Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Saint of Bright Doors," by Vajra Chandrasekera.
“The Five Unforgivables are the major crimes as defined by your father’s ideological apparatus,” Mother-of-Glory says. She has given this speech so often Fetter knows it by heart, which is the point. “They are declared to be outside the jurisdiction of any regime of restorative or retributive justice. The Five Unforgivables are, in order of severity, matricide; heresy leading to factionalism; the sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening; patricide; and the assassination of the Perfect and Kind. By definition, they cannot be forgiven and cannot be redeemed. That means that if you commit any one of them, the cult will hunt you for the rest of your life, and make your name a curse for generations to come. Your mission is to commit them all. Your father abandoned us. We were unchosen, cast out of his eschatology. We are going to destroy your father’s cult and salt the earth where it falls. Now you say it.”
Even with all this practice, Fetter cannot say if his skill in combat or the use of weapons improves. He eventually becomes accustomed to violence, which, he supposes, was the point in the first place. One day Mother-of-Glory pronounces him ready for the real thing. She packs him a lunch and gives him some money and a knife and a blessing, the words impatient and mumbled because she doesn’t believe in blessings, not even her own. Such things are his father’s territory.
“Remember, son,” Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.”
And Fetter goes out into the world, armed and dangerous and thirteen.
The day your father came to our strange and wonderful island, I was the first to meet him. That was where everything went wrong.
“O monks, know that I could have named my son Glorious Victory, in truth, because he was born with the signs of a great destiny, like I was: he was born to be a prophet or conqueror, one who masters the wheel of the world.
“But I did not name him thus, O monks, and why did I not name him thus? Because when I looked through the flesh of my wife’s distended belly and upon the face of my sleeping son within, I understood that I loved him so dearly that if I allowed it, this love for my only son would bind me tight like a chain and prevent me from reaching my own great destiny, prevent me from bringing peace to the world. So I named him Fetter, for he was the final chain upon me that I had to break before I could ascend to perfection.”
This is how he speaks of us. This is all he ever says in public about you or me, since he broke the chain and walked away.
“I will give you a title and a rank befitting your ancestry and respectful of both lines of your heritage. You could be Luriat’s Saint of Bright Doors. I would have you be guardian of this place. I will teach you how to seal bright doors, to give you power over those that come through. You will gain much knowledge from them. You could heal this city’s fractured power structure by placing yourself at its apex. The Absent King and Absent Queen will bow their absent knees; both presidents already swear fealty to the sun and the moon, and if I were to appoint you my prince regent in the north—”
“No,” Fetter says. It’s through gritted teeth, though he tells himself it is easy.
"You would have the power to undo the wrongs you hate,” the Perfect and Kind says. “You could close the prisons and open the borders. You could defrock the corrupt monks and end the pogroms. You could save lives and hearts and minds. You would soon eclipse the Saint-General and the Saint-Errant in both mundane and supramundane power. Eventually, you would surpass me. I could die at peace, knowing that the Path I’ve made would continue to save this world without me.”
Fetter shakes his head—this vision, this ridiculous vision of himself as a Saint, this thing completely opposed to anything he has ever wanted for himself, which proves that his father doesn’t know him and doesn’t care to, that his father only wants to make him an instrument, and yet, the vision of empowerment and knowledge is still tempting. He imagines himself chosen at last, invested with power and agency beyond his wildest dreams; he imagines a great expansion of his rib cage, bringing the island within his chest, being its gaoler instead of it being his. He imagines a long-held tightness inverted. What could he do with the power, no matter how ill-gotten, how tainted, how compromised, to undo even some of the wrongs of the world? Wouldn’t it be self-indulgence to turn down that chance? In his instinctive refusal, is he not placing his own choice, his assessment of what he can and cannot bear, above the suffering of others—suffering that he could alleviate, or even end?
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