50 years ago today, on the anniversary and origin of the Feast of Salted Petals, god died.
Not God, of course, but god. For there were other gods in other lands, but in Bakseo there was only god, who needed no other name for he was the only god in Bakseo.
There can be no doubt that he is dead. Look towards the bay and see the lingering stains of terminal dogma. Look at it in your mind's eye, and see his snout bobbing in the waves - there can be no other imagining.
This death - let's be frank here - this murder, was no consequence of philosophy or theology, nothing so high-minded or abstract. No, god was a dweller in parochial flesh, old and weak and set in his ways, and he made Bakseo's people the same way - so he had to die, or else in this time of cauldron-born armies and alchemical stone-gassings the whole of Bakseo might die with him.
The death of god opened Bakseo's gates to the wider world - to the earth's fourty-four corners and all its heavens.
A Fresh Crop, Ripe & Green
Bakseo is buffeted by fat fogs from the sea, walls of moisture so dense you can feel them push into you. When storms come the difference can be hard to tell, save for the peal of thunder. It's a lush land, once almost entirely swampy in its lowlands, though vast swathes have been drained and reshaped in the last half-century. Cash crops are seeded in its new fields, sugarcane in the lowlands, and inland and upland (though upstanding sorts would never admit to it) groves of heart-racing akarra. The crops are shipped out - once raw, now processed - and a balance of vital stuffs flow in: grains, metals, weapons, cloths, grimoires, and so on.
Like the land, Bakseo's people are reshaped too. The core of this reshaping is the school system, the funnel which feeds its army and bureaucracy (as if one could be cleanly told from the other in Bakseo). At the system's outset tutours and scholars were imported: turtle-pate sophists from Quelm, prophessors from the universities of Cathalo, and suchlike and sundry. Now, its teachers are mostly produced domestically. Its life-defining examinations, both physical and mental, sort students into occupational strata, (ideally) without regard for their ethnic or class background, from officer to exorcist to labourer for the island's infrastructural projects - as brutal as they are necessary for its modern conditions. Bands of young and radicalized fugitives lurk in the hills.
There are vicious, strongly suppressed, and perennial rumours that prisoners and the lowest performers on the examinations are sold off, to the witch-kingdoms or the Mewling or Ba'ator or the many other realms revealed in the grand cosmologies from across the sea.
Little Elephants With Sharp Tusks
Bakseo is sometimes called "The Isle of Little Elephants" - this is an old name, and one never used by its more respectable inhabitants. The name's an embarrassment, demeaning, not least because Bakseo really is home to little elephants, no taller than your nipples. These elephants were once believed to be god, and so a program of extermination was carried out against them in the early years of Bakseo's new era. Contemporary education teaches that this identification of god with the elephants was nothing more than a superstitious conflation, and so the extermination is now seen as a silly, even ignorant excess.
The same men who ordered the extermination still rule Bakseo, an aging junta. They were and still are visionaries - ruthless, violent thugs, maybe, but visionaries nonetheless - patriots who believe in an ideal of Bakseo above and beyond the old internal divisions, and in the power Bakseo can and has drawn from centralization, bureaucratization, modernization. There's no love lost between them, and not in an ironic sense - they are
comrades and confidants alloyed by conspiracy and tribulation. This closeness, this mutual trust, has become a weakness: in all their years of government, they have not found successors satisfactory to enough of them, even as they've passed from young men to white-haired patriarchs. Part of this is due to paranoia - they made a devil's bargain long ago with the god-killers of Far Vashar for the armaments necessary for their endeavour, and have been dodging their end of that bargain ever since. They said they'd make Bakseo a forward operating base for the Vasharans' theomachy, but balked when they realized just what psychotic fuckfreaks the Vasharans are. The Vasharans, for their part, have taken this lightly so far - they're patient, and slip their infiltrators in where they can. Besides the Vasharans, there are several somewhat less-freakish foreign powers who seek to subordinate the country, played off each other by the junta while they stockpile arms and expand their forces.
In the hills where date-drunk monkeys clamber and holler, the grip of the junta is tenuous, where it can reach at all. There are villages that live the old ways and fight the old feuds without a thought for the lowlanders, and there are newcomers - those fleeing the corvée, political offendees, uncontrollable wild talents, and some more organized sorts - the Widowmade chief among them, rebel-faithful and ritual wives of their dead god, who rescue piss-stained chunks of idols from Consecration Alley in Bakseo's capital, who weave necklaces of flowers and brew honey-wine for the island's surviving elephants, and who delve into its caves and interior ruins for artifacts of its legendary history to rally more people to their movement.
Flotsam On Astral Tides
Gods
don't die like we do - not by nature, for one thing, and not to return
to dust. They fall back into the astral plane, the place of stars and
spirits and the shining intellect. This falling-back is only very rarely
a neat and one-directional process.
In Bakseo god's fall has splashed, in the same way a meteor crashing into the ocean might be said to have splashed. The land is awash in astral energies. Dreams are often shared, and sometimes prophetic, latent psychic powers erupt, ghosts are strewn like roadside rubbish, manias periodically rush through the population, and ethereal predators come to pick over all of it.
Much of Bakseo's traditional culture was deliberately dismantled by the junta, because it was deemed sympathetic to god or an obstacle to new and superior methods. This left a void where once there were techniques for the treatment of these exponentially-increased spiritual/social maladies. Companies of exorcists popped up, relentlessly practical syncreticists and experimenters for hire, to cleanse a new construction of a haunting or stop an echopraxic worship-plague in its tracks.
Religion more specifically remains in flux. The priesthoods are foreign, and merely tenants in rented temple-space. They are held to bureaucratic standards and quotas much as the exorcists are - such-and-such required miracles, intercessions, abjurations, tithes kicked up as taxes, and so on. The sun Adonaios, god-king Zarus, and Panzuriel are the current leads in popularity.
Sweets & Treats
Bakseon cuisine has always been heavy on sweetness - from honey, traditionally and still, as most sugar is exported. Fruits and spiced syrup-infused pastries are nibbled at just about whenever more than one person sits down. This sweet-heavy diet isn’t conducive to dental hygiene, and so the people of Bakseo show their class in their mouths.
Ministers, plantation overseers, colonels, and other upper-enders have a set of dentures for every sort of
meal, most carved from the nacre of giant river mussels: thin razors to strip
the flesh from fish bones, delicate nubs for when the texture of
rum-soaked cakes must be fully appreciated, and so on. Men show off their grit by having their teeth pulled publicly at festivals. "Sweetpee" is an insult against the rich, like "fatcat" or "poncey". Only the truly wretched in Bakseo have a mouth full of their own teeth.
Besides sweets, foreign arts and languages are appreciated - being able to appreciate them is a mark of sophistication. Poets, painters, sculptors, and playwrights flock to the island, seeking the patronage of its elites and the chance to be immortalized in Bakseo's new canon. What they produce is typically either an inspired fusion of the various influences available, or a taste-fraying hodgepodge of clichés that would be laughed into the sea if not for the prevailing fashion. It's essentially a coin-flip.
