The Last Pilgrims

In the two decades following the collapse of
the imperial Western powers, and the destruction of the industrial
system, much of the medieval system of monarchy and aristocracy had
reasserted itself throughout the world.

The collapse of the unviable and
unsustainable world system had watered the earth with blood in a
way that very few could have imagined, and only 20 years later,
most of those who had lived through the crash now wondered how that
system had managed to last for over 200 years.

Across a massively depopulated continent,
ancient superstitions and idolatries multiplied as the new monarchs
adopted Napoleon’s idea that a monolithic state religion, even if
it were a false one, was necessary to the peace and security of the
realm. The freedom to practice one’s own religion, or to practice
no formal religion at all, was rare, indeed, following the
collapse. North America had come to resemble Old Europe in many
ways.

Although the most ancient of
motivations—greed, avarice, and covetousness—were behind most of
the persecutions and genocides of this new era, these were almost
exclusively carried out under the pretext of religion. The Bishops
and Cardinals, much as they had done in Europe six centuries
earlier, had multiplied like locusts across the land and served the
more predacious monarchs as willingly as they did their own
bellies.

Even though much of what was once the United
States had been conquered, the land and people absorbed into the
fiefdom of some newly formed kingdom or another, large areas of the
country—usually the wildest and most inaccessible parts—were
classified as “ungovernable”. Many of these areas were still farmed
by ‘plain’ peoples and sects. Akin to Amish or Mennonites of the
past, these peoples universally rejected absorption into the realms
of those regal idolaters who intended to force the practice of
predominantly ceremonial religions, contrary to their own beliefs,
upon them.

The
Vallenses
, one of the largest and
most well-known of the ‘plain’ sects in the South, were branded as
heretics by the religious authorities in order that the King of
Aztlan, as he greatly hoped, could either subjugate them or remove
them from his Kingdom. Due to the rather inhospitable climate, the
relative inaccessibility of the region, and active militant or
“insurgent” activity, the King had heretofore met with little
success in bringing the Vallenses under his domination. For these
reasons, most of Central Texas and the Hill Country were considered
by the King of Aztlan to be in open rebellion against his rule, and
persecutions and martyrdoms were not uncommon.

The Vallenses considered themselves humble
and obedient servants and an exceedingly peaceful people. They only
wished to farm their lands, raise and nurture their families, and
serve one another in humility and meekness. Their ‘crime’ was that
they desired to do these things outside of the predatory control of
people with whom they had nothing in common.

The Bishops of New Rome had, over the
intervening decades, sent missionaries and emissaries to the
Vallenses in order to receive their voluntary submission to both
the King of Aztlan, and the accepted religion of the realm. Though
they met with no success, the missionaries were always treated well
by the plain people, and they had been assured that the Vallenses
desired no Kingdom in this world, and that they sought only to be
helpful and productive citizens in the realm. However, they had no
intention of abjuring their religion or the free practice of
it.

Though some of the Vallenses’
co-religionists from former urban areas and regions more easily
controlled by New Rome had capitulated and had brought themselves
and their parishioners under the umbrella of the capital, the
Vallensian people of Central Texas and the Texas Hill Country had
resisted any amalgamation into the Kingdom and religion of
Aztlan.

Of late, the duty and obligation of the
subjugation of the Vallenses had fallen to the Duke of El Paso, an
ambitious man who had been a drug kingpin prior to the collapse.
The Duke intended, by whatever means necessary, to foully and
finally bring an end to any resistance in Central Texas.

The Vallenses, led for some 30 years by
Elders, elected from among themselves, foresaw the evil that was
coming—both the collapse and the global disasters that followed.
They believed that the Providence of God had guided them to their
lands and to a way of life that left them mostly unharmed and
untainted by the collapse of what they called ‘The World System.’
They were thus largely unaffected by the fall of the system of
commerce, industry, and society that ruled and reigned, they
believed, via
mammon
prior to the collapse.

The Vallenses believed that the lamp of the
apostolic faith continued to burn among them, and they did desire
to be a light to the world in the darkest of the last days of the
epoch.

And, the Vallenses were not the only ones
who rejected the rule of Aztlan. Opposition to the King of Aztlan,
who now reigned from his capital city of New Rome in the Sangre de
Christo Mountains of what was once northern New Mexico, had united
many militant bands of ‘freemen’ who, like the plain people, would
not bow to either nearby prelates or distant kings.

Among the Vallensian low-rolling hills,
valleys, and plains, there were free men of independent mind and
action. Some of the militia groups in Texas actively traded with
the Vallenses, and supported their freedom of lifestyle, worldview,
and belief. New Rome considered the militias to be terrorists and
branded them “insurgents.”

The relationships between the pacifistic
Vallenses and the militia were complex. The official position of
the eldership of the Vallenses was that they did not condone or
support militia activity—even in their own defense. Some of the
Vallenses, though, openly traded with, and often materially
supported, the freemen against the laws of New Rome and the desires
of their own leaders. Thus, relationships were often tense and
strained. The plain people desired peace and tranquility and
rejected violence in pursuit of those aims. Most of the plain
people believed that the violent actions of the militias, even if
they were defensive and measured, brought more attention and
persecution upon all of the people of the region. Their own history
provides ample evidence in support of this view.

Only a decade earlier, in the midst of the
coldest days of a very cold post-collapse winter, a great tragedy
befell the Vallensian people. Months prior to the tragic massacre,
a handful of Vallensian traders were returning to their homes via
the Old Comanche Road, when they were captured by a mounted unit of
Atzlani soldiers under the command of Santos, a lieutenant in the
service of the Duke of El Paso.

The Duke, answering a call from the King of
Aztlan and the religious leaders of New Rome to purge the land of
heretics and rebels, had sent out raiding parties in hopes of
capturing Vallensian traders. New Rome hoped to gain from the
captured men intelligence about the militias, after which the
Vallenses would be executed as an example and warning to the
rebels. The traders were dragged from their wagons, tied up, and
hauled over 80 miles to San Angelo, now a frontier town amidst the
vast and virtually ungovernable western expanse, where they were
burned at the stake in the city square.

In response, a unit of militia riders stole
into Santos’ camp at night, taking the Aztlani commander hostage,
and killing all of his entourage. Santos was carried back into San
Angelo by night and left impaled on a pike not far from where the
Vallensian traders had been burned.

The Duke of El Paso, offended and enraged
(Santos had been his brother-in-law), and seeking to appease both
the King and his own wife, had ordered a large army to march on a
Vallensian colony to the East of San Angelo. This was an
unprecedented attack, both in type and in scale. Prior to this
event, the Aztlani leadership had been cautious and measured in
their attacks, especially when those attacks called for them to
move a large body of men across vast distances, traversing areas
under nominal control of the freemen militias, without supply lines
or pre-positioned material.

On their journey, the army was harried by
freemen scouts and raiders who killed several of their troops.
Nonetheless, the army arrived mostly intact and had stormed
suddenly into the innocent Vallensian colony, hoping to kill every
man, woman and child. Those Vallenses not killed in the initial
attack fled eastward into the freezing night, carrying their young
and their old with them.

The fleeing Vallenses—most without winter
clothing—made it to the rolling hills and valleys of Central Texas,
where many of them froze to death over the first few nights due to
lack of food or shelter. Along the path of their flight, over 100
people—mostly children, the elderly, and the family members who
would not abandon them—were found lying on the ground, dead from
hypothermia, babies in the frozen clutches of their mothers, and
aged couples dead in icy embraces. This massacre had a polarizing
effect on many of the free people of the region. Most Vallenses
believed that the royal reprisal, though monstrous and murderous,
was the result of the rash actions of the militant freemen. Others,
including free traders, believed that the colonists had suffered
because of their unwillingness to defend themselves. They had made
targets of themselves, and they had suffered for it. In the years
that followed the Winter Massacre, the Vallenses had attempted to
persuade the militiamen with whom they had contact to be more
cautious and circumspect in their responses to Aztlani tyranny. “We
do not want to pay for the vengeful notions of freemen honor,” they
would say.

The free militias, on the other hand,
increased their numbers, their training, and their intelligence
gathering. Keeping the memory of the Winter Massacre alive in the
minds of innocent people became one of their greatest recruiting
tools.

There were other incidents and, as time
passed, tensions grew.

The King of Aztlan, from the moment he had
assumed power, desired absolutely to rid himself and his realm of
all heretics and insurgents. He had on many occasions requested,
even
demanded
, his underlings and bannermen to sweep the
Vallenses and all of the free militias from Texas soil.

The king’s decrees did not have the desired
effect for a number of reasons. First, the Vallenses lived in areas
over which it was very difficult to impose rules or laws from
outside. Furthermore, following the collapse, the roads had
degraded (some naturally, others by the willful acts of both rebels
and saints), making travel difficult and unpredictable; and because
most remote villages were hostile to Aztlan, it would have been
nearly impossible to maintain a full-time fort or base so far away
from Aztlani-controlled areas.

Second, the freemen militias patrolled most
of the areas of Central and West Texas that were not directly and
effectively under the active control of Aztlan.

Third, local leaders were not keen to incur
a loss to themselves and their own people. The Vallenses were the
most fruitful producers of food and goods in all of Texas, thus a
ruler was more likely to be immediately concerned with meeting the
needs of his people than obeying a distant King. Oftentimes the
belly trumps the heart.

In many ways, the world had returned to what
most people had once believed were the idyllic and romantic days of
kings and knights. However, once it became real, the romance was
harder to appreciate. Still, many saw it as an act of God, who had
hewn down the weeds and brambles (the deceitfulness of riches and
the cares of the world) that choked out the Word and the way God
would have men live.

Some of the same people who had once
programmed computers, sold cars, or built shopping malls now plowed
fields, picked cotton, and hand-dug their own root cellars.

So much of the old world had been an edifice
built on shifting sand. Like an onion, technology had been layered
upon technology until only a handful of people actually knew how
anything really worked. People made their lives increasingly
dependent on a structure that was less and less reliable and
destined to crash. The amount of raw materials needed to maintain
the most critical technologies on which the entirety of the
advanced world balanced so dangerously was mind-boggling.

Prior to the collapse, the whole world could
be shaken by what were, by historical standards, relatively minor
natural (or unnatural) disasters. In their ignorance, people shut
their eyes to the perilous condition of the entire system, ignoring
the signs of the impending systemic collapse.

Like Rome and Ancient Greece before it, the
Western lifestyle, coveted by the entire world, had created a very
productive system (one that was both enviable and unviable). The
system was unsustainable, as it was reliant on an increasing number
of consumers, while a very small and ever shrinking number of
people, using ever more advanced (and therefore tenuous) technology
and machines, provided for most of the means of life, living, and
survival.

New wonderments, gadgets and entertainment
devices appeared daily, as if by magic, to keep the people
stupefied and working mindlessly at highly specialized tasks in
order to be able to afford a “dream” concocted for them in the
boardrooms of large corporations and in the advertising offices of
Madison Avenue. The world had become a cult of dependency, and the
deception was so complete and so overwhelming that to question it
was considered de-facto proof of insanity.

In the end of the old world, nobody was
responsible, yet everyone was complicit. The collapse was as
inevitable as the arrival of a new morning. Almost everybody
died.