mcahogarth

Meta-Conversations: Taming

Added 2024-09-23 12:00:08 +0000 UTC

“Me? Tame Kherishdar?” Tsevet’s laugh ripples, but like music on the verge of cacophony. “I’m hardly less wild than it is. Whyever would I want to tame it? Render it clawless and vulnerable? No! Never!”

I hold up my hands. “Apologies, Eker.”

“Yes. You owed one for that. Tame it!” He is still simmering with it: mockery, outrage, mirth. “Make it less vital! What a sin. What would we be without our passions? What good would living do us? A nation of obedient slaves, the way you people first imagined us. The spirit beaten out of us. No, aunerai. I did not tame Kherishdar. I freed it. From the stranglehold of countless, erratic, useless laws that did not serve us. One master, not thousands.”

“Is that freedom?” I ask, careful.

“One master can love you,” Tsevet says. “A thousand heartless paper laws? Are both cruel and capricious. They leave you at the whim of a stranger’s interpretation of them.”

“Some would say—” I stop and continue, more sure of myself because I catch a glimpse, hear voices. “Some did say, when you began this, that they are now at the whim of a different stranger’s interpretation of the law, and a worser one because he has Thirukedi’s imprimatur, and so, every license.”

Tsevet leans toward me, and his weirdling eyes are laser-focused on mine, glassy, damaged, piercing. “And they were wrong. Because as you know intimately, Shame is never a stranger. He loves each and every sinner. He is father and lover as well as judge. And your welfare is his aim.”

“And Kherishdar’s,” I say.

“It is the same… or it is excised.” He leans back, baring his teeth at me. Not quite a grin, that. “You know that too.”

“And did you do a great deal of excising, servant of Shame?”

“Keep asking,” he says, “and find out.”