[NOBLES] Erasing the Line - History

Here is a translated extract from Eileen Power’s bestselling Madness and Civilisation: an account of our benevolent rulers.

The history of the Meritocrats is rightly known by every schooled lay person but few consider the ramifications of their millennia-long stewardship in daily life. These noble beings lead humanity, the quarrelsome children of the sentient races from an adolescent chaos into an age of dominance and prosperity. 

Before the Meritocrats, humanity was lost. What society did exist was little more than a random assortment of nations and serfdoms perpetually warring amongst themselves for what meagre resources they could gouge from their lands. Besieged equally by monsters and their own rulers, there was little incentive for altruism in the common people. The other sentient races, the elves, the dwarves, even the garrulous Halflings, wisely avoided contact with humanity judging them too self-destructive, to short-sighted to survive as a result of an abortively short life span. What little record there is of Orcish contact is so abhorrently violent that it can be considered a miracle their race survived at all.

This state of affairs continued unchecked until finally, with humankind at its reprehensible nadir, a new world power emerged. If humanity was to shatter itself then the Roman Empire would be the hammer. Little over one thousand years ago the dregs of our kind gathered to the mediterranean and began to coordinate to devise ever more complex stratagems and technologies to better visit their cruelties upon the world. This confederation of warriors and thieves cancered the land consuming everything in a combine of misery. All the cruelties that humanity visited upon themselves were multiplied a thousandfold and the other sentient races prepared to eulogize their shameful brethren.

Until this point our history was veiled in miscommunication and what little has been accumulated is fragmentary at best. But one could say that when the misery was at its height the roots of true civilisation were to be found. For just when the cries of the innocent grew to a wretched cacophony the Meritocrats awoke from their timeless slumber. They swept from their abodes and from the skies surveyed the land they had once known and wept at that damage humanity had wrought. The noble drakes prepared to cleanse the world through elemental destruction that it might heal without human folly, but then they hesitated.

It is beyond man to understand the ways of superior beings and the depths of mercy required to stay such justified punishment but nonetheless I would venture that the Meritocrats saw that humanity, the newest and most capricious of all the sentient races may not have been irredeemable, just too young and foolish to be left to govern itself.

Thus the hand that would have crushed all instead extended in parental sadness. The Roman empire resisted but was easily quelled and then the Meritocrats shouldered the responsibilities of man until such time that humanity proved itself mature enough to govern its own future. 

Beneath this immortal guiding influence the wars of man were soon extinguished and its fuel was instead set to the fires of industry. Our race spread in peace and prosperity and forged alliances with all the sentient races if not as equals then as aspirational younger brethren. Now, whilst we are unfit to govern we have begun to challenge the Dwarves in technical prowess, the Elves in Art, the Orcs in Discipline, the Gnomes in academics and the Halflings in all manner of frivolities. This is a testament to the innovation which spawned from our freedom from governmental responsibility.

Given our comparatively recent successes there are of course those who have begun to hope that perhaps in their lifetime we may have finally earned the trust of the Meritocrats and their blessing to continue unaided. I for one however, knowing as I do through my studies, the inherent and absolute cruelty of man, suspect such a time may never arrive.