Day 7: The Burning Kubu

During my time with Moth, I had taken on a variety of roles. While I had done what was asked of me then with a conviction that could easily be mistaken for devotion (though the latter may imply a delusional kind of optimism), the truth was that I had not believed myself to be anything like what was asked. Have you ever experienced this as well Reverend? Your position seems to imply it, though I mean no offense. Perhaps the truth is that we all have trouble with the perception of us as ourselves.

Prior to having met Moth, I had been a hoplite sent northward by a conviction that convinces me now was not a mistake. Though I cannot recall why, as that is no longer important, it was the role assigned to me by what I would have once called happenstance. We were to be sent out first to search for those who had gone with the sea, our benefactors were those I had believed to be angels sent by the Paraclete. This position was to be my self and all that implies, yet I’d been awoken by Moth half submerged in the Nerys that had far resembled anything close to the true sea. Taken by the eidolons, my role now was that of shelter. Had I been the armor or the thing that remained inside? I cannot answer that, as many others within my self make claim to it and because all make claim to it, then unanimously it is no one else’s but mine. As far as we can stretch the definition of “mine”, however.

Then was I now Moth’s protector? Certainly I had taken action to defend her yet I cannot recall if it was my decision (that is, the me who talks to you dear Reverend, do try to keep up) or if it was merely something I would have to do eventually. If hypothetically, I was given all of time as we know it to merely exist, would I have just assumed that role in due time? This I wondered, standing beside Moth who had declared a new role for myself. It was that evening following the penitent’s sacrifice, a fire had consumed a kubu, which to my understanding was not an uncommon issue. 

We’d seen it from a distance, yet all merely watched as inside the kubu was a criminal. A Hylic who once had a neighbor. This neighbor, as most of the Hylic are, was not so much different from him. And though all who lived within the Caldera had not owned anything of true value, the prisoner had decided his neighbor to now be undeserving of life. Life that may have very well been considered, no greater than his. As Moth and I were witness to, death had been commonplace to the people of the Caldera yet what caused the criminal his imprisonment was that he claimed himself innocent. Then that was to be his crime, that through his murder, he had claimed himself a right he did not deserve, the right of superiority. So it was decided that he was to be chained within the home of the man he had killed. 

The criminal however, lived in a kubu that had lost its connection to the Pylon. What was the reason for this? All those within the Caldera had the right to venerate the Pylon and receive the Paraclete’s blessing, so why did this one man decide he was unworthy? That is what I believed his crime to be, that he decided himself lesser. While his victim might as well have been the same Hylic who lived in the next kubu (or even the one after that), it was the neighbor who had to die. 

This I considered as Moth said I was to be the judge of this criminal’s life. Should we remain watching the fire or decide that the criminal’s life was worth saving? While I had decided the criminal guilty, I did not desire his death. He had decided himself a criminal, that was the right he could now only afford. He did not have the right to be incinerated in a blaze, likely caused by no particularly important reason at all. So I’d shown myself, my face still greatly scarred and pale, my eye sockets empty. My appearance had not been all that different from the bodies we’d seen as we entered the Caldera. Yet according to Moth, I was now judge and as judge, I entered the burning kubu, covered myself with the automaton’s robes and activated my energy spear. While previously I had used it primarily to eject matter in a way that would prove lethal, if Moth could instantaneously decide myself responsible for the life of another who’s to say I could not have matter absorbed instead?

The criminal who was chained had been taken by smoke. So I, freeing him from his shackles, took him by the hand and pulled the smoke that suffocated him out from his orifices. As I pulled the criminal from the kubu, I declared myself Moth’s justice though I did not myself believe this to be true. Unlike myself, the criminal had chosen his lot in life. I looked back at him whose eyes and mouth expunged the smog of burning corpses, wood and steel —and envied him.

I knew Moth watched from afar, dear Reverend and it should have been around this moment that a few of you missionaries had landed on Ennoia. Our paths are soon to cross in my story it seems, and though I admit my exhaustive efforts to recall my memories to be tiresome, I know I will come to miss our conversations. It is likely that tomorrow, I shall be able to tell you of that event you call the Exaltation.