On the Spirit of Celtheste

*This article is about the 614 address. For the Tumesi novel, see On the Spirit of Celtheste (Novel).*

Below is full text of the now famous speech by Timothai Torcaster, Doctor of History at the University of Castra Corvallum. The speech was addressed to the joint faculty and students of the Uniters University and the University of Castra Corvallum in the Royal Hall of Scholars on the day of Midfall in the year 614 Kq. It was also broadcast throughout the Celthestan States by CFP Wireless and printed the next day in papers throughout the Realms.

## Context: the Rise of Popular Nationalism

*By Damian Knoewla, MMg*

 Torcaster was an unorthodox choice for the Midfall Address, a tradition as old as it was perfunctory, up until then given by a senior lecturer in inaudible monotone. But that year, just four years after the end of the Capalesian war, the Joint Board decided to toss the decision on Speaker to Castra's students. They chose a young, decidedly nontraditional man, mostly unknown among the established academic ranks of the Old Capital and completely unknown outside the city. He came to the podium dressed informally, cracking jokes and waving at his favorite students.

The speech he delivered was met with both great acclaim and great resistance; for its brevity, and for its frank, irreverent, uplifting message. Yet what has lasted beyond the excitement and scandal of the moment is Torcaster's sly insistence that Celtheste is, in fact, a single nation, bound together by a shared heritage. This was despite the five plus governments operating the various Celthestan states and the steadily failing efforts of ARCOM to bring them together. Just one week before Dr. Torcaster took the stage at the Hall of Scholars, a bomb went off outside the Royal Palace at Carvenac, killing over thirty people. In all this, "On the Spirit of Celtheste" managed to cut through the doubts and fears, to put into words the optimism and affection that many Celthestans were beginning to feel for a unified nation. The speech, and the moment, marked the beginning of the end for formal diplomatic efforts to reconcile the Realms. In turn, it crystallized the realization of a much more powerful force: the thousands of popular movements that began to stir, clamor, and rise to the call of their own dreams and visions for a new country.

## "On the Spirit of Celtheste," Full Transcript

*Timothai Torcaster, Doctor of History*

 It’s my honor to speak before you all on this indispensable day in our nation’s history. I understand some of you are here against your will [scattered laughter] so I will try to keep it brief. Others of you must be either true patriots or are running for political office—to sit through this two hour long ceremony of your own volition [laughter]. In any case I can’t help but feel under-qualified to speak in this grand, historic hall. For those of you unfamiliar with my work, I study the lineage of the Royal line and its significance in the social history of Celtheste. In layman’s terms, I figure out which royal slept with which peasants and when and the dirty details as such. It’s not difficult to see why I was chosen by the students as their preferred speaker.

If I haven’t yet defiled this sacred place with my flippancy, I might continue in defense of my work and my perspective on this particular day in history. See, for me the significance of this day is that not only is it the oldest of our holidays but that it is purely, purely a social holiday and not a political one. Or rather it commemorates an important event in our journey to the present in which political history was indistinguishable from social history. And this was, in part, due to size, of course. At that point the Kingdom—the Kingdom was a number you could count. And they did. Though we don’t know what that number was anymore, we know that on the ships from Midland, they counted every day to see if someone had fallen overboard. This is a kind of intimacy in the Kingdom we never, of course, saw again. But imagine that! Every subject of this Kingdom had probably shaken the King’s hand, had sat and listened to him ramble on. And this is so important because that meant that everyone was infected by the King’s personality. And this was not a strong personality. No, by all accounts Cerodine was a phenomenally uninteresting man in conversation and, for the most part, in action. But he had the anointing of a goddess, so the story goes, and the people followed him and *listened* because they had little choice.

This is another important point. That we were not a people that came together because we were conquered, but because we fled together. You all know the story. You’ve been told it since you were little, no matter where you grew up and in whatever fragmented political state we were in. Come on, I know you are all saying the first lines of that very long poem in your head.

> *From Midland on ocean* [audience joins in] *did Cerodine Sail*
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> *Across from the west with Aen Simarel*
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> *On Avony, Dory, et Indris he went*
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> *To cross the mountains and reach the Maend*
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> [audience stops, while Torcaster continues]
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> *Three gods with Cerodine contended did*
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> *One to send and two to—*
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No one? No one knows the rest? Haha! You do? [points at a student] Of course you do [laughter]. Well you may not be able to recite our national epic, but everyone knows the story: A young chieftain of Midland, living in the shadow of his older brother, is prompted by a goddess to unite three peoples into one and bring them to a promised land. He rounds up his family, more chieftains, a couple demigods, the first mage, and a drunk priestess, and after a few clashes with the primal and cosmic forces at work yada yada yada, they arrive in this land that is to be Celtheste. And Cerodine is always hailed as the hero of this story.

But I object. I will say that Cerodine was an ordinary man and, certainly not the most intelligent. I will say that Cerodine was, more than a King and founder, a man without foresight, without any true knowledge of his people, without real compassion for them. I will say this entire land was not built upon the strength of this man, but on his weakness and his submission to the particularly aggressive members of his court. And you might disagree with all of it or some of it and I will fight to the end about these things because they are important and have massive impact on the way we see our history and our present circumstances. But more importantly, and something that we can all agree on, we know that Cerodine was a *dreamer* and an idealist in the purest, most innocent way. He had this unimaginable power in his hands and he chose to create a color coded symmetrical fantasy world, a world that, like some child with a box of colored chalk, was filled with everything he could think of. It was, if nothing else, bold and bright—his imagination—unleashed on an entire valley. And *that’s* the spirit that this nation has always had, the ability to dream in monolithic ways, to take that compelling sense of what could be—as it is in our wild imaginations—and for better or worse fight until it is a reality.

This is our obsession and always has been and I believe that’s what our history since Midfall has been about. If you look closely at the revivals of the Kingdom (and there haven’t been many despite the sort of
narrative we are taught in schools), they’ve all been thinly disguised ways in which powerful people could construct their own dreams, not to revive Cerodine’s. It’s written across the *insane* skyline of the DP. I mean, you’ve seen it right? [laughter]. Across Andaemvel –that poor structure has gone through more reiterations that Jani Katyn’s face [laughter]. And [laughter continues] haha, yes,whew! [wipes forehead]. Really! Not one revival of the First Kingdom has even tried to look vaguely like the original. And some argue that no, none of the revivalists had the same advanced architects and magiks to come close, none of them really knew what the original city looked like. But see, I don’t think any of them really cared! They were only looking back at the First Kingdom so they could take what they had come to understand as “classy” and remake it even bigger, even better, even more extravagant. And of course, if the tales are to be believed, they never came close to beating the original.

But the history is all around us, not just here in the capitol, though it’s certainly one of the best illustrations, but across the Valley. Why do you think so many city founders razed the old cities—just completely razed them to build new ones and *rename them*, *re-culture them*, the great city states are for the most part *clearly*, very intentional attempts at building utopias. Brakael. Perfect example. They really, really thought they were building a Utopia and they weren’t even the first to do so on that same spot of land. In a matter of decades Cerodine’s Red Castle and the surrounding town became Redcastle, Red Field, Astor Field, the third Parigna, the southwest point of the expanded Aruno and only then was it named Brakael –which as you know changed a few more times before being renamed and rebuilt as the Bracael we know today. And don’t even get me started on Southres because the different cities that have occupied the former Southold lands are almost too many to count. Who else does that? What other place in the world is in this constant manic state of erratic progress? What other nation is neither fixated on past or future, change or tradition, but on these eternal thoughts in our minds? The places we dream of? The unreal. And yet we build it. And 90% of the time it fails but there is that 10% that remains and stands the test of time in this spectacular fashion and I think that’s what makes this country messy and insomniac and a breathtakingly wonderful place.

And I am not the first to say this, but perhaps our successes have not been in spite of our successes. And perhaps our true successes have never been material or monumental. For while this nation has never been a world power, since Midfall, the eyes of every nation have been on us—we who have the courage to dare, for better or for worse. Perhaps in some ways we are that shining jewel Cerodine envisioned, that would sit on the crown of the world. Perhaps we are on our way.

Or, as in the words of Palope…

> *Three peoples and a boat of Ark*
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> *Under valley, blade, and bark*
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> *Queen of Spring and Lord of Stars*
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> *A Kingdom without strife or wars!*
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