“Empires get wrecked
Principles get crushed
Saviors get crucified
History gets what?
History fucking gets over it all.”
– MGLA, “Age of Excuse VI”
Nothing is ever certain except that nothing ever is.
For whatever reason, destiny chose us to be here, now, alive and burning with fire in this dark age that seems to grow ever darker.
But:
Et Lux In Tenebris Lucet.
“And light shines in the darkness.”
The darker it seems, the brighter the stars shine – the brighter the fires we light as beacons blaze into that blackness. They shine in rebellion. They shine in an unrelenting defiance of the foul masters of this unrighteous place.
We see so much that empties our hearts and drains our passions – we feel grief in knowing that there seems to be so little that we can do.
What can we do? Who are we but just men?
Therein lies the answer, that awful and brutal truth. We are just men, truly.
Just men. Forever at war with the injustice and the lies and the filth this world attempts to stain us with in a crushing bid to extinguish the brightness that it so desperately hates and wishes to destroy forever.
In a world where nothing is certain, we must be certain of one thing:
Ourselves. Our ideals. Our loyalties and our kinships to those things that we chose to believe in and to fight in a neverending war to see exist and to go on.
Not only for us, but for our sons and daughters, whose one inheritance will be the world we leave to them, the blood we give them to operate within it as kings and queens of whatever era dawns for them when we are gone forever.
And it is for this that we must truly be certain. Ironclad.
We cannot abandon the fight. We cannot give in to despair, or that more dangerous of enemies: lethargy and apathy.
To say “I don’t care,” or “I will not fight,” is to be damned as a heartless coward.
We must do this because we were born to do this.
It doesn’t matter what you would have preferred, or what would have been easier or more inspiring.
What could be more inspiring than this?
To be born into an age that so desperately needs you because it has so little of righteousness or holy wrath or fortitude.
To be given the quest of the grail that has only been tasted from by heroes, beckoning you to be like them, to drink their blood from that cup, and know that it has always flowed in your veins like the very waters of eternity.
We cannot know what will come tomorrow.
We cannot know what will come of any of this.
But we can know that we are real. That we are vital. That we are certain of our position on the side of right and truth against falseness and lies.
Our enemy is all that would threaten this – all that would seek to strip beauty and love from us, and ours.
We can know that every empire gets wrecked, in time.
And rather than merely watching history get over it all, we can be a part of it this time, in our lifetime. To raise the banners and the torches together in this blackness, and to raise our voices together in a vicious and awful cry for war against those who would seek to harm us and to do us and our children hurt.
This is the only banner that matters.
This is the only fight worth fighting.
It’s the only one that exists –
And a warrior exists only to fight, and to win.
Art by Christian V.