All Humans Are Cannibals

 

Yes, it is true. At least in the world described here, the subconscious cannibalistic urge is the great affliction of humanity, the source from which much evil which may otherwise have never come to pass. Much of culture, and much of faith, is centered around the sublimation, control, or indulgence in this act, the Primeval Sin. We are invariably cursed, fallen from grace, and it is manifested in this most terrible of hungers, which ever drives us to destroy all we have wrought, to turn kin against kin and the great against the small. We were not always such. We became this way. We cannot go back.            

I have stated earlier, there was a time in which things called Titans held sway. I shall speak of them now.

In the days before man grew civil he cowered beneath the gaze of what would be called the Pagan Gods, inhuman deities of the World which gardened it red in tooth and claw, or green in branch and leave, or white in rot and mycelium. For as all know life arises from water and soil as pale wriggling things that deviate and diversify into the myriad existences known to us, and it was the Pagan Gods who ruled the time before a certain thing came to be called Man. Great, impossible things. Trees above the horizon, beasts the size of mountains, networks of fungal tendrils which spread across uncountable leagues, orchestrating an alien hymn enacted by the lesser beasts and guardian daimons which bared their throats before the world's supreme masters.

Different were we, for conscious thought was our weapon rather than fang or talon. Tool users and mound builders, who altered the great engine of divinity unthinkingly mastered by its miraculous stewards. For the Pagan Gods were no more aware than any beast, their minds great and witless save instinctual urges near alien to us. We can guess at the motivations of a panther, we can note the inclinations of a flower to turn toward the sun. What does a thing which is miracle act upon? What hungers do they slake? What hidden patterns guide them?

Whatever they were, it was so that our actions were noticed and considered an affront. When a roof was built it was shattered. When crops were farmed they were trampled. Our crime was the twisting of the world into a form which overpowered that created by their will, and so we were reduced to meek, cowering things, sheltering under boughs and caverns.

It cannot be said who managed to slay the first of them, though all agree it could not have been through honest battle. A cub or faun or pup or old and sickly elder, perhaps the first elder to ever grow so infirm, it was assuredly, crept upon and taken in ambush. With cunning and swiftness must we have acted, and desperately did we devour it. Who can guess why? I think it was an intuitive understanding, a knowing that could not be expressed in words. For from that commingling came a union which was not, I think, supposed to be. The spirit of a worldly being, not grown slowly into the skin of divinity, was infused with the numinous transcendence of a divine soul. Rapidly, violently, we grew to accommodate it.

That, then, was the birth of the Titans. The gods of men rather than the earth, full of our cunning, our ignorance, and the miraculous potency of the Divine. Just as the Pagan Gods willed existence into their image, so did they. But augmented with willful thought, our arts were more subtle and refined.

Outnumbered were we, a thousand times so. But we only needed to win a single struggle to gain a new divine carcass and offer it to our kindred, and so grow our numbers. In time, we multiplied, and so many did we become that a single divinity did not birth a Titan, but was spread across a thousand thousand mouths. So did the Great Men come to be, tall and strong half-gods, the rank and file of a war against the world.

And war we did, against the very principle of an unordered existence, unordered in our minds at least. We made spears of tree trunks and infernos of continents. We trampled across the world in spite and fury, railing against those we perceived as our enemy, who had suppressed our ancestors so. Our great conflicts were terrible, but victorious, and in time it was Titan who stood at the peak of the world and the Pagan Gods banished to the most wild places. To this day, despite all that came after, mankind takes pride in this, our taming of the world. It is regarded as a righteous act, though perhaps it was the pride that beget the fall of that first civilization.

There is one exception to this, which I shall digress briefly on. The ocean has ever been untamed. For we are creatures of the earth, and an even, perhaps inferior match for the Pagan Gods in physical might and miraculous prowess but surpassing them in cunning and artifice. On the earth we could bring our whole strength to bear, but the depths were an alien place to us, and the disadvantages so profound that but few of the Titans could master the waters, and often their lives were short. Even now, the sea is ever at odds with us, and things swim in those dark abysses which have never known the yolk of order.

But now we return to the land, where the Pagan Gods dwindled, and we swelled. Immense structures which held millions of souls were erected or hewn from mountains, many persist to this day, even as mounds of porous rubble. The Titans ruled us and for a time we were united, not as a culture or a people but as shared strugglers.

But in our growth we had been reckless, and the hunts grew less fruitful.

And the Titans began to grow hungry.

We do not know which first slaughtered another, and slaked themselves upon their slain kin. We do not know which great temple-cities first turned upon their own populace and made themselves into great charnel pits. We do not know when the war-harvests started, and men became prey to men.

But they did.

They all did.

Those who did not partake were bereft of the miraculous strength of the divine, and could not withstand their nourished peers. Those who sought to limit their consumption were instead consumed by the vigor of those who did not. The most hungry, the most relentless, the ones which discarded every other virtue or pursuit in favor of their hunting; it was they who ruled, in time.

Imagine it, reader, if you would. A thousand pyramids the size of mountains, burning with cooking fires meant for immeasurable giants, their steps flooding with innumerable fountains of blood and offal, and the jeering laughter of the victors as they gained strength from those too weak to oppose them.

All of us alive now are the children of those people. Each of us bears the spiritual taint of those acts, the legacy of souls so twisted.

Of course, it was Heaven which ended that nightmare. It came upon us and smote the Titans, a greater miracle than their own which rent their bodies asunder and smeared their minds across the World. There they yet lay, dead yet dreaming, granting a holy pareidolia to those who look. The figures in the clouds, the man in the moon, the visage in the sun, all of these are traces of them. Blink, and they vanish. But are not truly gone.

But despite the intervention of Heaven, we are still the Titan's children. Within us, brought by the action of our ancestors, is Primeval Sin. When stress overtakes us, when passions mount us, when we succumb to madness, there is the urge. To look upon another is to have the tongue moisten, the hands twitch. To know, truly in your heart, if you kill this person and consume them, you will grow strong. You will become taller, wiser, your life extended. You will be as the Great Men of old, if you just indulge. Few can articulate this hunger, fewer still are raised to know what it truly means. Most sublimate its feelings, but it remains, working its way into callous words, spiteful script, and cruel deeds. We are brought low by it, even if never once do we taste the flesh of our fellows. Our race is made more wicked than it ought to have been, had we never distorted the divinity we had stolen.

Yet it is this sin which allows our kind to persist as inheritors of this World, no matter the horrors that have risen to challenge us, no matter how fractured and broken we become. For as we are winnowed by a great evil, those who remain and break under that strain become great horrors themselves, but ones arrayed against the prior foe. As some beasts devour their own young when they cannot be raised to maturity, so they may live another day, so too do we manifest that dreadful stratagem. And even in times of peace and plenty, do you not notice the lords and ladies to be taller than the common folk? That the passing of years touch them less? Oh yes, reader, they indulge. How can they not? But careful are they, for all of sane mind fear the rising of another great tyrant, another time of charnel pits and the strong glutted on the weak. To go too far is to risk war with another house which could not allow their growth to continue, or even treachery from within by fearful relatives. They but lightly touch Primeval Sin. Enough to just barely skirt above the common folk, for whom consumption is a direst crime, naturally. Outside of the second estate and its kindred castes one may only find Great Men at the margins of the law or outside it entirely.

I speak, of course, of the average realm, the common denominator by which others are measured. In such places, indulgence in Primeval Sin is tightly controlled and deeply ceremonial. A glutton who feasts on men with abandon will be put down like the beast he is, but to devour a slain foe or a deceased peasant as heriot is acceptable. In lands marked by the true zealots of Heaven it is said every dweller within is without such vices, though they may have others. In places which have succumbed to the urges of the Titans a hierarchy of size persists, the regent-tyrants ruling as giants while their ogrish lords and towering knights guard their hamlets as shepherds do their flocks, but it is yet a pale shadow of what came before. In some, given over to another Un- Worldly power, strength takes a different path. Living death, the madness of the Dream, the rulership of sorcerous Gnosis, among others.

For many are the ways by which we humans may grow. All of us have the barest mote of miracle in our souls, separating us both from beasts and other thinking things. Our spirits are mutable and unstable, poorly fit for our forms, able to twist and change at the slightest touch. We are as boulders set upon steep hills, surrounded by a thousand different fates depending on the direction we are pushed, yet we think we rest upon stable ground by the fact of our stillness. This ignorance, too, damns many.

But I meander. For most, Primeval Sin is a feared affliction, though most do not know its details and history. They only know the urge, and the consequences. That a man may be made old, strong, and clever by hunting his own kind.

It is a tempting offer.

Who does not want to be better? To those for whom all goes right, their own lives are greatly improved. But it is not without cost; once a certain threshold is passed, some degree of consumption is necessary for keeping one's strength, not merely augmenting it. It is at that point that man becomes a monster, in the eyes of most. To ignore this tax is to wither. One becomes a gaunt, helpless invalid, their miraculous body unable to preserve its form in defiance of natural law. Or did you think a man could stride thrice the height of his peers while bearing their proportions without divinity to keep him hale and healthy? No, each step he takes is a minor miracle, a spiritual exertion in defiance of Worldly principles. Thus additional infusions of spirit become required to maintain it, and yet more to grow further. It is thought that if millions could be fed to but a single human soul, a new Titan may walk the World.

But such an emergence is all but impossible in our time, so surely we have nothing to fear.

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I like the idea of warrior-as-giant past a certain threshold. A human is a human, you can't XP your way into superhumanity without growing monstrous in some way. In this setting, the most conventional method is to consume enough human flesh to push past baseline peak humanity into something other, roughly comparable with Arbitrarily Large Men from Berserk or Dark Souls. Most nobility and knights will be like this. You then have a bit of leeway to get bigger before you hit the mandatory cannibalism threshold, where your body cannot support itself without a steady diet of human meat. While ostensibly simple to obtain, this is a world that knows the dangers of such individuals and you know, how often will you be able to find people you can justifiably kill and consume without raising a fuss? Certainly more on average if you are an adventuring type, but eventually you will be surrounded by people you cannot eat without consequence, and you have a problem. If you walk that road, you better be ready for a society that knows exactly what you are, and has good reason to fear what you might become or the acts you might inspire. After all, if one person can do it, another might try their hand. One far less scrupulous than yourself, assuming you are so at all. Most instead will take their growth sideways into sorcery or some other niche, than risk such a thing.

It also serves as my answer to a conundrum I often see posed in fantasy discourse; why do humans dominate/what makes humans special? Often it is simply taken as fact that humans are the ruling species (or at least most populous and nominally in-charge), sometimes they are favored by the gods or just the True Everyman, and sometimes the solution is to get rid of them and replace them with something else, either through an apocalyptic event or just not having them. This is my solution. Like the hamster, the humans of this world eat their own in times of stress. Unlike the hamster, the more they do it, the more the grow in stature and divine power. When backed into a corner, a force which has ill intentions for humanity can end up producing its own undoing. At the same time, those new powers rarely have the best interests of their lesser kin at heart when the dust has settled. So the land comes under the rulership of a new dynasty of cannibal tyrants, and the cycle begins anew...