Kattegat doesn’t end when Ragnar dies. Or Bjorn. It ends when the Seer dies.
Seers are these people with pent-up energy. My hunch is that they are people who saw longer patterns. Who yearned to see longer patterns – fundamental drivers of the world and patterns of 1000s of years – as opposed to those who can hardly see beyond their own pains, days, years, and lives.
These are also people who have somehow detached themselves from world affairs. In a way that nothing can affect them.
Yet everything affects them because they finally see things no one else can.
Seers have also made peace with death. They do not fear it nor possess the existential angst to do something other than sit in a chair in an empty room.
These are troubled people because they cannot stop seeing, but they have such calm inside them, they hold storms without speaking a word. Without pulling the strings of the world to benefit them in the short-term.
They could. They could play the game and get absolutely whatever they want for themselves.
But Seers know the worthlessness of things and shallowness of people around them.
Modern Seers, you cannot recognise them beyond that slight tinge of wisdom that they let out.
If Seers see everything, why don’t they tell everyone about the future?
Because no one wants to listen to it. It comes with a flood of connected dots and most minds do not have the capacity or the desire to hold such amounts of information, pain, or even happiness.
“There is no audience”, one of them said.
Another switched off their connection to the world and holed himself up, probably in the Jungles of Madhya Pradesh.
The most powerful solace for a Seer is that the world does not need them or anyone else. It is true. Everything is always in balance. Humans are the only naive species that thinks the world needs some kind of fixing.
The only thing I have yet to see is: what happens when a few of them come together to talk without talking, listen without listening. And just be. I doubt that is a sight that this planet has ever seen. Maybe a handful of times in history.