Apostasy

In my youth, I refused to acknowledge the utility of anything beyond my own world. The boundaries of that were nothing so grand as the abstract contours of culture, but rather a glacial lake surrounding the island on which my family's monastery stood for uncounted centuries. We were a martial order, devout in our belief that mastery of the spirit came through mastery of the body. Noble families from across Athra (as we call it to this day, for having been a part of Amarr, we disdained the dilution of that name through its extension to the entire planet) sent children to train in our techniques. An anachronism even in ancient times, by the advent of warp drives and jump gates, we were all but forgotten. The children stopped coming, and this suited us, for the interference of others diluted our ascetic traditions.

However, shortly after Amarr enslaved the Minmatar and, more importantly, the Human Endurance Program began, we saw children again: some of the kameira. Control through martial artistry suited these young soldiers, and all junior subigos who trained with us advanced to their final potential. Over time, we began training slaver pups as well, turning the lethal predators into fiercely loyal companions paired with our youths. Though we maintained the facade of isolated purity, and the young among us - such as myself - continued to see no further than our glassy horizon, the kameira had changed us.

We did not abandon our belief in the mastery of body or spirit.

However, rather than look ever more inward for the mysteries of our souls, we began to look outward for the mysteries of all things. The adults would not bring me into contact with this new understanding until my affinity for neurological implants became apparent. I at first refused to consider any such transformation. Some pale joke of "immortality" meant nothing to me, for existing in perpetuity as a sequence of empty husks, tools plugged into nothing more significant than machines (however "mighty" a juvenile soul might perceive such machines to be) surely represented the antithesis of self mastery.

Slowly, my great grandmother inverted this perception of holiness. The very notion of self was a prison. Certainly, to become nothing more than a tool, a circuit between objectives of no lasting significance, represented a pathetic fate. But where might the labyrinth lead, if walked with awareness? Her words did not reach me, then, and I refused to stomach any contention perfection tolerated an external crutch. As each self reflects all, to become all, become one's true self.

It was my observation of the kameira hound masters which changed this belief. The ferocious slavers did not devolve into tools, obediently waiting to leap into the execution of banal instructions, thoughtlessly, time and again - a pitiful existence, unworthy of the true soul. No, at their most effective, master and hound became a new entity. The hound had transformed its master as surely as it had been transformed. So my path through the labyrinth emerged from mist: I would not be a tool of the machine, nor would the machine be a tool of mine.

We would find our common soul, together.