The New Herd
Flash Fiction
A Submission for Iron Age Media’s Prompt: The Chrysalis
What does it ever mean, to peel from an ensconced elite any measure of babel?
That is to ask: Why does any unseating of an elderly aristocracy, per their ignoble order, result from and extend into more chaos?
The irony of course, is the instituting of a new order, one many hope would not be one of malice and disgrace but of real purchase, of finely tuned civility, the type which can then blossom into haut monde, a world to make pettifogging Elven women blush.
Deep in the Dunes of the Singing Theme, Humans struck such a bargain, restoring nobility considered long lost to a land of ignoble order, but it was the bargain which similarly ensconced their knowledge of the familiar.
The sands were always the tenement to a duality however, not a singularity.
By the whims of the ironclad rule of their new King, the Human population has regained confidence after it had begun to grow uneasy. Over a thousand years of fighting an eldritch species has diminished the population, and it seemed with every year heralding the loss of one technology to lapsed expertise came subsequently the stuff of fantasy. Gunpowder, satellites, and skyscrapers, penultimate as they were until being turned into dust by the alien, still were wonders that had been, perhaps not unlike these preternatural forces who are now returning.
What started as reluctant fear metamorphosized into an animated forage for the phantasmagoric, magic soars throughout the desert, bleeding from a single point, preparing to reveal an ugly underbelly, and mankind was hungry for it. Is the horizon of the Singing Theme destined to be naught more than a cream vista owing a large bounty of hidden wealth to its tenants? Or will they owe an even greater deal of effort to the very concept of survival in a new hazardous alien theater?
Deep below its haunted golden knolls, the Singing Theme housed a fortress of man's own making from long ago, which in turn protected the premiere object of not just cold brooding tactical power, but one which may spell out the next era altogether.
Millennia of slaughter already stoked the anticipation of such an acquisition, and of course the bane to any long-lasting sense of noble order was evil itself, not for the chaos it would sow, but the deliberate cramming of authority and rotting stagnancy like that imposed upon man by its enemy. In recent history, this type of Anthropocene decay had only been temporarily pacified by the four other species reconstituted in this “return” of the magical. Incidental allies of always a foreign nature to mankind: Minotaurs, Elves, and even Gryphons and giant sea-serpents intervened on man's behalf thus buying mankind more time to recover in-between bouts with that fifth hazardous genus which had been the enemy of all.
Furthermore, it was below the very cradle of mankind's endless close-calls with extinction did the object of their reclamation finally reveal itself. Some have speculated that the quartet of compeers man fought alongside saw mankind as neighbors fallen on hard times, while others claim only rigid opportunism, that these beings only aided mankind against far more peculiar hordes only for simple enumerated strategy.
Reasons being whatever they were, mankind was definitively in possession of what they thought was tangibly empyrean power.
It took the form of many shapes. To some, it reverberated in geological sluggishness, appearing as one shape one day, and never changing for fifty weeks at a time. To others, it sped through these transformations, but if there was one shape that was most commonly visualized, it was an egg.
Upon its discovery, the King himself was brought forth, to know this thing which was tool, friend, family, and enemy all at once.
Under no other illusion, whether by his Crown or by his blood, the King understood that this creation of supposedly divine origin would give man the ability to reforge himself by a factor of Thulium becoming Gold and so the only King to ever know a stellar hand at the same magic flowing through the winds above, harvested that fateful egg of its contents, and spread them among his own species worldwide.
So goes the duality however. This would not be a singularity of sudden and endless prosperity for mankind, merely the next chapter for why they fought, for where there now existed for mankind: a longer lifespan, more durable bodies, higher intellect, and a penchant for newfound creativity and independence, this power could also be used for the undeviating consumption of stars.
A gold rush and a cold war all at once.
And it just so happens that there were at least five other races who now had a reason to bring antlers to the new Herne.
What were once mortal underdogs were now a fundamentally beatific herd of another kind.
But to what headache?