This is the spiritual successor to my old TL, And From Many Came One. Consider a collection of loosely-woven tales, all taking place in the same TL, and all taking place in the general alt-"Age of Exploration". The perspectives range from that of a lowly slave to those of rulers, and the narratives may be accompanied with small historical perspectives to illuminate the setting and plot of each little story. These pieces may have multiple parts; some may be one-shots. Each will have a list of characters, so as to give the reader a guide as to what is occurring. Here is a piece centering around one character, already posted at the end page of my former TL.
The Twilight of a Slave
LUWEE is an older slave, and a man of the Kru people, although he does not remember this any more.
He had not always been Luwee. He had been born far across the ocean, in a land lost to his memories, in a village barely remembered across the vastness of years in the New World. He remembered little of the old lands and the old ways, known to him only in dreams, long since forgotten under the whip and the brand, the wear and tear of his daily life, if one could truly call his existence a life at all.
In the New World, he was not a man; he was property, a commodity, a number, an unperson. His faith was the undead god of his masters, forced upon him; his mother tongue was long since stripped away for the bastardized patois that dominated his daily life. He was naught but an extension, a tool, of his owner- his personhood lost.
Up until tender twelve, he had been a free person, not yet a man but a person nonetheless, confirmed in his self-ownership, unscarred by the toils of a slave. And at twelve, an enemy raid took him away and sold him to the coast, to the white masters. And he was put on a ship, and it was on that ship that he lost who he was. Clapped in chains in the bowels of the great wooden beast, he lay next to his mother, pregnant with a sibling of his.
And on that ship, that hellscape revisited in many of Luwee’s nightmares, his mother died next to him, speaking faintly to him as fever sapped her body. Her frantic last words sounded like babble to him now, her message lost beneath the weight of what he had become. The heat, even in his dreams, scorched his skin, the sweat drowning him like a flood, his first chains a phantom ache on his well-worn wrists, the cage of wood still surrounding him as it had all those years ago. All that he was at tender twelve had been lost on that ship, and he would never gain it back.
And so, at tender twelve, Luwee became livestock, little more than a sentient beast of burden, bound by chains, branded by a man that now owned him. Slavery painted a brutal canvass across his body, the marks of lashes and burns and injuries long past remaining as a testament to the longevity of chattel. His name was not his, but rather an appellation of ownership. He had no man-name, for he was no longer a man. He was slave in body and slave in soul, slave in mind and action, slave awake and slave asleep.
In this role, Luwee was a part of a greater system, a drone in the hive that was his master’s plantation. He and the others, united in their owned-ness, picked the sugar that sustained the system, and performed the other tasks that allowed the plantation to operate from day to day. As Master rested, the slaves worked in the fields- that was how life was. Freedom no longer existed to any of the slaves; they lived to serve their Master, bereft even of the meager property and selfhood that a peasant had across the Ocean. Some priest of the cross-god had once postured, upon seeing the New World, whether slavery could truly be counted as living. Luwee did not know of this man, only that God had freed the Israelites and redeemed the sins of the Masters as his own Son, but would not come to save him. The Masters had “saved his soul” by bringing him to their God, even if he was clapped in chains both mental and physical.
Luwee thought little of Heaven, although he suspected that his current life might be Hell. With the amount of times the overseers threatened him with damnation for mishaps or false slights, he dreaded to even consider a place worse than the plantation, where Satan was Master over all the damned, brown or white. For of all the talk that the Masters gave about souls and Heaven and Hell, of the three-part Cross-God and of humility, of the evil of the Pope and the primacy of the “Iglesia Mayoriana”, Luwee was already damned. Luwee, by any estimation, was born into sin- and then sold into Hell, and no amount of divine salvation could change the damnation of his earthly life. Souls were irrelevant to slaves, whom already suffered the torments of Satan, who felt the heat and the whips and the chains, who saw death and who were treated as animals. To be a field slave was to be damned on Earth- such was the way of things.
The Twilight of a Slave
LUWEE is an older slave, and a man of the Kru people, although he does not remember this any more.
He had not always been Luwee. He had been born far across the ocean, in a land lost to his memories, in a village barely remembered across the vastness of years in the New World. He remembered little of the old lands and the old ways, known to him only in dreams, long since forgotten under the whip and the brand, the wear and tear of his daily life, if one could truly call his existence a life at all.
In the New World, he was not a man; he was property, a commodity, a number, an unperson. His faith was the undead god of his masters, forced upon him; his mother tongue was long since stripped away for the bastardized patois that dominated his daily life. He was naught but an extension, a tool, of his owner- his personhood lost.
Up until tender twelve, he had been a free person, not yet a man but a person nonetheless, confirmed in his self-ownership, unscarred by the toils of a slave. And at twelve, an enemy raid took him away and sold him to the coast, to the white masters. And he was put on a ship, and it was on that ship that he lost who he was. Clapped in chains in the bowels of the great wooden beast, he lay next to his mother, pregnant with a sibling of his.
And on that ship, that hellscape revisited in many of Luwee’s nightmares, his mother died next to him, speaking faintly to him as fever sapped her body. Her frantic last words sounded like babble to him now, her message lost beneath the weight of what he had become. The heat, even in his dreams, scorched his skin, the sweat drowning him like a flood, his first chains a phantom ache on his well-worn wrists, the cage of wood still surrounding him as it had all those years ago. All that he was at tender twelve had been lost on that ship, and he would never gain it back.
And so, at tender twelve, Luwee became livestock, little more than a sentient beast of burden, bound by chains, branded by a man that now owned him. Slavery painted a brutal canvass across his body, the marks of lashes and burns and injuries long past remaining as a testament to the longevity of chattel. His name was not his, but rather an appellation of ownership. He had no man-name, for he was no longer a man. He was slave in body and slave in soul, slave in mind and action, slave awake and slave asleep.
In this role, Luwee was a part of a greater system, a drone in the hive that was his master’s plantation. He and the others, united in their owned-ness, picked the sugar that sustained the system, and performed the other tasks that allowed the plantation to operate from day to day. As Master rested, the slaves worked in the fields- that was how life was. Freedom no longer existed to any of the slaves; they lived to serve their Master, bereft even of the meager property and selfhood that a peasant had across the Ocean. Some priest of the cross-god had once postured, upon seeing the New World, whether slavery could truly be counted as living. Luwee did not know of this man, only that God had freed the Israelites and redeemed the sins of the Masters as his own Son, but would not come to save him. The Masters had “saved his soul” by bringing him to their God, even if he was clapped in chains both mental and physical.
Luwee thought little of Heaven, although he suspected that his current life might be Hell. With the amount of times the overseers threatened him with damnation for mishaps or false slights, he dreaded to even consider a place worse than the plantation, where Satan was Master over all the damned, brown or white. For of all the talk that the Masters gave about souls and Heaven and Hell, of the three-part Cross-God and of humility, of the evil of the Pope and the primacy of the “Iglesia Mayoriana”, Luwee was already damned. Luwee, by any estimation, was born into sin- and then sold into Hell, and no amount of divine salvation could change the damnation of his earthly life. Souls were irrelevant to slaves, whom already suffered the torments of Satan, who felt the heat and the whips and the chains, who saw death and who were treated as animals. To be a field slave was to be damned on Earth- such was the way of things.
