On the People of the Third City, and the power of transformative fandom
Warning: self-indulgent rambling, reflection, and hope for writing spurred by the desire for writing that is not present.
I'd been an amateur scholar when it came to Mesoamerican history: just enough to know how much I didn't know. I knew the Third City was Mesoamerican, though I knew not where. I believed, as many, that it referring to a city called Hopelchen (nevermind that Hopelchen was named several centuries after the Third City was supposed to have fallen, and that it was only proposed as a candidate because of the "five wells" sidebar snippet). I personally have interpreted it as Chichen Itza in the past, but I have also heard compelling arguments for Tikal and even perhaps a pre-Nahautl Teotihuacan (and to this day, I still find it amusing, in a frustrating way, how much we know the identities of the Second and Fourth Cities and yet the Third, the one New World city, is still the subject of debate). I knew it was associated with the God-Eaters, and the story of Seeking Mr Eaten's Name.
But as a fan, this was the text that grabbed me first and foremost about the Third City:
Rebels who will not rise
The revolutionaries of the Third City sleep here, fifty-five of them. They would have made their republics in the tomb-colonies. It was not permitted. Their enemies must have hated them, to lay them here to rest where they would never be remembered
- The Catafalquerie, Cave of the Nadir
From this text, interest: what were the revolutionaries of previous Fallen Cities like?
And then, 2016: Election 1894, the first of it's kind. If you chose to back the Jovial Contrarian - and as a revolutionary character, of course Hotshot did - you could choose a Reactionary Tomb-Colonist as your free item for the election. And if you did...
Something old
His bandages run black with ink. Words are scrawled over his wrappings, like the husks of spiders. Not all of it is English. Giddily, he points out choice fragments – "Here, the schematics for a Fourth City catapult we never got to use. This one's the lessons we learned from the Galleries. And here – everything the Contrarian has ever published. I have made a study. This time, for sure." Between the bandages, his dessicated eyes smoulder like spent coals. "Things shall be as they were once and should be again."
Words not all in English? Mentions of the Fourth City weapon "we never got to use"? Evidence on how old this colonist was?
In retrospect, the text was more likely just referring to an old tomb-colonist of the Fifth City. But at the time, to me, it felt like it could point to something else: a rebel who escaped the fate of his colleagues, a revolutionary who continued to fight the Masters and the God-Eaters even long after his city was submerged into lacre.
And from this, Itza Matul was born.
I share the sentiment that the Third City, in canon writing, is almost entirely tied to the God Eaters and Seeking like an albatross around it's neck. What little we get of the one New World city in the Neath, a city from a place whose peoples were horrifically genocided and colonized and thus from which we have enormous holes and gaps in the histories, and it always seems to be related to this one story of betrayal, sacrifice, hunger, and monstrous priest-kings.
I am still not impressed with the idea that the one example of a tomb-republic we have in lore, the same kind of republic as mentioned in the text above, is Tanah-Chook. A Third City tomb-republic, named after a fictional English character whose creator backed at a high enough kickstarter tier.
I have tried my hand at alternatives, using what Yucatec dictionaries and sources I could find that seemed at all reliable for tomb-colony names, people's names, an equivalent to "free citizen". I have tried light speculation on what it might have been like for the people of the Third City, what kind of Neath they might have lived in, how the survivors have adapted as their City was drowned and their peoples displaced and the eventual realization that on the Surface, the place they once called home was overrun centuries later by the colonial empires of Europe. It is not sufficient, but it was what I could contribute.
And all of this is to say...you can do that too. It may not be canon. But it can be something beyond canon. To write in a version of the Neath where the Third City is more than the God-Eaters and the Betrayal, where people lived and struggled as more than just fearful subjects to a monstrous priesthood. And if in the effort to do it justice, you are driven to read more, learn more about the people whose descendants still live in the world, realize how much has been lost and yet how much has not been lost...
I have never regretted realizing I wanted to know more.
They say it's the letters that Helen wrote to Menelaus in the years of her imprisonment. They say it's the letters Raffles wrote about the Cat that never were published. They say it's the last accounts of the last days of the Third City, strung in beads on cord in a code no-one living understands…
