Everything fades.
Passion fades. Love fades. Desire fades. Friendship wanes, power wanes. People die. Everything, high and low and everything in between, fades in time. Even time itself will fade, someday. Someday.
Heroism, too, fades. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but it fades, always. Great deeds are forgotten. Names change or are lost. Tales alter in the telling, and eventually, all truth is lost, and there is only legend. And in the face of a new hero, all stories, legends, and tales are forgotten, as the praises of a new hero are sung. Until they, too, fade in time.
Heroism is but a shadow, a dream, an ideal, heroes are distant god figures, to be revered and then forgotten, their tales lost to all but the memories of the very old. And even those pass in time, or are changed to praise the rise of a new idol, a new god.
Times change. Gods are created and pass on. Does God create us, or did we create the gods? Statues crumble and monuments fall. Religions rise and fall; cities are built and forgotten. Peoples prosper and perish. Such is the way of heroes – to be forgotten as our races look forward, and time passes us by, bringing with it a new hero, a new idol, a new city, a new age.
For heroes cannot change, cannot move forward. To be a hero is to be frozen, frozen in the time when the great deed was done, frozen in the image of triumph. To be a hero is to become a statue in time, unable to move, unable to change, unable to forget. For if one changes, then one is no longer in that place of honor. Who would choose to abandon that spotlight willingly? Who would choose to be human rather than an idol, a god – unreachable, untouchable, forgettable. But time passes us, because statues cannot move from the moment in which they are frozen, while all humankind rushes by, hurrying to get to the future, to the new heroes, the new heroism, while we are forgotten. Our statues crumble. Our memories die. We are lost to the past that becomes but a memory, a myth, then nothing.
No past for heroes, no future. Only the moment in which they are a hero, and then are forgotten. Time passes us by, but remember our names before they are lost forever.
Mithros. Thor. Prometheus. Heracles. Jason. Frodo. Aragorn. Rand. Harry.
These are but a few of our names. Remember them. Past heroes need not fade into future. Future need not be forgotten for past. Remember our names, and perhaps we alone will not fade into nothing. Everything fades, but perhaps everything need not fade.
Think. Read. Listen. Remember.
A/N: Just a small ficlet that I thought up randomly in a sort of thoughtful/depressed mood. Not really fan fiction I guess, just something that (I hope) will make you think. I hope you enjoyed it.