Bard Billot on the barbarian Brown
Decline and Fall
The wild and potent Visigoths surge through the Gates of the City and lay waste. The citizens have long since given up and lie about in togas stained with wine, moaning and bleating. Alaric the Brown, Chief of the Visigoths, drunk on the blood of hapless Imperial bureaucrats, clambers to the top of the hill. He turns from side to side, surveying the City of Auk from his coign of vantage, as the pleasant boulevards are torched and various non-stationary objects are hauled off by the invaders and locals alike. There remains one last treasure to plunder: the Great Temple of Culture. In tramp the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths and the Vandals and the Huns. Alaric the Brown, Overlord of the Barbarian Horde, sits at the high table and chews loudly on an aged leg of mutton. Lo, the Nymphs of Art flutter beseechingly and the Fauns of Aesthetic Sensibility wither before the cruel gaze of Alaric. "To what purpose do these scribblings serve us?" demands the brutish Philistine King. "A warrior needs only a leg of mutton to chew on and an occasional game of golf." The marble statues are scattered and beheaded, and the fine canvases of the toga-clad cosmopolitans are stomped underfoot by the sneering Goths. And thus it came to pass, as the New Dark Age settled on the charred ruins of the Kingdom in the North.
Victor Billot has previously felt moved to compose Odes for such luminaries as Christopher Luxon, Bishop Brian, and Garrick Tremain.
