>>520811820
>The Fall and the Reckoning

Our Visigoth rose beneath Alaric, not out of chaos but out of refusal. Rome, fat with its own virtue, had turned its laws against the old gods — the fires that once made it strong.
Alaric sought reason first; he came to the gates not as a raider, but as a negotiator. Yet each time, the Christian lords turned away, blind to the storm they were calling down.
When the gates finally fell, it was not vengeance — it was balance restored.

From those ashes, our people wandered eastward. Some served the Byzantine emperors, who in their silks and mosaics had learned a harsher wisdom: that empire cannot live on creed alone.
They let the northern warriors keep their rites — the old oaths, the toasts to the unseen powers — for they knew that devotion, in any tongue, was strength.
In the Book of Ceremonies, their own scribes recorded it: the mingling of Greek and Gothic, of cross and rune, all beneath one roof.

Byzantium endured where Rome collapsed because it remembered what Rome had forgotten — that faith without roots is a flame without oil. And so the empire bent, and in bending, survived.

This is the quiet truth beneath the noise of centuries:
> Christianity did not conquer our gods; it fed upon their endurance.
Without our people — without the old strength, the discipline, the reverence for what is unseen — its temples would have crumbled into dust long ago.