Reviews - Victory City | The StoryGraph

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"Nothing endures, but nothing is meaningless either. We rise, we fall, we rise again, and again we fall. We go on. I too have succeeded and I have also failed. Death is close now. In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat." (p.337)

In these tumultuous times, when our global societies appear to be collapsing, this book offered a somber release from my worries regarding our survival. Empires rise and empires fall. I have lived through many crises and victories during my 23 short years around the Sun. Now I feel with the last generation of Bisnaga who might have sensed collapse brooding under the surface, but felt powerless to do much about it.

Even Pampa Kampana, endowed with the powers of the goddess Pampa, could not save her world. One person, one object, one spell, one God -- none of it is enough to save a nation. Just like the seven walls of Bisnaga, our comfortable security is held up by people's belief in it. When fascism rises and weaponizes fear, like the overwhelming artillery of the allied four sultanates, it can exterminate life in all of its most precious forms. With every right arm swung high up in the air, another straw-stuffed head is marched around our ranks.

This book amplifies the otherwise quiet resignation of my generation. We have realized that we have caught the tail of our society's life cycle, and as such, our own might be cut short. We prevail and act as if there was hope (not unlike Pampa Kampana and Tirumalamba Devi did in the last 20 odd years of the Empire), passively awaiting our premature funeral pyre. Surely some new seeds will root in our ashes, but we won't be there to savor the fruits. Only Pampa Kampana was cursed with a long enough life to see her children die over and over again. After all, she could not use her excess time to defy the unavoidable.

"...in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, no matter how large and imposing -- and even magical -- those things might be." (p. 334)

All we have is each other. Our beginning, our triumphs and tribulations, our end. It's all just other people, with god-like powers or otherwise. We are but components and subjects of the masses. All we can do is our part. Slowly march to the pyre, hand in hand, all together.