Two Steps From Hell - Evergreen

Two Steps From Hell - Neverdark

Alexandrian Elgance

Restrained, highly polished literary or artistic expression
 

In the gap between the Classical period of Greek literature in the fifth century BC and the flowering of Latin literature some four hundred years later, the undisputed centreof ancient learning was the Hellenistic city of Alexandria, in modern Egypt.

The city was founded by Alexander the Great to mark his conquest of Egypt in 331 Bc and was the capital of the ptolemaic pharaohs after Alexander's death. A rich and peaceful city, it attracted the leading scholars of the age, who came to study in its famous library. Although Alexandrian literature never matched the classical greek literature from which it derived, it did have a huge influence on later Roman work.

Most influencial of all was the poet Callimachus, who advocated a move away from the rambling epic style that had gone before and concetrated insead on writing highly polished short verses, few of which now survive. This 'Alexandrian' elegance became proverbial, making a big impression on Roman poets like Catullus, although it has always been associated with dry, scholarly erudition unlike the fresh, vigorous literature that came before

We Know You Are Out There

We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth, The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infalliable logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.

It began a short while ago, as these things are measured, less than 6^6 Deeli ago, though I suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio signals from a blossoming intelligence 2^14 Deelis outward from the Galactic Core, as photons travel. At first, crude and unstructured, these leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did the messages they carried. Through our Observatories we watched a race of strife and violence, populated by a barbaric race of short-lived, fast-breeding vermin. They were brutal and uncultured things which stabbed and shot and burned each other with no regard for life or purpose. Even their concepts of Art spoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to cause of death.

They terrified us, but we were older and wiser and so very far away, so we did no fret. Then we watched them split the atom and breech the heavens within the breadth of one of their single, short generations, and we began to worry. When they began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space, we felt fear and horror. Their transmissions promised peace and camaraderie to any who were listening, but we had watched them for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They knew we were out here, and they were coming for us.

The Orchestrators consulted the Predictor, and the output was dire. They would multiply and grow and flood out of their home system like some uncountable tide of Devourer worms, consuming all that lay in their path. It might be 6^8 Deelis, but they would destroy us if left unchecked. With aching carapaces, we decided to act, and sealed our fate.

The Gift of Mercy was 8^4 strides long with a mouth 2/4 that in diameter, filled with many 4^4 weights of machinery, fuel, and ballast. It would push itself up to 2/8th of light speed with its onboard fuel, and then begin to consume interstellar Primary Element 2/2 to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling at nearly light speed when it hit. They would never see it coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration, and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed weighed heavily upon us all; the necessity of our crime did little to comfort us.

The Gift had barely cleared the outer cometary halo when the mistake was realized, but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught, could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The architects and work crews, horrified at the awful power of the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self-terminated in droves, walking unshielded into radiation zones, neglecting proper null pressure, safety or simply ceasing their nutrient consumption until their metabolic functions stopped. The appalling cost in lives had forced the Orchestrators to streamline the Gift's design and construction. There had been no time for the design or implementation of anything beyond the simple, massive engines and the stabilizing systems. We could only watch in shame and horror as the light of genocide faded in infrared against the distant void.

They grew, and they changed, in a handful of lifetimes. They abolished war, abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves to the grand purpose of life and Art. We watched them remake first themselves, and then their world. Their frail, soft bodies gave way to gleaming metals and plastics, they unified their people through an omnipotent communications grid and produced Art of such power and emotion, the likes of which the Galaxy has never seen before. Or again, because of us.

They converted their home world into a paradise (by their standards) and many 10^6s of them poured out into the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we could only envy. With bodies built to survive every environment from the day-lit surface of their innermost world, to the atmosphere of their largest gas giant and the cold void in between, they set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful. At first we thought them to be simple miners, stripping the rocky planets and moons for vital resources, but then we began to see the purpose to their construction, the artworks carved into every surface, and traced across the system in glittering lights and dancing fusion trails. And still, our terrible Gift approached.

They had less than 2^2 Deelis to see it, following so closely on the tail of its own light. In that time, oh so brief even by their fleeting lives, more than 10^10 sentients prepared for death. Lovers exchanged last words, separated by worlds and the tyranny of light speed. Their planet-side engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission to upload countless masses with the necessary neural modification, while those above dumped lifetimes of music and literature from their databanks to make room for passengers, Those lacking the required hardware of the time to acquire it consigned themselves to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.

The Gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible in our skies, shining bright and cruel even to the unaugmented ocular receptor. We watched and we wept for our victims, dead so many Deelis before the light of their doom had even reached us. Many 6^4s of those who had been directly or even tangentially involved in the creation of the Gift sealed their spiracles as a final penance for the small roles they had played in this atrocity. The light dimmed, the dust cleared, and our Observatories refocused upon the place where their shining blue world had once hung in the void, and found only dust and the pale gleam of an orphaned moon, wrapped in a thin, burning wisp of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.

Radiation and relativistic shrapnel had wiped out much of the inner system, and continent-sized chunks of molten rock carried screaming ghosts outward at interstellar escape velocities, damned to wander the great void for an eternity. The damage was apocalyptic, but not complete. From the shadows of the outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged, thousands of fusion trails of single ships and world ships and everything in between, many 10^6s of survivors in flesh and steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments we felt relief, even joy, and we were filled with the hope that their culture and Art would survive the terrible blow we had dealt them. Then came the message, tightly focused at our star, transmitted simultaneously by hundreds of their ships.

"We know you are out there, and we are coming for you."

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Aeolian Harp

A musical instrument designed to be played by the wind

The Aeolian Harp, invented in Germany in the seventeenth century, is an instrument in which strings are made to vibrate by the movement of the air, without any human interference. It is named after Aeolus, an abiguous figure from Greek mythology who was thought to be the master of the four winds.

He appears most famously in a story of the hero Odysseus, who is said to have arrived at a mysterious floating island where Aeolus reigned along with his six sons and daughters (who were, disturbingly, all married to each other).

Strange domestic arrangements notwithstanding, Aeolus entertained the hero kindly, and gave him a gift to help him on his way home: a magical bag in which all the winds were trapped, fastened ith silver string. By only letting out the favourable West ind, Odysseus was able to make swift progress, and before long, the shores of his beloved homeland were in sight.

But some of Odysseus. men greedy for loot, decide to see what their captain was keeping in his mysterious bag and, whle he slept, they untied the silver string. Immediately, the winds that were trapped insid rushed out in allmighty squall, which blew Odysseus all the way back to Aeolus' island.

Βιβλιοσυζήτηση: The 4th Revolution (part 2)

To be under the Aegis

To be under someone's protection or authority

In Greek myhology, the aegis was a very mysterious garment associated with Zeus and his daughter Athena. Sometimes the aegis is represented as a sort of cloak. At other times, it is a shield or a fringed breastplate. Some accounts have it made out of goatskin (perhaps the skin of the magical she-goat Amalthea) while others claim it was made of gold. In Athena's hands, the aegis is sometimes a mantle woven out of hissing snakes.

At any rate, the aegis was believed to be a tool of incredible power. Zeus could bring down thunderstorms and strike terror into mortals just by shaking it, and Athena wore it in battle in order to terrify her enemies. Set on the front of the aegis was the severed head of the Gorgon Medusa, which was so horrible to look at that anyone who saw it turned to stone.

To be covered by the aegis of the gods was to have some friends in seriously high places, and that sense of protection, coupled with high authority, survives today.

Achilles Heel

A person's weak spot or volnerability

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess sing

Homer, Iliad, i 1-2, trans Alexander Pope

The story of Achilles is central to the plot of the Iliad, Homer's epic poem of the Trojan War and Greek literature's earliest and perhaps finest work. The poem tells what happens when Achilles Quarrels with Agamemnon, his commander-in-chief, and withdraws from the fighting around Troy.

Deprived of their best fighter, the Greek army is pushed back by the Trojans until Achilles' beloved friend Patroclus enters the battle wearing th hero's famous armour. The Trojans, thinking that Achilles has returned, begin to flee, but the Trojan Hero Hector kills Patroclus and stems the tide. Devasted by his friend's death, Achilles vows revenge and defeats the unfortunate Hector under the walls of Troy.

At this point, the Iliad ends, but Achilles become such a huge figure in the Greek world that later writers (like modern fans who write home - made sequels to The Lord of The Rings) kept adding to the mythology around him. It was the Roman poet Statius who introduced the story that the baby Achilles had been dipped in the River Styx. This, Statius wrote, made him involnerable except at the heel by which his mother had held him.

In Statius' version, Achilles is finally killed by a poisoned arrow that strikes the vulnerable spot, and ever since, any fatal weakness has been called an 'Achilles heel'.

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An academy

The world's first academy was founded in Athens at the beginning of the fourth century BC by the philosopher Plato, perhaps one of the greatest and most influential thinker of ancient Greece. It started as a simple association of like - minded intellectuals which was named after its meeting place near the grove of the hero Academus on the outskirts of the city.

Through the Academy, Plato taught young Athenian aristocrats (including the equally influential philosopher Aristotle) the arts of philosophy, geometry and mathematics. Even after Plato's death the academy continued as a centre of learning, developing ideas which would become the foundation of Western philosophy and which would have a profound influence on the development of Christian ideology hundreds of years later.

In modern English, the world 'academic' has come to imply 'out of touch', 'pointless' or 'obscure'. This of course is terribly unfair on the original Academics, whose philosophies lie at the very heart of later Western thought. 

Βιβλιοσυζήτηση: The 4th Revolution (part 1)

What Makes Black Mirror So Dark

I'm a Demon and I Need Your Help...

I’m a monster.

I don’t mean that in the sense that I’m a terrible person or anything like that; I mean it in the sense that I’m a monstrous Hell-creature that feeds off human fear and misery. You may be wondering why I’m writing this to you; it’s because I need your help. I’ll get to the specifics in a moment, but first I’d like to explain why I need your help at all.

About sixteen hundred years ago, some practitioners of black magic discovered an ancient Latin text and summoned me to this plane of existence to do their bidding. Only, one of the warlocks, Adriel I think his name was, messed the ritual up so that I was no longer bound to do their will. Apparently they wanted me to enact an apocalypse that would destroy the current world order and set them up as leaders. I decided that was a bit much so I just slaughtered them all instead.

I might have enacted the apocalypse anyway, but Adriel’s screw-up caused me to be summoned with only a tiny fraction of my power.

Even so, I left Adriel alive, mostly because he seemed like a good lad. He went on to become a baker later on if I recall correctly.

I burned the summoning scroll and went back to my plane of existence, where I had been tormenting lost souls with my kids. However, it seems like I should have killed Adriel after all, because unbeknownst to me, he had transcribed the summoning ritual and bequeathed it to his children after he died. The scroll was lost for centuries, until one of Adriel’s modern descendants discovered it in his great-grandfather’s attic while preparing for an after-death estate sale.

He decided to get it translated out of curiosity, and afterwards he decided that the contents would make a great “creepypasta.” He even included the original Latin incantation for flavor. This was a few years ago when the fad of ritualistic stories was still booming. To my great surprise and distress, my summoning instructions became somewhat popular. At this point, I hadn’t been to Earth in over a thousand years, and I had been summoned by the most powerful of dark wizards.

Now, every few days I was being whisked out of Hell by some drunk teenagers shining flashlights up at their face in their bathroom trying to scare each other.

You see, a long time ago, when literacy was exceptionally rare, my summoning ritual was extremely complicated. But in the days of booming literacy rates and Google translate, it’s become absurdly easy.

Luckily for me, though, Adriel didn’t just fuck up when he summoned me, he fucked up when he transcribed the ritual as well, so that I’m not bound to anyone’s will when I get summoned. That’s a good thing, because drunk human teenagers usually ask me to do some pretty weird stuff. However, I still only get summoned with a tiny fraction of my full power, so I usually just terrify them to their very core before whisking back to Hell so that they won’t bother me again.

That was until Lucy.

Last month some six year old girl found my “creepypasta” summoning ritual, and decided to try it out. By chance, she got the ending right. I suppose it was bound to happen eventually; it was only a small mistake that Adriel made in the transcription after all.

The problem is that she’s not actually evil in any sense of the word. She’s managed to summon a demon capable of bringing about the Apocalypse, and she has me do things like materialize cotton candy and puppies out of thin air.

Her parents are always flabbergasted when they arrive to pick her up from school and she’s surrounded by at least eight puppies.

At this point, I don’t even care about destroying humans and feasting on their souls anymore, I’d really just like to go back home. So I’m asking for your help. I need someone here to complete my banishing ritual so I can go back to Hell and live in peace.

It’s actually quite simple, you just draw a pentagram in a mirror, light seven candles and read the following words:

Daemonum Magister ab antiquo,

dono tibi mea corpus, gratia liberabo vos

ego vivere invite vos intra corpus mea

ego immolo anima mea

nos vanae humanae creaturae,

nos apetimus mortis et infernus

producat in fine hominis

Amen

So if anyone could help me out it would be greatly appreciated.

Oct 3rd 1283 - Hanged, drawn and quartered

Dafydd ap Gruffydd was Prince of Wales from 11 December 1282 until his execution on 3 October 1283 by King Edward I of England. He was the last independent ruler of Wales.

Dafydd ap Gruffydd was also the first nobleman to be executed by being hanged, drawn and quartered. On 30 September, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, was condemned to death, the first person known to have been tried and executed for what from that time onwards would be described as high treason against the King.

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