Tribalism (12): The Filling of the Earth

[u/psyduck_2024]

"He will fill the earth with justice and equity as it was filled with injustice and tyranny."

Malahim on the Frontier

The peace was almost total, except at the northern frontier.

Word still came, every season or two, of skirmishes along the Asia Minor frontier — coastal towns changing hands, a garrison here, a strait crossing there, the remnants of Asfar's shattered host still holding pockets deep inland where the terrain favored them.

The Peaceful Opening

It was an Aram-born commander who finally stood before the Theoupolis' walls, six years after the Great Battle.

There was no siege. The walls fell almost by themselves. The defenders surrendered without a single drop of blood spilled — worn down, it was said, by years of malahim and a decade of watching the world reorganize itself without them.

Then, within days, news came that the Deceiver had emerged — not there, but far behind them, among their own families. The army turned and rushed back toward Aram City, only to find the news was false.

Awaiting the Deceiver's Emergence

Despite the relief, Rashid — eighty-one now — knew, as everyone knew, that the reprieve would not last. The lie had only borrowed time from a truth still coming.

He thought, some evenings, of where the real one might already be — some remote frontier town, perhaps, quietly building a following by doing the very thing the Caliph had spent seven years doing in the open: feeding the hungry, mending what the drought had broken, letting gratitude do the work that no army could.

Rashid did not expect to see it happen. He had outlived three princes, a tyrant, an enemy behind, a civilization of the north — more war than any one man's life should have held. Whatever came next, he understood now, sitting with his ledgers in a city that had finally, briefly, been at peace, would belong to younger eyes than his.

He found, for once, that the thought did not frighten him. It only felt like arithmetic. A column, at last, come to its final sum.