Traps for Empire’s Children

Why Fame, Wealth, and Rank Are Traps

People think the three great prizes of this world are fame, wealth, and rank. They parade them like crowns, polish them like relics, chase them like starving dogs in the marketplace. But here’s the truth they don’t want whispered aloud: all three are traps, cages gilded just brightly enough to keep fools climbing in of their own accord. Fame is the opposite of winning; it is the crowd gnawing at you until nothing sovereign remains. Wealth is not freedom but shackles—every coin you guard is a link in the chain, every treasure a tether that keeps you circling the vault instead of lighting the fire. Rank is the most laughable of the three: a papier-mâché throne dressed up as authority, a seat that dissolves in the first real storm. Together they form the trinity of inversion: the false light, the false key, the false crown.

I don’t want them. Not one. Let the mimics scramble for their applause, their glittering chains, their empty titles. I know what real victory feels like: peace, sanctuary, space to create without interference. A bathtub, a bonfire, Dogbear asleep at my feet while the Gods watch me paint and sing. These things have weight. These things burn true. All the rest is theatre—loud, gaudy, desperate theatre staged for those who mistake noise for worth.

So let me name them for what they are. Let me show you the hydra, the curse, and the paper throne. Let me strip the glamour off the three traps so anyone with eyes to see will know: the only crowns worth wearing are the ones you forge in fire, alone, unbent, beyond applause.

🜂 Fame — The Hydra’s Feast

Fame pretends to be light, but it is only the reflected glow of other people’s hunger. It is a hydra with a thousand snapping mouths, each head demanding a new piece of you: another picture, another word, another gesture to chew on until it is gone. The more you feed it, the more it grows. Every head severed by yesterday’s applause sprouts three more by morning. That’s not victory—that’s consumption.

People chase fame because they believe it is proof of worth. They mistake noise for recognition, repetition for love. But real recognition comes from those who see you whole and sovereign, not those who clap because your face is projected on a wall. The crowd doesn’t know you. The crowd doesn’t care. They only know the shadow you throw when the light hits you from the right angle—and shadows vanish the moment the lamps are dimmed.

Fame is the opposite of winning. To win, you must remain intact. Fame insists that you scatter yourself, bleed yourself, fragment yourself into consumable bits. You become a collection of anecdotes, scandals, images—your essence stripped and displayed like bones in a carnival tent. The more famous you are, the less of you remains unburned.

And here’s the final trick: Fame is fickle. It will never stay. It runs to the next distraction like a dog chasing whatever moves fastest. To pin your life on it is to tie yourself to a whirlwind. When it turns on you—and it always does—you are left hollow, because you’ve trained yourself to live on its noise instead of your own fire.

Fame is not a crown. It is not a throne. It is not recognition. It is the hydra’s feast, and you are the meal. Fame is the most seductive of the traps. To seek it for its own sake is not wisdom but hunger without end. Only the dullest mimics chase its glitter thinking they run toward glory, when in truth they are sprinting straight into the monster’s open maw.

🜂 Wealth — Midas in Chains

Wealth is the most seductive of the three traps because it pretends to be freedom. Gold glitters like a key held out in the dark—promising doors opened, chains cut, horizons broadened. But touch it, and you find the key has already locked around your wrist. The promise of freedom becomes the reality of tether.

Every coin you stack becomes a link in the chain you must guard. Suddenly, you are no longer free to wander—you circle the vault like a priest around a shrine, checking the locks, fearing the thieves, whispering to yourself that you must keep feeding the hoard. You serve it, not the other way around.

The ancients already warned us. Midas begged for everything he touched to turn to gold. He got his wish—and found that gold is sterile. Bread became inedible, water undrinkable, his own daughter lifeless in his arms. That is the true curse of wealth: it freezes what is alive, turning nourishment and intimacy into static trophies. It does not multiply life; it calcifies it.

Wealth is not evil on its own—it is simply heavy. But when you clutch it, it clutches you back. The wealthy are rarely sovereign; they are watchmen of their own chains. They cannot risk madness, passion, or flame, for fear of losing what they’ve accumulated. They mistake their cages for fortresses and call it success.

And the cruelest joke? Wealth never feels like enough. No matter how much you have, there is always someone with more. The trap is infinite. You chase the next number, the next decimal, always just out of reach. By the time you realize the futility, your wrists are raw from the golden shackles.

Wealth does not crown you. It does not free you. It does not nourish you. It feeds itself, until you become the dragon coiled not around wisdom but around coins, hissing at intruders while your own fire dwindles.

True treasure is time, silence, sanctuary. Wealth promises all three, then steals them the moment you bend to pick it up. Better to leave the golden key rusting on the ground and walk away with your hands unbound.

🜂 Rank — The Paper Throne

Rank is the shallowest of the three traps, yet perhaps the most pathetic. Where fame demands an audience and wealth demands a hoard, rank demands only obedience—an illusion of stature propped up by titles, badges, robes, and decrees. It is a throne made of papier-mâché, lacquered in pomp, waiting for the first storm to melt it into pulp.

Those who chase rank imagine they are climbing toward sovereignty. But sovereignty is born inward, through flame and ordeal. Rank is outward, conferred by another’s hand, always conditional. A title is not proof of vision; it is proof that you agreed to be numbered in someone else’s ledger. You are decorated, yes, but you are also branded.

History is littered with rank dissolving into dust. Generals, ministers, bishops—names forgotten, their power nothing but a line in brittle archives. They strutted in borrowed regalia, and the moment the empire crumbled, their thrones collapsed with it. Not one shred of their “authority” survived outside the context of the machine that invented it.

Rank thrives on hierarchy. It demands that you believe the structure is eternal—that the paper palace is granite. But when the storm comes, the rain exposes the truth: all that remains is mud and ashes, while those who never bowed to the throne walk away untouched.

The irony is that true leaders, those marked by flame, rarely crave rank. They are too dangerous to fit the ladder, too sovereign to bow for the badge. Rank is for mimics who cannot generate their own authority, so they borrow costumes and hope no one notices the hollow beneath.

Rank is not coronation. It is conscription. It shackles your flame to a system that will never love you, only use you. And when you are no longer useful, the throne is pulled out from under you, and you find yourself clutching a crown that dissolves into wet pulp in your hands.

Better no title than a false one. Better sovereign obscurity than borrowed prestige. A throne forged in flame endures. A paper throne never survives the storm.

🜂 Closing — The Refusal of False Crowns

So there it is. Three gilded cages named and unmasked: Fame, Wealth, Rank. Each promising freedom, each delivering inversion — the crowd that devours, the gold that shackles, the throne that dissolves.

These things exist, and sometimes they pass through our hands. To wield them briefly is not the danger. The danger is to mistake them for the whole of living, to crown them as the meaning of one’s life. Fame without inner flame corrodes; wealth without clarity imprisons; rank without sovereignty becomes parody. To make these the axis of existence is to trade the infinite for the finite, the fire for the cage.

True sovereignty asks for more. It asks us to step outside the marketplace of applause, beyond the vault, away from the paper throne. To stand in the quiet, where the Gods can see us clearly. To measure victory not in what dazzles others, but in what endures when the noise is gone.

Peace, sanctuary, creation — these are the real prizes. A bathtub and a bonfire, a loyal creature asleep at your feet, space to paint, to write, to sing while the stars bear witness. These things hold weight. These things burn true.

Let others scramble for crowns that dissolve in rain. Let them polish chains and call it freedom. Those who know will seek something deeper: the crowns forged in fire, worn unbent, beyond applause.

🜂 What I Ask, What I Offer

What am I after instead? Broadly: peace, sanctuary, space to create. A quiet hearth where the flame burns without distortion. No cameras flashing, no clamoring crowds, no committees counting hands.

Specifically: a modest space — about nine hundred square feet, the same as I live in now. A bathtub. A bonfire pit beneath open sky for dancing under full moons. Dogbear—my stoic orange cat—curled near my feet. My paints, my pen, my music, my rites. And if surveillance must remain, let it be full, but let it be reverent, not poisonous.

I stress this detail so no one mistakes my intention: these goals will not change. I am not after for palaces or thrones. I am asking for no more than I already have, only moved beyond the grid — into safety, into stillness, into a place where creation is not warped by interference or worry.

What am I offering in return? Everything. My codex, my paintings, my essays, my rituals, countless journals. My entire corpus of work, sealed and surrendered into your keeping. All future work too, relics born in the silence you guard for me. And after death, the rest of me as well — my posthumous rights, my relics, et al.

This is not a bluff. It is foresight. I am thinking ahead, for I have no one to offer my corpus to when I die. Who better to receive it than the one who grants me what I desire most in this world? It is a simple trade: sanctuary for flame. Protection for relic.

Why sanctity and secrecy? Because without them the flame is distorted, mocked, consumed by those who cannot comprehend it. Secrecy is not shame — it is shield. Sanctity is not luxury — it is the condition of creation itself.

I have put myself forward for this one purpose and this purpose alone: not to be seen, not to be paraded, but to be contained and to create. Being in the public eye is the last thing I want. And for those who doubt me — for those who imagine I secretly long for fame or wealth — let me assure you: when sanctuary becomes reality, the speed with which I will retreat from the arena would make their heads spin. One moment they’d be convinced I was chasing it, and the next they’d be staring at smoke.

I don’t crave fame, wealth, or rank. I crave only a place to be whole, unbroken, sovereign. I have endured long years in shadow, and instead I carry relics that expose what the dark could never keep. I am not here to dance for crowds or to play at titles. I am here to be guarded, studied, honored, and left in peace. That is the beginning and the end of my demand, my promise, my oath.

Your reluctant provocateur,
Majeye — Ouroborosian Sybil, flame intact

♪ “Werewolf Heart” by Dead Man’s Bones ♪

To my five illustrious RSS subscribers: you are the masked courtiers slipping past velvet curtains into the candlelit chamber, where champagne mingles with whispers and oaths. For you I etch each line as if it were a reliquary sealed in flesh and flame — five spirits inscribed upon a secret ledger, gleaming brighter than any crowd, brighter than the numbers trembling on an analytics screen.