8/18/357
Had the loveliest birthday picnic with Marisa the other day. I brought along plenty of candles and took her out to that valley to the east for a midnight dinner and to watch the sun rise. Such moments of peace and comfort are about the only thing that keeps me sane.
As it is, knowing I’d have to be my usual cheerful, playful self for it allowed me to banish some of the guilt that’s been haunting me about the scene in the Queen’s Inn. Not all, but enough that I’ve been sleeping again.
I still hope that Her Holiness will see fit to give me a proper penance for the matter, though. I know that I had that problem with both Romana and Caria; when I would confess matters that troubled me, they seemed reluctant to assign penances of sufficient weight. Perhaps it was because I’d already done penance for the mattrs I confessed, but I think that if guilt still troubles a man, it’s a sign his penance was insufficient and he is required to suffer further for proper expiation.
Speaking of expiation, I have been thinking constantly of my Almshouse. The Tenebrae wasn’t entirely wrong; I have been unable to do what I wanted to do with it. It does a fraction of the good it could properly do, were I able to actually invest more time in it directly.
Perhaps it’s time I search again for an overseer, but every time I’ve tried it’s ended in complete failure. I am at my wit’s end on the matter. Why can I not find a commoner who is sincerely concerned with the state of the Southside and not a thief, heretic or mage? To be fair, I can hardly find a member of the gentry or a noble either who fits those criteria. People are content to ignore that massive pit of human suffering that devours all those unlucky enough to fall into its teeth.
Maybe it’s the sheer scope of the problem. I could put my entire fortune into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it; the Crown could probably pour its entire coffers into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it. The problem is in minds and hears conditioned to desperation over histories of cruel years. You can fill people’s bellies, put roofs over their heads and clothes on their back, but that isn’t going to change their pasts. Once you’ve learned morality is a luxury, why should you ever go back to it?
It goes back to penance, too. I don’t think it’s only a fault in me, this feeling that sin clings like tar long after penance has been done. I think that people find it difficult to forget, to forgive the things that they’ve done. If you are damned already, why try to be a good person? The hope that you could, perhaps, be forgiven one day is far more painful than the knowledge that you are not. Better to accept a life without morality, because admitting morality means facing the brutality of what you’ve done.
Or so I gather it goes. Me… the brutality stares me in the face every day. I go to the graveyard and walk among the stones, thinking of those whose death I had a hand in. Maebel Maldrek, Ramil Barrows, Sigrid Latago, Julea Sanguine, Setina Rethvin, Benedictus ab Piuso, Leto Bharani, the scar where Remi leBou lay, Cedany ab Clarke… to some extent I am implicated in every last one of those deaths, and countless more buried without name or marker.
And then there is the grave I dug for the men and women I killed myself. Ended with my own hands, buried with my own hands.
No. It’s not for me, pretending I didn’t do anything wrong. But I can understand the temptation. This work becomes far more palatable if you eschew morality, or reduce it down to black and white. The victims and the villains; the sheep and the wolves.
I fight the urge to reduce it all to that every time I think about it. The dead deserve better.
