Atonement
From Zaheeda's Journal
Image version available here.
We live in a world with objective good and evil. The gods pass their judgements on the living, and the requirements of a good life are spelled out for us as clear as the blue skies over the Inner Sea. The righteous are to be exalted. The malicious destroyed. The process is simple.
So any priest might tell you.
I believe that life is not -- cannot -- be this simple. The difference between sainthood and diabolic malevolence is not choosing one side and slaughtering the other. One does not become righteous through the deaths of a thousand monsters.
One becomes a monster.
This morning I met a child in Absalom. She was adorable; brown hair, eyes dark like mine, skin weathered from too many days spent enduring cold nights with nothing but a holed blanket. Her arms were thin, her cheeks hollow, and the way she eyed my morning bread broke my heart. So I gave it to her.
I did not do this because I was trying to repent for my failure as a paladin, nor for any other reason than this stranger, this living creature, was hungry. A child of her tender years should not spend their days begging for scraps.
I found her body later that afternoon, murdered for her meager ration. My kindness had killed her.
Am I closer to redemption now than I was? Or am I further away?
I sometimes wonder if Sarenrae is trying to reach me, to sit in my heart as she once did, but I am too afraid to check. I cannot allow myself to feel the things I used to feel, because I would do as I used to do, a path that lead me here.
The world is not a forgiving place for wide eyed idealists.
I have no specific regrets about my life as a Pathfinder, but I have so many doubts, second guesses, hesitations that I cannot go back.
The Diamond City calls for aid and I refuse the call, so the lodge sends other, inexperienced Pathfinders to fight in my stead. They are so young. They have not seen what I've seen. They've not stood toe to toe with the foulest spawns of the pits, stared into their souls and seen the darkness writhing within.
I will be far away from the siege. My ears will hear only the pleasant sound of lyre and harp, my lips tasting fine ale and roast mutton, my hands warmed by a roaring fire.
I will be comfortable as the Silver Crusade's blood splatters on the streets of the Diamond City. I will be unable to hear the screams as fiends carve flesh from bone. I will sit nursing my self-pity in whatever cheap inn I find myself at for the night as my fellows taste blood and mud and rot.
I will imagine it all well enough, though, and that thought is too much for me.
I cannot atone for my failures with a sword. No matter how many devils and demons I may slay, it is water to a drowning man. Atonement is no simple feat, no set of prayers and rituals and tithes to become whole again. Perhaps the darkness within cannot be quelled. Perhaps I am too far gone for forgiveness.
Perhaps the Diamond City is no worse a place to die than here.
-- Zaheeda
