Trope-a-Day: Badass Creed

Badass Creed: Not the Imperial motto (that’s “Order, Progress, Liberty”), but more of a simple statement the eldrae, at least, have been using in tight situations – those who are not of one of the various institutions that have one of their own – for a very, very long time: “The Flame, Unconquered!”.

The Flame, of course, is meant symbolically; the soul, the will, qalasír, that ineffable quality – so in a sense, this can be read as another variant on assorted other creeds of variable badassitude used by various people and institutions from place to place and time to time in their culture: “In Death, Unbroken”, “We Do Not Serve”, “Unowned, Unconquered, Undefeated”, etc., etc.

More pointedly, though, the traditional duality/opposition to the Flame in classical philosophy is Entropy, death, chaos, the void, the decay of all things and the inevitable heat death of the universe.  And that “Unconquered”?  In the original Eldraeic, that’s the verb-like predicate, and attached to that, well, Eldraeic has probabilistic tenses for describing future events.  Care to guess what tense that “unconquered” is in?

Future simple certain.