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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.