feuds; but the great mass continued to till the soil, taking but little notice of their would-be rulers, so long as they did not interfere with the independence of their village communities.[157] The new occupiers of Europe evolved the systems of land tenure and soil culture which are still in force with hundreds of millions of men; they worked out their systems of compensation for wrongs, instead of the old tribal blood-revenge; they learned the first rudiments of industry; and while they fortified their villages with palisaded walls, or erected towers and earthen forts whereto to repair in case of a new invasion, they soon abandoned the task of defending these towers and forts to those who made of war a speciality.

The very peacefulness of the barbarians, certainly not their supposed warlike instincts, thus became the source of their subsequent subjection to the military chieftains. It is evident that the very mode of life of the armed brotherhoods offered them more facilities for enrichment than the tillers of the soil could find in their agricultural communities. Even now we see that armed men occasionally come together to shoot down Matabeles and to rob them of their droves of cattle, though the Matabeles only want peace and are ready to buy it at a high price. The scholæ of old certainly were not more scrupulous than the scholæ of our own time. Droves of cattle, iron (which was extremely costly at that time[158]), and slaves were appropriated in this way; and although most acquisitions were wasted on the spot in those glorious feasts of which epic poetry has so much to say — still some part of the robbed riches was used for further enrichment. There was plenty of waste land, and no lack of men ready to till it, if only they could obtain the necessary cattle and implements. Whole villages, ruined by murrains, pests, fires, or raids of new immigrants, were often abandoned by their inhabitants, who went anywhere in search of new abodes. They still do so in Russia in similar circumstances. And if one of the hirdmen of the armed brotherhoods offered the peasants some cattle for a fresh start, some iron to make a plough, if not the plough itself, his protection from further raids, and a number of years free from all obligations, before they should begin to repay the contracted debt, they settled upon the land. And when, after a hard fight with bad crops, inundations and pestilences, those pioneers began to repay their debts, they fell into servile obligations towards the protector of the territory. Wealth undoubtedly did accumulate in this way, and power always follows wealth.[159] And yet, the more we penetrate into the life of those times, the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, the more we see that another element, besides wealth and military force, was required to constitute the authority of the few. It was an element of law and right, a desire of the masses to maintain peace, and to establish what they considered to be justice, which gave to the chieftains of the scholæ — kings, dukes, knyazes, and the like — the force they acquired two or three hundred years later. That same idea of justice, conceived as an adequate revenge for the wrong done, which had grown in the tribal stage, now passed as a red thread through the history of subsequent institutions, and, much more even than military or economic causes, it became the basis upon which the authority of the kings and the feudal lords was founded.

In fact, one of the chief preoccupations of the barbarian village community always was, as it still is with our barbarian contemporaries, to put a speedy end to the feuds which arose from the then current conception of justice. When a quarrel took place, the community at once interfered, and after the folkmote had heard the case, it settled the amount of composition (wergeld) to be paid to the wronged person, or to his family, as well as the fred, or fine for breach of peace, which had to be paid to the community. Interior quarrels were easily appeased in this way. But when feuds broke out between two different tribes, or two confederations of tribes, notwithstanding all measures taken to prevent them,[160] the difficulty was to find an arbiter or sentence-finder whose decision should be accepted by both parties alike, both for his impartiality and for his knowledge of the oldest law. The difficulty was the greater as the customary laws of different tribes and confederations were at variance as to the compensation due in different cases. It therefore became habitual to take the sentence-finder from among such families, or such tribes, as were reputed for keeping the law of old in its purity; of being versed in the songs, triads, sagas, etc., by means of which law was perpetuated in memory; and to retain law in this way became a sort of art, a “mystery,” carefully transmitted in certain families from generation to generation. Thus in Iceland, and in other Scandinavian lands, at every Allthing, or national folkmote, a lövsögmathr used to recite the whole law from memory for the enlightening of the assembly; and in Ireland there was, as is known, a special class of men reputed for the knowledge of the old traditions, and therefore enjoying a great authority as judges.[161] Again, when we are told by the Russian annals that some stems of North-West Russia, moved by the growing disorder which resulted from “clans rising against clans,” appealed to Norman varingiar to be their judges and commanders of warrior scholæ; and when we see the knyazes, or dukes, elected for the next two hundred years always from the same Norman family, we cannot but recognize that the Slavonians trusted to the Normans for a better knowledge of the law which would be equally recognized as good by different Slavonian kins. In this case the possession of runes, used for the transmission of old customs, was a decided advantage in favour of the Normans; but in other cases there are faint indications that the “eldest” branch of the stem, the supposed motherbranch, was appealed to to supply the judges, and its decisions were relied upon as just;[162] while at a later epoch we see a distinct tendency towards taking the sentence-finders from the Christian clergy, which, at that time, kept still to the fundamental, now forgotten, principle of Christianity, that retaliation is no act of justice. At that time the Christian clergy opened the churches as places of asylum for those who fled from blood revenge, and they willingly acted as arbiters in criminal cases, always opposing the old tribal principle of life for life and wound for wound. In short, the deeper we penetrate into the history of early institutions, the less we find grounds for the military theory of origin of authority. Even that power which later on became such a source of oppression seems, on the contrary, to have found its origin in the peaceful inclinations of the masses.

In all these cases the fred, which often amounted to half the compensation, went to the folkmote, and from times immemorial it used to be applied to works of common utility and defence. It has still the same destination (the erection of towers) among the Kabyles and certain Mongolian stems; and we have direct evidence that even several centuries later the judicial fines, in Pskov and several French and German cities, continued to be used for the repair of the city walls.[163] It was thus quite natural that the fines should be handed over to the sentence-finder, who was bound, in return, both to maintain the schola of armed men to whom the defence of the territory was trusted, and to execute the sentences. This became a universal custom in the eighth and ninth centuries, even when the sentence-finder was an elected bishop. The germ of a combination of what we should now call the judicial power and the executive thus made its appearance. But to these two functions the attributions of the duke or king were strictly limited. He was no ruler of the people — the supreme power still belonging to the folkmote — not even a commander of the popular militia; when the folk took to arms, it marched under a separate, also elected, commander, who was not a subordinate, but an equal to the king.[164] The king was a lord on his personal domain only. In fact, in barbarian language, the word konung, koning, or cyning synonymous with the Latin rex, had no other meaning than that of a temporary leader or chieftain of a band of men. The commander of a flotilla of boats, or even of a single pirate boat, was also a konung, and till the present day the commander of fishing in Norway is named Not-kong — “the king of the nets.”[165] The veneration attached later on to the personality of a king did not yet exist, and while treason to the kin was punished by death, the slaying of a king could be recouped by the payment of compensation: a king simply was valued so much more than a freeman.[166] And when King Knu (or Canute) had killed one man of his own schola, the saga represents him convoking his comrades to a thing where he stood on his knees imploring pardon. He was pardoned, but not till he had agreed to pay nine times the regular composition, of which one-third went to himself for the loss of one of his men, one-third to the relatives of the slain man, and one-third (the fred) to the schola.[167] In reality, a complete change had to be accomplished in the current conceptions, under the double influence of the Church and the students of Roman law, before an idea of sanctity began to be attached to the personality of the king.

However, it lies beyond the scope of these essays to follow the gradual development of authority out of the elements just indicated. Historians, such as Mr. and Mrs. Green for this country, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and Luchaire for France, Kaufmann, Janssen, W. Arnold, and even Nitzsch, for Germany, Leo and Botta for Italy, Byelaeff, Kostomaroff, and their followers for Russia, and many others, have fully told that tale. They have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing “to feed” a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors; how “commendation” to the Church, or to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each lord’s and bishop’s castle became a robber’s nest — how feudalism was imposed, in a word — and how the crusades, by freeing the serfs who wore the cross, gave the first impulse to popular emancipation. All this need not be retold in this place, our chief aim being to follow the constructive genius of the masses in their mutual-aid institutions.

At a time when the last vestiges of barbarian freedom seemed to disappear, and Europe, fallen under the dominion of thousands of petty rulers, was marching towards the constitution of such theocracies and despotic States as had followed the barbarian stage during the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord’s castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it. The movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain. Everywhere the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing through the same phases, leading to the same results. Wherever men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they instituted their “co-jurations,” their “fraternities,” their “friendships,” united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty. And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe. They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development. And when we now look to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find them — not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of huge States or the political capacities of their rulers, but in the very same current of mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community, and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new model — the guilds.

It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction. In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him — which law he intended to apply: the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him? And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him.[168] Now, they accepted the king’s or the lord’s official whom they could not refuse; but they maintained the folkmote’s jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord’s judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders. In most cases the official had nothing left to him but to confirm the sentence and to levy the customary fred. This precious right of self-jurisdiction, which, at that time, meant self-administration and self-legislation, had been maintained through all the struggles; and even the lawyers by whom Karl the Great was surrounded could not abolish it; they were bound to confirm it. At the same time, in all matters concerning the community’s domain, the folkmote retained its supremacy and (as shown by Maurer) often claimed submission from the lord himself in land tenure matters. No growth of feudalism could break this resistance; the village community kept its ground; and when, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions of the Normans, the Arabs, and the Ugrians had demonstrated that military scholæ were of little value for protecting the land, a general movement began all over Europe for fortifying the villages with stone walls and citadels. Thousands of fortified centres were then built by the energies of the village communities; and, once they had built their walls, once a common interest had been created in this new sanctuary — the town walls — they soon understood that they could henceforward resist the encroachments of the inner enemies, the lords, as well as the invasions of foreigners. A new life of freedom began to develop within the fortified enclosures. The mediæval city was born.[169]

No period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the fortified villages and market-places, representing so many “oases amidst the feudal forest,” began to free themselves from their lord’s yoke, and slowly elaborated the future city organization; but, unhappily, this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce: we know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which they were achieved. Under the protection of their walls the cities’ folkmotes — either quite independent, or led by the chief noble or merchant families — conquered and maintained the right of electing the military defensor and supreme judge of the town, or at least of choosing between those who pretended to occupy this position. In Italy the young communes were continually sending away their defensors or domini, fighting those who refused to go. The same went on in the East. In Bohemia, rich and poor alike (Bohemicae gentis magni et parvi, nobiles et ignobiles) took part in the election;[170] while, the vyeches (folkmotes) of the Russian cities regularly elected their dukes — always from the same Rurik family — covenanted with them, and sent the knyaz away if he had provoked discontent.[171] At the same time in most cities of Western and Southern Europe, the tendency was to take for defensor a bishop whom the city had elected itself; and so many bishops took the lead in protecting the “immunities” of the towns and in defending their liberties, that numbers of them were considered, after their death, as saints and special patrons of different cities. St. Uthelred of Winchester, St. Ulrik of Augsburg, St. Wolfgang of Ratisbon, St. Heribert of Cologne, St. Adalbert of Prague, and so on, as well as many abbots and monks, became so many cities’ saints for having acted in defence of popular rights.[172] And under the new defensors, whether laic or clerical, the citizens conquered full self-jurisdiction and self-administration for their folkmotes.[173]

The whole process of liberation progressed by a series of imperceptible acts of devotion to the common cause, accomplished by men who came out of the masses — by unknown heroes whose very names have not been preserved by history. The wonderful movement of the God’s peace (treuga Dei) by which the popular masses endeavoured to put a limit to the endless family feuds of the noble families, was born in the young towns, the bishops and the citizens trying to extend to the nobles the peace they had established within their town walls.[174] Already at that period, the commercial cities of Italy, and especially Amalfi (which had its elected consuls since 844, and frequently changed its doges in the tenth century)[175] worked out the customary maritime and commercial law which later on became a model for all Europe; Ravenna elaborated its craft organization, and Milan, which had made its first revolution in 980, became a great centre of commerce, its trades enjoying a full independence since the eleventh century.[176] So also Brügge and Ghent; so also several cities of France in which the Mahl or forum had become a quite independent institution.[177] And already during that period began the work of artistic decoration of the towns by works of architecture, which we still admire and which loudly testify of the intellectual movement of the times. “The basilicae were then renewed in almost all the universe,” Raoul Glaber wrote in his chronicle, and some of the finest monuments of mediæval architecture date from that period: the wonderful old church of Bremen was built in the ninth century, Saint Marc of Venice was finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in 1063. In fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the Twelfth Century Renaissance[178] and the Twelfth Century Rationalism — the precursor of the Reform[179] date from that period, when most cities were still simple agglomerations of small village communities enclosed by walls.

However, another element, besides the village-community principle, was required to give to these growing centres of liberty and enlightenment the unity of thought and action, and the powers of initiative, which made their force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. With the growing diversity of occupations, crafts and arts, and with the growing commerce in distant lands, some new form of union was required, and this necessary new element was supplied by the guilds. Volumes and volumes have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia, and so on, took such a formidable development in mediæval times and played such an important part in the emancipation of the cities. But it took historians more than sixty years before the universality of this institution and its true characters were understood. Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,[180] is known, can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village community.

Nothing illustrates better these mediæval brotherhoods than those temporary guilds which were formed on board ships. When a ship of the Hansa had accomplished her first half-day passage after having left the port, the captain (Schiffer) gathered all crew and passengers on the deck, and held the following language, as reported by a contemporary: —

“‘As we are now at the mercy of God and the waves,’ he said, ‘each one must be equal to each other. And as we are surrounded by storms, high waves, pirates and other dangers, we must keep a strict order that we may bring our voyage to a good end. That is why we shall pronounce the prayer for a good wind and good success, and, according to marine law, we shall name the occupiers of the judges’ seats (Schöffenstellen).’ Thereupon the crew elected a Vogt and four scabini, to act as their judges. At the end of the voyage the Vogt and the scabini abdicated their functions and addressed the crew as follows: — ‘What has happened on board ship, we must pardon to each other and consider as dead (todt und ab sein lassen). What we have judged right, was for the sake of justice. This is why we beg you all, in the name of honest justice, to forget all the animosity one may nourish against another, and to swear on bread and salt that he will not think of it in a bad spirit. If any one, however, considers himself wronged, he must appeal to the land Vogt and ask justice from him before sunset.’ On landing, the Stock with the fred fines was handed over to the Vogt of the sea-port for distribution among the poor.”[181]

This simple narrative, perhaps better than anything else, depicts the spirit of the mediæval guilds. Like organizations came into existence wherever a group of men — fishermen, hunters, travelling merchants, builders, or settled craftsmen — came together for a common pursuit. Thus, there was on board ship the naval authority of the captain; but, for the very success of the common enterprise, all men on board, rich and poor, masters and crew, captain and sailors, agreed to be equals in their mutual relations, to be simply men, bound to aid each other and to settle their possible disputes before judges elected by all of them. So also when a number of craftsmen — masons, carpenters, stone-cutters, etc. — came together for building, say, a cathedral, they all belonged to a city which had its political organization, and each of them belonged moreover to his own craft; but they were united besides by their common enterprise, which they knew better than any one else, and they joined into a body united by closer, although temporary, bonds; they founded the guild for the building of the cathedral.[182] We may see the same till now in the Kabylian çof:[183] the Kabyles have their village community; but this union is not sufficient for all political, commercial, and personal needs of union, and the closer brotherhood of the çof is constituted.

As to the social characters of the mediæval guild, any guild-statute may illustrate them. Taking, for instance, the skraa of some early Danish guild, we read in it, first, a statement of the general brotherly feelings which must reign in the guild; next come the regulations relative to self-jurisdiction in cases of quarrels arising between two brothers, or a brother and a stranger; and then, the social duties of the brethren are enumerated. If a brother’s house is burned, or he has lost his ship, or has suffered on a pilgrim’s voyage, all the brethren must come to his aid. If a brother falls dangerously ill, two brethren must keep watch by his bed till he is out of danger, and if he dies, the brethren must bury him — a great affair in those times of pestilences — and follow him to the church and the grave. After his death they must provide for his children, if necessary; very often the widow becomes a sister to the guild.[184]

These two leading features appeared in every brotherhood formed for any possible purpose. In each case the members treated each other as, and named each other, brother and sister;[185] all were equals before the guild. They owned some “chattel” (cattle, land, buildings, places of worship, or “stock”) in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a lawsuit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for good; that is, whether he was unjustly accused of aggression, or really was the aggressor, they had to support him, and to bring things to a peaceful end. So long as his was not a secret aggression — in which case he would have been treated as an outlaw — the brotherhood stood by him.[186] If the relatives of the wronged man wanted to revenge the offence at once by a new aggression, the brotherhood supplied him with a horse to run away, or with a boat, a pair of oars, a knife and a steel for striking light; if he remained in town, twelve brothers accompanied him to protect him; and in the meantime they arranged the composition. They went to court to support by oath the truthfulness of his statements, and if he was found guilty they did not let him go to full ruin and become a slave through not paying the due compensation: they all paid it, just as the gens did in olden times. Only when a brother had broken the faith towards his guild-brethren, or other people, he was excluded from the brotherhood “with a Nothing’s name” (tha scal han maeles af brödrescap met nidings nafn).[187]

Such were the leading ideas of those brotherhoods which gradually covered the whole of mediæval life. In fact, we know of guilds among all possible professions: guilds of serfs,[188] guilds of freemen, and guilds of both serfs and freemen; guilds called into life for the special purpose of hunting, fishing, or a trading expedition, and dissolved when the special purpose had been achieved; and guilds lasting for centuries in a given craft or trade. And, in proportion as life took an always greater variety of pursuits, the variety in the guilds grew in proportion. So we see not only merchants, craftsmen, hunters, and peasants united in guilds; we also see guilds of priests, painters, teachers of primary schools and universities, guilds for performing the passion play, for building a church, for developing the “mystery” of a given school of art or craft, or for a special recreation — even guilds among beggars, executioners, and lost women, all organized on the same double principle of self-jurisdiction and mutual support.[189] For Russia we have positive evidence showing that the very “making of Russia” was as much the work of its hunters’, fishermen’s, and traders’ artels as of the budding village communities, and up to the present day the country is covered with artels.[190]

These few remarks show how incorrect was the view taken by some early explorers of the guilds when they wanted to see the essence of the institution in its yearly festival. In reality, the day of the common meal was always the day, or the morrow of the day, of election of aldermen, of discussion of alterations in the statutes, and very often the day of judgment of quarrels that had risen among the brethren,[191] or of renewed allegiance to the guild. The common meal, like the festival at the old tribal folkmote — the mahl or malum — or the Buryate aba, or the parish feast and the harvest supper, was simply an affirmation of brotherhood. It symbolized the times when everything was kept in common by the clan. This day, at least, all belonged to all; all sat at the same table and partook of the same meal. Even at a much later time the inmate of the almshouse of a London guild sat this day by the side of the rich alderman. As to the distinction which several explorers have tried to establish between the old Saxon “frith guild” and the so-called “social” or “religious” guilds — all were frith guilds in the sense above mentioned,[192] and all were religious in the sense in which a village community or a city placed under the protection of a special saint is social and religious. If the institution of the guild has taken such an immense extension in Asia, Africa, and Europe, if it has lived thousands of years, reappearing again and again when similar conditions called it into existence, it is because it was much more than an eating association, or an association for going to church on a certain day, or a burial club. It answered to a deeply inrooted want of human nature; and it embodied all the attributes which the State appropriated later on for its bureaucracy and police, and much more than that. It was an association for mutual support in all circumstances and in all accidents of life, “by deed and advise,” and it was an organization for maintaining justice — with this difference from the State, that on all these occasions a humane, a brotherly element was introduced instead of the formal element which is the essential characteristic of State interference. Even when appearing before the guild tribunal, the guild-brother answered before men who knew him well and had stood by him before in their daily work, at the common meal, in the performance of their brotherly duties: men who were his equals and brethren indeed, not theorists of law nor defenders of some one else’s interests.[193]

It is evident that an institution so well suited to serve the need of union, without depriving the individual of his initiative, could but spread, grow, and fortify. The difficulty was only to find such form as would permit to federate the unions of the guilds without interfering with the unions of the village communities, and to federate all these into one harmonious whole. And when this form of combination had been found, and a series of favourable circumstances permitted the cities to affirm their independence, they did so with a unity of thought which can but excite our admiration, even in our century of railways, telegraphs, and printing. Hundreds of charters in which the cities inscribed their liberation have reached us, and through all of them — notwithstanding the infinite variety of details, which depended upon the more or less greater fulness of emancipation — the same leading ideas run. The city organized itself as a federation of both small village communities and guilds.

“All those who belong to the friendship of the town” — so runs a charter given in 1188 to the burghesses of Aire by Philip, Count of Flanders — “have promised and confirmed by faith and oath that they will aid each other as brethren, in whatever is useful and honest. That if one commits against another an offence in words or in deeds, the one who has suffered there from will not take revenge, either himself or his people... he will lodge a complaint and the offender will make good for his offence, according to what will be pronounced by twelve elected judges acting as arbiters, And if the offender or the offended, after having been warned thrice, does not submit to the decision of the arbiters, he will be excluded from the friendship as a wicked man and a perjuror.[194] “Each one of the men of the commune will be faithful to his conjuror, and will give him aid and advice, according to what justice will dictate him” — the Amiens and Abbeville charters say. “All will aid each other, according to their powers, within the boundaries of the Commune, and will not suffer that any one takes anything from any one of them, or makes one pay contributions” — do we read in the charters of Soissons, Compiègne, Senlis, and many others of the same type.[195] And so on with countless variations on the same theme. “The Commune,” Guilbert de Nogent wrote, “is an oath of mutual aid (mutui adjutorii conjuratio)... A new and detestable word. Through it the serfs (capite sensi) are freed from all serfdom; through it, they can only be condemned to a legally determined fine for breaches of the law; through it, they cease to be liable to payments which the serfs always used to pay.”[196]

The same wave of emancipation ran, in the twelfth century, through all parts of the continent, involving both rich cities and the poorest towns. And if we may say that, as a rule, the Italian cities were the first to free themselves, we can assign no centre from which the movement would have spread. Very often a small burg in central Europe took the lead for its region, and big agglomerations accepted the little town’s charter as a model for their own. Thus, the charter of a small town, Lorris, was adopted by eighty-three towns in south-west France, and that of Beaumont became the model for over five hundred towns and cities in Belgium and France. Special deputies were dispatched by the cities to their neighbours to obtain a copy from their charter, and the constitution was framed upon that model. However, they did not simply copy each other: they framed their own charters in accordance with the concessions they had obtained from their lords; and the result was that, as remarked by an historian, the charters of the mediæval communes offer the same variety as the Gothic architecture of their churches and cathedrals. The same leading ideas in all of them — the cathedral symbolizing the union of parish and guild in the city, — and the same infinitely rich variety of detail.

Self-jurisdiction was the essential point, and self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. But the commune was not simply an “autonomous” part of the State — such ambiguous words had not yet been invented by that time — it was a State in itself. It had the right of war and peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbours. It was sovereign in its own affairs, and mixed with no others. The supreme political power could be vested entirely in a democratic forum, as was the case in Pskov, whose vyeche sent and received ambassadors, concluded treaties, accepted and sent away princes, or went on without them for dozens of years; or it was vested in, or usurped by, an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, as was the case in hundreds of Italian and middle European cities. The principle, nevertheless, remained the same: the city was a State and — what was perhaps still more remarkable — when the power in the city was usurped by an aristocracy of merchants or even nobles, the inner life of the city and the democratism of its daily life did not disappear: they depended but little upon what may be called the political form of the State.

The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that a mediæval city was not a centralized State. During the first centuries of its existence, the city hardly could be named a State as regards its interior organization, because the middle ages knew no more of the present centralization of functions than of the present territorial centralization. Each group had its share of sovereignty. The city was usually divided into four quarters, or into five to seven sections radiating from a centre, each quarter or section roughly corresponding to a certain trade or profession which prevailed in it, but nevertheless containing inhabitants of different social positions and occupations — nobles, merchants, artisans, or even half-serfs; and each section or quarter constituted a quite independent agglomeration. In Venice, each island was an independent political community. It had its own organized trades, its own commerce in salt, its own jurisdiction and administration, its own forum; and the nomination of a doge by the city changed nothing in the inner independence of the units.[197] In Cologne, we see the inhabitants divided into Geburschaften and Heimschaften (viciniae), i.e. neighbour guilds, which dated from the Franconian period. Each of them had its judge (Burrichter) and the usual twelve elected sentence-finders (Schöffen), its Vogt, and its greve or commander of the local militia.[198] The story of early London before the Conquest — Mr. Green says — is that “of a number of little groups scattered here and there over the area within the walls, each growing up with its own life and institutions, guilds, sokes, religious houses and the like, and only slowly drawing together into a municipal union.”[199] And if we refer to the annals of the Russian cities, Novgorod and Pskov, both of which are relatively rich in local details, we find the section (konets) consisting of independent streets (ulitsa), each of which, though chiefly peopled with artisans of a certain craft, had also merchants and landowners among its inhabitants, and was a separate community. It had the communal responsibility of all members in case of crime, its own jurisdiction and administration by street aldermen (ulichanskiye starosty), its own seal and, in case of need, its own forum; its own militia, as also its self-elected priests and its, own collective life and collective enterprise.[200]

The mediæval city thus appears as a double federation: of all householders united into small territorial unions — the street, the parish, the section — and of individuals united by oath into guilds according to their professions; the former being a produce of the village-community origin of the city, while the second is a subsequent growth called to life by new conditions.

To guarantee liberty, self-administration, and peace was the chief aim of the mediæval city; and labour, as we shall presently see when speaking of the craft guilds, was its chief foundation. But “production” did not absorb the whole attention of the mediæval economist. With his practical mind, he understood that “consumption” must be guaranteed in order to obtain production; and therefore, to provide for “the common first food and lodging of poor and rich alike” (gemeine notdurft und gemach armer und richer[201]) was the fundamental principle in each city. The purchase of food supplies and other first necessaries (coal, wood, etc.) before they had reached the market, or altogether in especially favourable conditions from which others would be excluded — the preempcio, in a word — was entirely prohibited. Everything had to go to the market and be offered there for every one’s purchase, till the ringing of the bell had closed the market. Then only could the retailer buy the remainder, and even then his profit should be an “honest profit” only.[202] Moreover, when corn was bought by a baker wholesale after the close of the market, every citizen had the right to claim part of the corn (about half-a-quarter) for his own use, at wholesale price, if he did so before the final conclusion of the bargain; and reciprocally, every baker could claim the same if the citizen purchased corn for re-selling it. In the first case, the corn had only to be brought to the town mill to be ground in its proper turn for a settled price, and the bread could be baked in the four banal, or communal oven.[203] In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the case in our own times.

However, all such regulations belong to later periods of the cities’ life, while at an earlier period it was the city itself which used to buy all food supplies for the use of the citizens. The documents recently published by Mr. Gross are quite positive on this point and fully support his conclusion to the effect that the cargoes of subsistences “were purchased by certain civic officials in the name of the town, and then distributed in shares among the merchant burgesses, no one being allowed to buy wares landed in the port unless the municipal authorities refused to purchase them. This seem — she adds — to have been quite a common practice in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland.“[204] Even in the sixteenth century we find that common purchases of corn were made for the “comoditie and profitt in all things of this.... Citie and Chamber of London, and of all the Citizens and Inhabitants of the same as moche as in us lieth” — as the Mayor wrote in 1565.[205] In Venice, the whole of the trade in corn is well known to have been in the hands of the city; the “quarters,” on receiving the cereals from the board which administrated the imports, being bound to send to every citizen’s house the quantity allotted to him.[206] In France, the city of Amiens used to purchase salt and to distribute it to all citizens at cost price;[207] and even now one sees in many French towns the halles which formerly were municipal dépôts for corn and salt.[208] In Russia it was a regular custom in Novgorod and Pskov.

The whole matter relative to the communal purchases for the use of the citizens, and the manner in which they used to be made, seems not to have yet received proper attention from the historians of the period; but there are here and there some very interesting facts which throw a new light upon it. Thus there is, among Mr. Gross’s documents, a Kilkenny ordinance of the year 1367, from which we learn how the prices of the goods were established. “The merchants and the sailors,” Mr. Gross writes, “were to state on oath the first cost of the goods and the expenses of transportation. Then the mayor of the town and two discreet men were to name the price at which the wares were to be sold.” The same rule held good in Thurso for merchandise coming “by sea or land.” This way of “naming the price” so well answers to the very conceptions of trade which were current in mediæval times that it must have been all but universal. To have the price established by a third person was a very old custom; and for all interchange within the city it certainly was a widely-spread habit to leave the establishment of prices to “discreet men” — to a third party — and not to the vendor or the buyer. But this order of things takes us still further back in the history of trade — namely, to a time when trade in staple produce was carried on by the whole city, and the merchants were only the commissioners, the trustees, of the city for selling the goods which it exported. A Waterford ordinance, published also by Mr. Gross, says “that all manere of marchandis what so ever kynde thei be of... shal be bought by the Maire and balives which bene commene biers [common buyers, for the town] for the time being, and to distribute the same on freemen of the citie (the propre goods of free citisains and inhabitants only excepted).” This ordinance can hardly be explained otherwise than by admitting that all the exterior trade of the town was carried on by its agents. Moreover, we have direct evidence of such having been the case for Novgorod and Pskov. It was the Sovereign Novgorod and the Sovereign Pskov who sent their caravans of merchants to distant lands.

We know also that in nearly all mediæval cities of Middle and Western Europe, the craft guilds used to buy, as a body, all necessary raw produce, and to sell the produce of their work through their officials, and it is hardly possible that the same should not have been done for exterior trade — the more so as it is well known that up to the thirteenth century, not only all merchants of a given city were considered abroad as responsible in a body for debts contracted by any one of them, but the whole city as well was responsible for the debts of each one of its merchants. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth century the towns on the Rhine entered into special treaties abolishing this responsibility.[209] And finally we have the remarkable Ipswich document published by Mr. Gross, from which document we learn that the merchant guild of this town was constituted by all who had the freedom of the city, and who wished to pay their contribution (“their hanse”) to the guild, the whole community discussing all together how better to maintain the merchant guild, and giving it certain privileges. The merchant guild of Ipswich thus appears rather as a body of trustees of the town than as a common private guild.

In short, the more we begin to know the mediaeval city the more we see that it was not simply a political organization for the protection of certain political liberties. It was an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization. How far this attempt has been successful will be best seen when we have analyzed in the next chapter the organization of labour in the mediæval city and the relations of the cities with the surrounding peasant population.

[inventors-fair]

The Penthouse: Room Contest Winners ~

Our winners this week are @an-anarchist-shapeshifter, @corporalotherbear, and @curiooftheheart!

@an-anarchist-shapeshifter — Secluded Bedroom / Dark Closet

I think this card's theoretical art direction—or I suppose, the spacework that it's purporting to show—is a phenomenal trope execution. The Dark Closet spawning a Beast is a great little Goyf relative. For limited, having that ability to "feed" on your graveyard is another delirium payoff, even if it is a single token. Even if that token goes away, I love the Bedroom's ability to pump out manifested creatures. Very powerful, of course, but at mythic, that kind of pumping is perfectly reasonable; if you somehow don't have any creatures, well, too bad for your board state. And then the Closet awakens the beast! Or whatever order you choose, yadda yadda.

But back to the flavor. I personally haven't payed too much attention to the flavor of canonical Duskmourn rooms, so it's reasonable for me to get off my high horse and actually pay attention to these. My take/feeling is that the Bedroom is the place where, by sending a creature to "rest," it's summoning the monsters from their imagination, whereas the Closet is the place where the actual monsters are, feeding on the dreams and nightmares and growing more powerful because of that. And hey, I love what you've done with it! Just make sure you add that last quotation mark to the Beast reminder text.

@corporalotherbear — Center Stage / Splash Zone

You're a disgusting performer, ain'tcha. This is supremely gross and very powerful, mostly on the Splash Zone side of things, IMO. I think that out of all the directions that Rakdos could go, having that kind of direct fiery damage is a great way to throw the viscera. I really don't know where this design first started! The idea for a Rakdos-themed room opens you up to many options, of course, but maybe the sacrifice-to-damage came first because, of course, mechanical synergies. It's hard to tell, and that's a good thing. It makes me feel that the design went through some cohesive thought processes before you settled on this choice.

Maybe it didn't and maybe having a splash zone as a room was just the best way to go about a "wouldn't this be messed up" mindset. I'm down for it! I'm also down for some very strong limited enchantments. Early draw is great for the aggro side when you're curving out to a turn-five swing having built up your board. There's a small chance that balance might lead this to six mana, but either way, that's such a small tweak for such a strong effect. I will say that I almost want to see a Ravnica that has two different guilds representing different directions now. One rooms leads to Rakdos carnage, one to Gruul tribal unity—or, one to Rakdos showmanship, the other to Orzhov austerity. Y'know? Lots of neat possibilities that this card brings out.

@curiooftheheart — Worn Nursery / Maids' Chamber

Overall, I think this card's function is kinda perfect. Like, printably perfect. Someone might raise the point about playtesting for the tutor and that kind of power (see: Recruiter of the Guard), but I would say that you could maybe bump it to 2W easily if necessary. Is it necessary at this point? Honestly, without the body, I don't think you need to change it. It fits the theme of white cards in this set, and I really like how you have the caveat for the Chambers so that you have to be aggressive to get that lifegain; lifegain hasn't been as much of a presence in Duskmoun from my experience, but the cards that go with it are great.

And with this to go with it—yeah, no, I'm thoroughly impressed with the cleanness of this card. It's not blowing the tops off of any design specs in terms of 'radical innovation,' and it doesn't have to, and I'm sure you're aware of that. This card is a design-first gameplay-matters cut-and-dry explicitly functional piece of tech. It would certainly see both limited and constructed play, and it's appropriately pushed for its power. Hard to go against, easy to love. I think that you've done awesome work here! It's kind of a shame that D&T has been pushed out of the Legacy meta a little bit, because we both know that brewing with tutor rooms would be super fun.

Runners in the next room... @abelzumi

[shadowedknight68]

DBZ OC: Zeno The Heraclan Survivor

In the expansive cosmic tapestry of universe 6, where the clash of powers reshapes destinies, a shadowy figure emerges from the remnants of a once-thriving world. Zeno, a lone heir of the Hera Clan, carries the heavy burden of his past—one steeped in loss and survival.

With striking firey orange hair, unkept and long, his sharp, piercing yellow eyes that portray little emotion, Zeno embodies an air of detachment. His skin bears the scars of his harsh upbringing, marked by battles fought not for honor, but survival. A single golden earring, a tribal emblem of strength and unity pierced into his right ear, a constant reminder of the home he lost in the flames of destruction.

As a child, Zeno watched his world fall apart, flames consuming the vibrant skies of his planet. At only six years old, he was hastily evacuated in an escape pod, his fate sealed by a choice he did not make. Hovering among the stars, he became a mere pawn to a merciless galaxy. Rescued by a brutal mercenary organization, he was molded into a soldier through relentless training, stripped of his childhood innocence and taught that vulnerability was a weakness in a galaxy that preyed on the weak.

Years spent in a ruthless boot camp built his physical and mental resilience, but they also forged a heart hardened by betrayal and loss. The camaraderie he sought among his fellow soldiers turned into bitter rivalry, each day fueled by the oppressive need to prove himself and the unquenchable thirst for freedom. As his strength grew, so did his resentment towards those who manipulated him, fueling a fire that would one day blaze bright enough to scorch the shackles from his spirit.

Zeno's escape was a smooth but perilous ballet over the bodies of his former captors, his skills honed to deadly precision. Now a bounty hunter, he wanders the galaxy like a storm on the horizon—an unpredictable force with his own code of honor. He accepts jobs from mercenaries and criminals alike, piecing together a living without attachments, all while quietly plotting his revenge against the organization that sought to control him.

Yet, within this cold, jagged exterior lies a soul still searching for purpose—half-forgotten memories of laughter and love haunting him in the stillness of the night. With the universe stretching before him, Zeno grapples with his identity: a soldier forged in battle or a wanderer seeking redemption. In the chaotic dance of fate, he is both hunter and hunted, a warrior seeking to redefine the meaning of strength in a world that has forgotten the warmth of compassion.

As Zeno surges through the cosmos, his saga is one of loss, resilience, and the unyielding hope that even in darkness, a flicker of light can spark a fire strong enough to ignite change. Whether he remains a solitary warrior or rises to reclaim the honor of his clan, only time will tell.

In his full power form, Zeno's cold personality is washed away by a sadistic, malicious, aggressive one, enjoying battles far more and becoming a wreckless titan of destruction.

When even his full power form is tested in battle, Zenos power will become out of control and his mind will become completely consumed by his power, leaving a insane monster which craves battle and bloodshed.