1.A Utopia
It was only in my middle years that I truly began to understand the plight of my society. Six centuries after the fall of our predecessors, and five and a half since the imprisonment of the Sixth Sage, and yet we still squabbled over scraps.
I was not yet scholared in history at this time, yet even then I could see from the stann bones of our cities that we were no lesser in population than our ancestors of higher status. Why was it, that us humans who varied in intelligence no different from our long-lost kin could not build anything approaching the same majesty? We we truly doomed to mockeries in the skeletons of the past?
Indeed, the question followed me in my travels for the next years. I sought knowledge of history, rabid in my efforts to understand what made those who came before use different from us, and to bring that into the society that existed now.
The more I read however, the less I understood. There was no greater institution of understanding evident in their society, sharing truths of the world like that my master had lent me as a child. I saw no treatise on the secrets of higher technology, the machines that had elevated their society no more transparent to them than they were opaque to me.
Most shocking, what I saw in the past was war. Decades, centuries of war. Man suffered today the depredations of despots driven by the scarcity of settled land and cruel economics of food within cities, but those figures of the past waged death on the promise of pride or argument, on the word of whose kings and queens were right and wrong.
Though people of the past sat in rooms of stann and dyed fabric, they too were subject to the sufferings of our kind. The Ancient Monuments which lay mostly in ruins today, whose coiling and churning had fed and kept safe the environment of the past, eliminated not the terror and meaningless conflict that plagued their civilizations.
It was not our lack of technology and society that caused our squabbling, for we had squabbled for as long as history had been recorded.
Despairing, I stopped my travels in a town that today bears no name. Even my practice of self-alchemy, followed fastidiously since my master had shown me how, lapsed. Every fat man who starved his children for food, every corrupt official who condemned a center of charity for their own enrichment, every homeless beggar on the streets with an empty bowl, every broken bond of brotherhood in the name of wealth, it haunted me. I had seen the way of society, and we were savages.
I cannot say exactly when the thought came into my mind. Perhaps it was perspective gained by my total detachment, perhaps it was the delayed percolation of the many new ideas I had encountered over the years, perhaps it was my desperate hope for something better. It lingered within my ears: the genesis of evil is conflict, and the genesis of conflict is scarcity.
The fat man, the corrupt official, the homeless beggar, the broken brotherhood, all this stemmed from need. The need for food, for safety, for home. Alchemy could meet those needs. The Transmutation of Salt was the very first principle any Alchemist learned, and who was the iterant Alchemist who did not know how to bond Earth and Fire with a touch of Vitae into a passable—if admittedly unpleasant—source of nutrition?
Once I saw it, it almost blinded me. I could imagine a society where every man, woman, and child lived with free food and housing built from endless materials. There was none who would deny it was possible, either—was it not the great machines of the Second Sage which had before and even now fed the people of the few metropolises still left, requiring naught but the infusion of base earth? I had not the means nor knowledge to build anything of the scale, and I doubted any mortal alive did either, but where did the Second Sage arise from but the common person?
I had a goal, and I renewed my travels. The Sages still alive spoke rarely with humanity, but I could study their works. The city of Turhmaln, not more than a month's journey by foot from myself, beat still with the heart of one of those great machines. I felt myself different in my travels to that place, freely offering of that I carried and could gather with my practice of Alchemy to feed all those I saw starving.
During my walk, I encountered a man by the name of Pheris, an Alchemist of a tradition far from my own traveling too by happenstance in my same direction. I spent time pondering his visage, not talking for respect of the hidden sacred traditions of our respective Alchemical lineages. Like another spark of light, it hit me then too—the nature of the professional Alchemist was rarity and hardship, fumbling in the dark for lost knowledge, seeking to recreate it yourself. Here before me was a archive of knowledge, spanning generations of masters and disciples, holder theories and principles of Alchemy I surely did not know, and I of him.
I approached Pheris, and broke the barriers of tradition by wordlessly giving him my personal codex, that most precious index of everything I knew about Alchemy, the carried traditions of my master and his masters before him. I spent the night explaining all I knew to him, and in time he did the same. We were both better for it, having lost nothing but misconceptions and gained so much knowledge and some manner of enlightenment.
Once again, the future stretched before me. Every person fed, every person housed, and every person an Alchemist worthy of the name. No person would engender conflict, not when everything that they lacked could be created at their own hands.
I would later come learn of the importance of art in passion in life, and the internal apathy that can take a person who has everything, leading to my creation of the Standings and the refinement of my work. This however, was the germinating seed of my Utopia, the first and everlasting vision that brought me to my ascendance and drove me to elevate humanity.
We could be better than we were, better than those who came before us. In the intersections of our natures there lay the possibility of a good world. If truly none had accomplished it in the past, I would take the tools of my hands and mind and bring us to accomplish it now.
- Excerpt from Utopia, autobiography of the Seventh Sage