Obey to be Free

I spend days in silence. Or rather, I am allowed silence. I do nothing, and I am treated like the most delicate and beautiful of dolls. I am bathed in rosewater and anointed with lavender rosewater. I am clad in their finest linens and softest silks. I rest in a bed of wildflowers and furs.

They kept bringing me food. Enticing meats and tender stewed vegetables and soft white bread. Foods I used to dream of when I lay in the Dungeon. Now I dream of killing them all, one by one, again and again. I am reminded of the poisoned food that they gave me, the meal that drove me to blind and mindless murder. The last supper that drove Amparo and I to madness.

Many monks and nuns came to me to speak of many things. They appeared to be kind, dutiful people. They each gave their names. Isabel. Jibril. Alexos. Eldara. Alsonso. Grigorio. Etcetera. They were all different; young, old, human, demihuman, male, female, worldly, scholarly. Etcetera. Quickly I realized they were looking to elicit any sort of reaction from me. Something for me to attach to. An angle into my soul. If I had been a normal child, I most certainly would’ve been seduced by their sudden kindness. A normal person, nevermind a child, cannot square the round hole of hatred being met with kindness. It drives them to re-evaluate their hatred, to even forgive. It was unfortunate for them that I had already been driven mad.

Loathing and scorn replaced all the blood flowing through my veins and I would've killed on the first day, if not for Missol. That huge woman was always present whenever a servant or holy person came to visit, and always she loomed like a loaded gun. For all my levels and attribute gains, my strange animalistic sense of danger continued to mark Missol as dangerous. It continued to scream that I would not win.

And so I could do nothing but swallow my anger when she would arrive with the servants who tended to me and their holy people would rave at me. I would powerlessly watch as she would post up by the door of my dark room and stare at me. She wouldn’t speak. At most, she would see that I left my food untouched, and would go to eat it in my stead. Other times she would just tell the servants to take the food away and to eat it for themselves, for which I would see some measure of joy and appreciation spread across their faces. Utter revulsion would boil in my entrails whenever I saw that happen.

In my silence they would fill it with the story of their religion and their One True God, revealed to them by the great sage Allistor. His class gave him near omniscience of the past through S-rank History and Religion. He exposed the lies told about the world and reality. I believed that he could go expose his ass to a sharp stick.

Once upon a time, there was nothing, but the True God. Out of divine free will, and implications of boredom, God created souls and spirits to inhabit the aether. Of them, there was the demiurge, who created the physical world of life and matter. However, he did not wish to rule over a world of inert stone and so the Deceiver conceived of a plan. They would trick all their fellow spirits into bodies, over whom the Demiurge would then rule.

So it came to be that by promise and by lies the souls entered bodies, becoming the animals, the plants and humans. To keep them shackled the Deceiver used the system of attributes and class to divide people and to forever tickle their greed for more power. It then tricked the Deceiver into dividing itself into countless pieces after which the Deceiver hid them away in the dark of the Dungeons. Thus, the dystopia of the world is made by the hands of God and men.

The True God could not intervene, in part because it granted free will to the spirits to make their own mistakes, but also because the world was not made to handle its raw majesty. The True God would shatter the flesh and the fragile soul within, if it deigned to try and free them itself. And so the True God was forced to work in mysterious ways to persuade humanity in casting off their chains. That chance came with the great sage Allistor, and so the Stone Solari were born.

This broke sharply with the orthodoxy they assumed I ought to know as an inhabitant of this shithole. They referred to the God of Souls as the ‘Deceiver’ and the ‘false one,’ while the God of Bodies was the ‘Demiurge’. The various holy people who passed by my bed gave their own views on how the world would end, which surprised me. I didn't expect some psychotic death cult to have such a flexible view of how the end would, or ought, to come. Or maybe there was a canon way to kill false gods, and these were merely heresies of a heresy.

Some spoke of harnessing the might of the Demiurge's hidden corpse to destroy the Deceiver. With their new found power taken from both gods, this Chosen ought not to have their brains blown out by merely talking to the True God. In doing so, God could once again communicate with the world and its peoples. This Chosen one, this Prophet, could be me, they keep repeating.

Just as many maintain a vision of the chosen one going to all the Dungeons to absorb the fallen Demiurge, who would then go to kick the Deceiver's ass and achieve the same result. A few said that they need to release the Demiurge so that the two evil Gods could destroy one another. Once this was done, God could create new replacements. Or that we would have the opportunity to harness their powers for our own.

I stopped paying attention after the nun, Helvyre, came to me on the fourth day. Unlike the others, she brought a book that I could not read, and described as being a copy of the hidden scriptures of the Solari. She spoke endlessly on who and what it meant to be Chosen. Because I survived, I was Chosen. They were adamant that the corollary did not apply, that I did not survive because I was chosen. They denied divine right, or rather, they rebelled against it. By their theological theory, human souls were actually spiritual beings on par with the evil Gods, and are only imprisoned in flesh due to the deceptions of the Demiurge and the Deceiver.

I stopped paying attention because I realized they were all absolute lunatics.

They were just like one of those doomsday cults from earth. A bunch of psychopaths dressing up their mass murders and mass suicides as a mission from God. At least on earth, there was a perverse sense that they were onto something. A dying planet and a crumbling empire was fertile ground for the end of the world. All my life we’d stood on the precipice of a coming apocalypse, waiting for revelation to unfold, for modern society to collapse and for the curtain to be finally drawn back. Years, decades even, of watching the slow death of everything we knew and loved, had primed us all for a reckoning. In that type of situation, I could only carry a small flame of envy for those fanatics, because at least they had something to look forward to, after the end.

Maybe the end of the world was approaching this place too, I didn’t know, and I didn’t care to know. I decided that on the seventh night I ought to flee.

On the seventh day, they brought Javier to see me. Still blind, but now able to walk, he moved with all the grace and confidence of someone who saw too much. A darkness loomed over him.

"It is good to see that you are alive, Loiel, but I fear your health could be better." He said, carrying in a tray of soup. Noticing my apprehension, he took a sip, and showed no symptoms. "Please, eat as a favor for me."

"What do you want." I demanded, not asking, as I took a spoon and had my first meal in a week. It tasted like sewage.

"I came here to see how you are. And I wanted to congratulate you." He said, sitting on my bed. "You should be proud, Loiel. You are the most powerful Chosen out of all of us."

"Why is that?"

"Because of how many people laid their lives down for you."

"What? How many?"

"Before this, the strongest chosen had only a thousand souls, but you have more than five thousand."

"F-five thousand?" That number was insane. Staggering. No, there couldn’t have been that many there. That must be a lie. That was the size of my high school. There were five thousand children there. I went to school with five thousand children. I saw them all lined up on the PE field for the school picture every year.

Javier continued to talk, as if it were remarkable, but natural. It only drove me further into crisis. I only snapped back to the conversation when he said, "I’ve become Chosen too."

"How many people, Javier?" I asked. Please, let there be few. Let there be none.

"They were the last ones to be saved from the war. Not many remained.”

"How many?"

"Five hundred." He said, struggling under the weight of his own words, "I can see so clearly now, I don’t need eyes anymore. It’s only for a few moments, but I see the future. My class even changed to Prophet! I haven’t tried to see if I can change the future, though"

"How do these monsters have access to so many people? Who is letting this happen?"

"There is a war. There’s been a war for the past five years. Whole towns and villages are left as scars on the earth. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of refugees. Maybe beyond counting, honestly. I was one of them, and you most likely were one of them too. The monastery takes them in, and they die for something, instead of dying for nothing."

"Release me." I said, unable to continue eating. "You said that the Stone Solari would release me. I still have the slave mark. I am still a slave."

"It’s not that simple, Loiel."

"You’re smart, simplify it."

"At the end of the Soul Mantle ritual, you ran amok." Missol said, interrupting from her corner, "It took everything we had to subdue you and keep you from killing anyone else. It took the slave mark. Even then, you powered through it. We had to resort to powerful spells that should’ve killed you. But you have the troubling ability to not die."

"Remove it now. I am awake, and I am clear minded." I said.

"Removing that thing is excruciating in the extreme. The process is known to drive the stronger races, such as Goliaths, Orcs or Therians into a frenzy that leads them to kill everything around them. At least with lesser creatures, like humans, they merely pass out. The truth is that you are dangerous, bear cub. We cannot risk a danger to the realm wandering around without a drop of insurance."

"So then, I am still a slave." I said, instantly recognizing it as a lie. My Class Features showed that I now had -Pain is Meaningless to Me. That thing cannot hurt me. I would not go mad. "And I will remain a slave."

"No, that’s not true. I’m sure once you’re better, once things are better, we can remove it." Javier said."That’s a lie, isn’t it Senora Missol?"

"Depends on you." She said, drawing a rod from the darkness of her cloak and pointing it at me. "Eat."

I felt my body suddenly overridden, as a thought, a compulsion, dug into my brain. I tried to resist it, fight it with all of my being. I was no longer in control of my body. All of my autonomy had vanished. I brought the spoon to my lips and ate.

"If you can prove your loyalty and obedience, then we will take off the collar." Missol said, storing the rod away. "That is how a tamer trains a wild animal."

"Senora Missol, that is cruel! Apologize, immediately!" Javier yelled.

The woman shrugged, as if it were no concern of hers. "I’ve had enough of giving her carrots. She needs a stick."

"Didn’t you see that things would play out like this, Javier?" I asked after downing the bowl in moments. It hurt to be so full, but it proved a theory. With vague orders, I still had some autonomy in deciding how to operate.

"No!" He shot back, only to meekly pause and answer, "Yes."

"You couldn’t do anything to stop it, could you? You saw the future, and you couldn’t change it.’ I said, still eating against my will "On the orders of your masters, you participated in the slaughter of hundreds of people. You’re a slave, Javier. As much a slave as me."

"No, I am a Chosen Prophet of the Stone Solari, and you are a comrade. Not a slave." Javier said, "True, I cannot change the future, but we are not slaves. We make our choices."

"Yes, I must choose to obey in order to be free."