The Source of All Sin in The World

The next day, Renard resolves to invite Pleione out for friendly fun.

Best they find something memorably pleasant to do before the party, so as to make the atmosphere between them during it less awkward. But the day of that party is approaching rapidly. Exciting events may rise like daisies in the weeks after it, but to find something suitably thrilling in the short gap before will be rather a challenge.

A simple challenge — just how Renard likes it! Hoho!

Scouring gossip and message boards across the city, Renard finds several goings-on Pleione might enjoy. But his pride in having achieved this fades, as anxiety arises over that ‘might’. Kingslayer, absent any distractions, burns with horrible whispers. You undermine my power with frivolities… A lump lodges in Renard’s throat.

He swallows, shakes his head. He must be bold, muster his courage…

But the fear is great. Hesitating, he finds himself comforted by the thought of inviting Pleione out, rather than actually doing it. Paralysis, though, is forbidden. He ventures to the private library of one of the city’s noblemen — as a prominent local figure, the master allows Renard access, as he allows most scholars — and settles in with a book on Palidan theology.

Honestly, he’s not a great reader. He is soon skimming over the text, not focused, mind wandering.

Much of Palidan mysticism, he knows, revolves around the notion that people’s fates are written in stars. It’s a romantic thought, but also poppycock, at least in the simple terms that he’s always heard it said. Perhaps there is some nuance, though, he has never known to grasp, which could lend credence to the idea…

And by extension, to the idea that reading these fates can divine whether two people will fall in love…

Renard pours over drawings and charts, more focused upon these. Pleione, so the reference notes state, signifies a birth under ‘taurean’ concepts, but specifically under the ‘dove’, and precisely under the ‘mother dove’, who is the one who proliferates. Should he perhaps call her by her name Gayle, rather than this tribal signifier? The mythos of this prevailing star tells that she was a kind eastern matriarch, one with many children, who made valuable things that were small in number become very abundant…

Renard flips back to the charts. There are mathematical formulae that can measure what prevailing stars have influenced an individual, and upon what dimension they have done so, but this requires the date, time, and location of birth. Renard is not certain of these for Pleione. But if he can estimate, then the things that appeal on the ‘romantic’ dimension, or even just the ‘friendship’ dimension may be…

A voice interjects from over Renard’s shoulder. It’s another nobleman who has been studying in this library, and, bored, thought it odd to see Renard here, and became curious as to what he was reading. Seeing that it is esoteric Palidan mysticism, and specifically the exciting sections of it commonly known to deal with romance, he cannot stop himself from lightly razzing Renard.

Renard, embarrassed, tries to hide the book, but it’s too late.

The nobleman expresses his surprise that Renard is consulting such ideas. Though he finds them romantic enough to be interesting, and strange enough to be intriguing, he’d like to offer his own brain as a sounding board for whatever Renard came here to study, first. Heaven knows the headache it would be if one of Lacren’s more important military figures fell too deep into eastern hoodoo and turned into another zealot against snakes.

Renard, confused, questions what snakes have to do with it.

The nobleman, again, is surprised. Taken off-guard by how Renard was legitimately only consulting this foreign mythology for relationship advice, he is torn on how much to tell him. In the end, he does simply say that Palidans regard snakes as evil, to the point of wishing to exterminate all those born in a certain month, because they associate that month with snakes.

Renard is shocked to hear this and rather betrayed. He looks at the book in horror. Surely, the man must be exaggerating…

But the way he shakes his head, so serious and rueful, assures that he is not.

Renard stares paralysed at the book. Struggling to make sense of this news, Renard blurts in frustration what he figures the nobleman means: similar to how lords of Western kingdoms so passionately pit their ‘honour’ and ‘righteousness’ against treachery wherever they may find it, the easterners, too, have a hunger to destroy evil villains. But they do not even regard people for their individual acts when determining this villainy, but rather their inborn association with an arbitrary symbol of an unpleasant animal.

Renard clenches his teeth. For how acerbic a screed he has just said, he deeply desires to forgive the Palidans — rather, to find reason by which he can rationalise such a stance as reasonable, and still accept the general worldview Pleione has been easing him towards as positive and legitimate. The point that most strongly holds this hope is that, by his research and his interactions with Pleione, he does not think the Palidans would assign such a symbol arbitrarily.

At the same time, to consider that there could be good rationale to kill someone purely because of the day they were born, or to regard someone as inherently evil for the same reason, and let himself accept such an idea, would be to enter onto a ferociously dark path.

It is savagery to kill a man for such a reason, says Renard, flipping through the book for reference to this snake-month.

The nobleman, not exactly defending the Palidans, but willing to clarify their thought, informs that it’s because Arsene is a snake.

The book thomps to a stop, landing open on a chart of the night sky and its constellations. There is no chapter devoted to the snake-sign, but it is shown and labelled here, indeed set upon the meridian the Palidans have decided confers astral, symbolic energy to newborns — now that he considers the pictures before him in those terms, somehow it all seems quite shallow and stupid.

‘Arsene is a snake’. It’s an association so banal an infant could make it. The romance drains out of the pages, leaving the tome before him as a mundane lump of ink from a delusionist’s quill set on paper as much as any fiction.

Renard may not be religious, but he does recognise the name Arsene. It is the name of an ancient deity that formerly served the Demiurge, but usurped him to construct Nix, and so severed the surface world from that Demiurge. In the way Renard always heard it, Arsene had flattered the Demiurge away from humanity but towards himself, and though this carried no formal theological backing or even much involved consideration on Renard’s part, he always imagined the Demiurge and Arsene had constructed new planes within Nix, as though establishing fresh boards of a board game, and invested themselves in that instead. Then left that for another — and another, and another, only really caring about themselves and the romantic process of creation.

He imagined that the Demiurge held a nominal affection for the worlds he had abandoned, since they were his creations, and so would not destroy them. Arsene was more lucid about it and recognised they would never return to these shelved worlds, and, as a good servant, gave their inhabitants rationale in the form of his ‘usurpation’ for why they had been left to rot, protecting the esteem of the Demiurge. This is of course all personal thought, but it makes sense to Renard. How else could a figure everyone asserted was all-powerful and all-loving allow himself to die?

To say that someone born under the ‘energy’ of a snake is evil, because Arsene is a snake, and Arsene is evil, indeed requires the assertion that Arsene is evil. Renard has never truly believed that. If anything, the one more responsible for the wrong in the world would be the Demiurge, who left everyone.

But it’s not like Renard can’t understand that, or would call that evil, either. A child cannot always be dependant on its parents — eventually, the parent will leave, and the child must grow by himself into what he will become. Evil is then the product of man, who simply chooses to be evil. But then could the Demiurge not have made man minus the capacity to be evil? Could he not have created a world where hurt or wickedness simply never existed?

Renard is scared, the same way he would be of criticising his parent, of regarding that oversight as just spite or pointlessness.

That fear gives way to a strange kind of hope. For the first time, he wonders if things didn’t go the way he always hazily imagined they did, and if maybe it really is so straightforward that Arsene is just evil — that he was not really the devoted servant Renard fancied him to be, that he did somehow defy the pure intentions of the Demiurge, and that he did, through artifice that Renard cannot understand, kill him and for whatever reason not take his place as the lord of humanity.

But just as much as he can feel hope and perhaps yearning in these thoughts, he is disgusted by the proposition that a whole subset of people exist who deserve to be killed because of their birthday.

The nobleman departs as Renard redoubles his research, brushing off the noble’s invitation to hang out at the upcoming party. Renard pours through books meticulously, hunched over line after line.

It is in the course of this study, as the sun blooms streaks of a new morning outside the dark library windows, that Renard stumbles over the revelations he hadn’t known he was searching for:

Arsene, by his own admission, was not created by the Demiurge.

And soul rot, a phenomenon that only came to effect the world within the past two hundred years, coinciding with the death of the Demiurge, was not simply a natural effect of the Demiurge’s departure, but instated purposefully by Arsene, and was not only instated purposefully — it emanates from him, like a smell.

Arsene, who is not something the Demiurge designed, is the source of soul rot.

The information Renard needs to reach this conclusion is scattered, assembled snippet by snippet across testimonies and off-hand hypotheses from philosophers, shamans, theorists, historians. But these are the points their individual analyses all cohere into, and all basically agree upon.

Renard reels, too stunned to look at the book anymore, as the implications set. Soul rot is not a natural phenomenon of this world, nor its natural state. And if there is a source of it — then, if the link between that source and the land could be severed, or if that source could be destroyed, logically, soul rot could be ended.

Renard jolts to his feet, stricken with the urge to announce this revelation to anybody he can find, that they might understand the importance of what he’s uncovered. Even so, he marches past servants in the hallways as if they are not there, too trapped in his whizzing brain to recognise anything. Even as he exits the building entirely and returns to town in a semblance of his usual routines, all he can think about is this new information.

The Palidans, too — though not conscious, Renard feels the relief that their notions of murdering the snake-born are hopelessly misguided, not intrinsically bloodthirsty, but in fact likely another example of Arsene subverting a legitimate concept into an illegitimate mockery. A human being will never synthesise the blessings of an entity so fundamentally alien into their soul. It’s why people were created in the shape of the Demiurge, not as serpents in the shape of Arsene. They are Demiurge’s children — not Arsene’s — and until they are literally twisted out of their humanity by soul rot, their nature will always reflect that.

Questions do still linger. Why did Arsene instate the rot? Is it a voluntary effect or not? Is his situation one that is difficult, or could be helped? None of that matters. As long as the source of soul rot can be destroyed, none of these questions matter.

Renard had conceived to go out with Pleione today. But now he is too concerned with these thoughts to even possibly pursue that. Struggling to grapple the implications of his discovery, he finds the day soon over and himself soon in bed.