Culture » Architecture
A Form To Outlast Time — A Brief History of Architecture During the Times of the Fae Empire
by Evelynn Kipling, 2036
Published by the unVeiled magazine on behalf of Bauhaus4
An artistic recreation of the ur-brutalist forms of the early Fae Empire, re-designed from recovered archeological material and finished in line with the artist's own artistic interpretation and their own liberties; O. Niemeyer, 1955.
Introduction
When most think of the Fae Empire and its influence on history, its architectural heritage is often shafted as one of the less important parts of its legacy. It's a natural instinct, I feel — after all, the books on the history of the Empire's bloody conquests have far more pages than those dedicated to the merit of its art. It is the slain demigods and broken nations that we consider when we hear of the Twin Queens and their regime — not the way in which their slaves put together stones for the supposed glory of their masters.
Now, however, more than two hundred millennia later, the Empire's violence has disappeared — but its art has survived. Scattered all throughout the world, ruined Fae Empire-era architecture gives us a far more credible testimony to what the times of the Empire actually looked like than the many fairy tales and legends that talk about its wars and romances. Testimony that also holds great significance within the wider context of the times of the Empire and its culture.
It would be easy to outright ignore this part of history, citing it as less than important when compared to the military wound the Empire has inflicted upon the world. But it would also be intellectually dishonest — the Empire has fallen, but the forms it has created as the vessels of its tyrannical zeitgeist remained. How did they manage to survive that long? Why were they constructed like this? And, most importantly of all, what do they truly have to tell us about the formation and eventual collapse of the Fae Empire?
Early History
In the early days, the Fae Empire had a singular, almost banal goal: to conquer the entire world.
Of course, winning a war is not nearly the same as ruling a kingdom. The Twin Tyrants might have held a military advantage over their enemies,[1] but to entirely uproot the old, fluid order of things was a whole different matter entirely. Changing the many cultures of the world to fit the singular form of the Empire, by necessity, took time; time that its Queens spent building their nation from the ground up. It was impossible to govern a state made up of ruins, but it was equally impossible to do so from inside structures which had once belonged to the Empire's enemies. The only logical move then was to construct the Empire's own seats of power. Ones which, by their very design, would send a message to the rest of the world.
To kill two birds with one stone, the artists and slavemasters of the emergent Empire came up with a genius plan.
Back then, the unconquered Fae were still free folk — they lived and died as wild spirits, changing their forms, Names, and lives with just a flick of a hand. They knew no forms and constructed no buildings — because why would they? What use could they possibly have for structures so stagnant and permanent in their nature? What use could a raindrop ever have for a bed, a ray of sunshine for a door, or a wild hare for a roof? What secrets would the forest wind whisper about the floor or the hearth?
Indeed, archeological and cultural evidence suggest that the early Fae refused the human and Yeren ways of construction,[2] instead fully embracing their free and fluid natures. The Fae Empire was the first to change that.
To show the oft-illiterate peoples (why would the breeze ever write down its wisdom?) of the old times that a new order has come, the first palaces brought up to the glory of Mab and her sister were simple. They were monumental shapes, bereft of most decorations and unnecessary additions. Cubes and cuboid shapes were the most fashionable, recovered sites tell us, as were small windows, barely enough to fit the head of a single person. Similarly, the fortresses of the emergent Empire knew little of inclined roofs, or colorful banners, or even of flanks. All were seen as too extravagant for the needs of the sisters.[3]
Through their gigantic, imposing forms — mostly made from unnaturally polished stone — the buildings were meant to relay a simple message: one of strength and integrity beyond time.
It is important to note here that the earliest buildings constructed by the Empire were almost entirely constructed using manual labor.[4] To use magic to bring up its buildings would be, in the Queens' eyes, anathema to their message. What use was conquering a nation that opposed the Twins if they faced no punishment? What would the populace of those lands ever use its able-bodied workers for? If not for back-breaking work, then surely for plotting rebellion.
It is because of this that a grand majority of palaces and cities built during the early days of the Empire were created by slaves. They used materials excavated from the Earth with their own hands, often refined without expertise. With how wide the Empire soon grew to be, though the almost brutalist forms of the Empire could be recognized anywhere, they were never identical. Sites from all over the world paint us a very diverse picture of those structures. As materials (and those who utilized them) always differed between locations, no two settlements were truly alike.[5] Still: in the grand scheme of things, they did remain coherent in their design philosophy.
Though this approach — one which rarely utilized any amount of magic in construction and maintenance — left a majority of the early cities to crumble with time, it also showed the world at the time that the Empire's power was of this world. That it was not merely an invader, but rather a rightful ruler. That, for better or for worse, it was not going anywhere anytime soon.
Height of Power
In the end, the Empire's war — however great and bloody — did not last forever. When the last god bent their knee and the last kingdom fell before the Queens, the Fae Empire succeeded. It had successfully waged war against the whole world and won.[6]
Overnight, the Empire became something new. It was no longer a force to be feared — it was a fact, an unchangeable truth of the universe. One whose perpetuity and power was self-evident through its mere existence; a reality that soon became so obvious that it didn't need to be reinforced by art anymore. The Empire's continued actuality took care of that task, leaving the previously strong and important fortresses it had once built as nothing but monuments to a by-gone era. Monuments which would soon come to be seen as an eyesore against the new magnificence the Empire would construct.
Before we continue, it is important to note that the nature of the Queens' conquest was not one of pure, total war. There were a few peoples which had been persuaded to bend their knee willingly, before the total destruction and inevitable replacement of their previous, unwilling leader could occur.[7] Of course, that persuasion most often came from the sheer overwhelming numbers of the approaching armies, but those who swore fealty and prevented the annihilation of their subjects were very often granted relative mercy by Mab.
Legends tell us that members of the Unseelie Court, her personal confidants and closest allies, were almost exclusively those who greeted Mab with open arms. Amongst songs and poems, we often hear names such as those of Nessilatha, the Golden Twins, Yar'deth and — most importantly for us here — the Horned King and his Ambassador, both rulers of the ancient (and abstruse) Kingdom of Alagadda.[8]
All of these mighty deities were not conquered, legends say; they were welcomed into the Empire. Not quite as equals, of course, but as more than just slaughtered cattle. They were greeted almost like old friends and received with delight — and when they came to the capitals, with them they carried art. Art unlike anything the Empire has ever seen.
The many cultures which would soon become imported to the Empire were great and numerous, but none of them proved to be as grand as the art and literature (however glum) of the morose Alagadda. The customs of the other lands were also something new, but they weren't anything revolutionary. They weren't anything out of this world — but Alagadda was.
Alagadda, on the last threshold of cohesion, was home to a great many techniques and styles which the denizens of the growing Empire had never imagined. Techniques and styles they couldn't have ever imagined — for unlike the rest of its now-subservient kin, Alagadda was not a kingdom. It was a mask.
It's difficult to talk about Alagadda, even today, because its distant location which tethers beyond the edge of comprehension is not something man was really meant to understand. It isn't a concrete culture, one whose history can be traced back and analyzed. It is a cruel reflection of what is, what could have been, and what maybe one day shall be; a mirror against whatever the current and local zeitgeist might represent and resent.[9]
The only thing we can really state for certain, today, is Alagadda's quadruple palette; that red, white, black, and yellow are the only colors which are allowed to exist within the kingdom. Because of this, most of its creations, no matter how familiar they might seem, evade our true perception.
The Fae Empire too was not exempt from this issue. Though the architecture that the Alagadda-inspired Fae artists created was no doubt something its deific monarchs could grasp, today, their ruins are engulfed in thick fogs. Both antimemetic and dreamlike, they evade precise measurements and analysis even by the sharpest of experts.[10] This is why most of the Empire's remnants are just that: barely-comprehensible records, constructed en masse during the times of greatest wealth and now forgotten.
Still, not all has been lost. By looking at the margins, at the borders of the elusive shapes of Alagadda imposed upon large portions of the Empire, experts were able to understand a few things about the architecture that it had inspired.
We know that the dominant form was that of nature, of the leaf and the flower, of vines and butterflies. In a style almost akin to the human art nouveau, these forms focused on movement and dynamism.[11] The role of light was very important to those structures, as we can infer from great windows made from colorful glass, as was the continuity of the buildings.
Nature itself has also found a place among the forms which imitated it. The appearance of the ancient Fernafaun still stands as a monument to all that greenery which the Twin Tyrants would come to cultivate, perhaps so as to appear that they are returning to their roots. No matter the reason, soil analysis and whatever few surviving ancient texts (fully exempt from the issue of the fog!) show us that the Empire soon exploded with bark and branches between its buildings like never before.
Of course — though this issue only affected the richest echelons of society, entirely escaping the still-simple houses the poor masses had lived in — all of these forms remained only yellow, red, black or white. These colors were oft achieved by the incorporation of expensive jewels and minerals into the forms. From rubies to the soon-to-become-fashionable magic conductor of irrilte, the Empire had proven it knew no limit to its avarice and vanity, dabbling in debauchery never before seen.
Were the excessive customs of the Fae royalty influenced by the colors and forms they have chosen to appropriate as their own, making themselves subconsciously more akin to the depraved Alagadda? Was it all an intentional play by the King and his Ambassador, a subtle way to sink reality closer towards their own reach? As with all truths about the Empire, there seems to be no concrete answer; Scholars still debate this issue to this day. Whatever the case, however, the overabundance the Empire began to display had just started. Their lavishness would, in the end, prove humble compared to their future practises.
The Fall
If there's one thing that history teaches us, it's that time is but a wheel[12] — after every day there must inevitably come the sunset, and with it, the night. Indeed: the Empire's reign did not, in the end, last forever. Though the might its rulers had displayed was no doubt great, just like everything, it too was bound to end.
When the civil war began, splitting the Empire into two, the whole world was set aflame.
It is difficult to say anything certain about the conflict between Seelie and Unseelie, about the millenia-long massacres that engulfed the world during the struggle between the now-feuding Sisters. All we know is that it was a bloodbath, one that brought down entire civilizations and their cultural legacies. Because of this, even with the magic-hardening the Empire would practice on its buildings by then, there exists little concrete archeological evidence to show us what these times looked like. Almost all structures that have been brought up during the last eras of the Fae Empire were ultimately leveled, as were its older kin — and those that weren't remained little more than magic-haunted rubble.[10] All historical records of that part of history were forever lost to time.
…Or so we had thought.
When the Veil fell back in 2021, a crucial missing part of the puzzle was revealed to us. It was the mostly-ruined but still-extant palace buried beneath the former SCP Foundation Site-01. The last remaining witness to the Empire, finally shown to the public by Vanguard after more than a century of secrecy, kept up shockingly well despite its age.
Though the building still remained in too poor of a condition to give us a whole, coherent picture, time — or, very possibly, the will of Mab herself — nevertheless kept it a true rosetta stone. We cannot, of course, claim in good intellectual faith that the style the structure shows us accurately reflects the entire incredibly long period of the civil war, especially considering the cultural differences which inevitably must have grown between the two factions. Its form, however, still shows us a fascinating departure from both of the previously-described dominant styles of the Empire.
The building is still a sharp thing, in spite of its damage, one constructed with honed, long, and thin forms. Almost all of the material used in its composition is a black stone of unknown make, reinforced with ancient runes writ in irrilite. Though the palace has certainly shown innovation with its incredibly tall spires and angular walls and slopes, a return to the more traditional style that the Empire had been founded on can also be seen. For all of the palace's novelty, one cannot ignore the almost-brutalist interiors that bear little to no decoration.[13] Though they were no longer banal in their shape, they were certainly not home to many unnecessary decorations or elaborate ornaments. Between the gloomy corridors and sharp, almost spear-like shapes of its towers, it appears as if the building itself was also preparing for war.
Of course, the war it had been built to brace would in the end claim it too, just as it had claimed the rest of its architectural brethren. Whether it was the latest or the oldest structure in that period, we might never know, because those parts of the Fae Empire which were not leveled by the war effort were later mostly cleaned up by the emergent Yeren civilization and its cultural revolution.[14]
Conclusion
With this, our brief look at the history of architecture in the Fae Empire comes to an end. Of course, this article should only be regarded as a primer into this topic for those uninitiated in the field and not as a deep dive into a detailed record of all styles prevalent throughout the Empire aimed at experts. (For a few particularly great examples of the latter, I would personally recommend the collected works of Olivié Gwyneth, the Head Archivist of the Sidhe Lounge, especially her memoirs of paranarcotic-enduced extemporal visions.)
Nevertheless, it is my hope that this work has caught your attention, dear reader, and has persuaded you into diving deeper into the fascinating part of our history that is the examination of the artistic legacy of the Fae Empire. As mentioned before, though we often ignore this part of history, it is precisely the art that shows us the most accurate image of those time. Indeed, just as all art, architecture too is little but a reflection of the current cultural zeitgeist, accurately mirroring the worries and hopes of any given time period — one far more poignant than any sword or axe could ever give us.
One that, if properly learned and understood, might perhaps even help us break the wheel and never again repeat the horrors that the Twins have brought upon the world.
…But that's just wishful thinking.
