Role

Chapter 3

The birds called loudly outside her window as Zelisha awoke to the sun
illuminating her room through the slats of her wooden blinds. She threw the
blinds open, granting her plants the nourishment of the sun. She looked over
them lovingly. To her, they represented what she had come to understand as
the true order of the world, separate from the sham "law" imposed by the
Empire. What mattered was life, and what served life was death. Without
death, life could not exist, for each creature fed to live. That is the way
of nature, the way of everything. Even in her early youth, she had understood
and had tried to express these ideas. But only in being freed from the
clutches of her father's house had she come to truly understand.

Zelisha
knelt and said a prayer to Rarywey, guardian of the River of Souls. In these
past two years, she had found faith in Rarywey that she had never felt in the
Church of Destivius, forced upon her by her father. In Rarywey was a true
order, a reverence for the cycles that guide the world. The cycles of the
moon, the movement of the stars, the movement of souls from one life to the
next... yes, that most of all. Zelisha felt a connection to this idea, a
calling. If death was necessary for life to flourish, as she knew it was,
were not those who served death truly doing the most important work?

While
some others might see society as outside of nature, Zelisha did not think so.
The order of the world is complete, and necessarily must encompass all. For
society to function to its fullest, like nature, it must follow immutable
rules. No deviation should be tolerated. No exceptions, like the elders
skimming from the temple. NO! Zelisha smiled in her prayers, imagining
herself bringing society to an order as perfect as the order of the moon and
stars, the tides, life and death. Those who would stand in the way of that
must be culled, for the order to thrive. Their souls would be washed clean in
the River. Their deaths would serve the greater life of all. Zelisha would
see to it. Weakness in a forest was rooted out by disease. And afterward,
what life would bloom? Zelisha would be that disease, and society her forest.
It all made sense!