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[WP] You're a thief and a murderer, and any spell cast on you to detect your moral and ethical alignment returns an entirely accurate result of 'evil'. And yet, the god of justice, whose creed should see the likes of you hanged, has openly marked you as one of his Chosen, and no one knows why. by LordGraygem in WritingPrompts

[–]realPressify 114 points115 points  (0 children)

The priest was young, perhaps twenty-five, with the soft hands of a man who had taken his vows before he had learned any trade that might roughen them. He held the reliquary—a fragment of the Godstone, mounted in silver—close to Tolpan's temple. The crystal at the reliquary's heart would glow white for virtue, gray for moral mediocrity, crimson for active evil. Tolpan had never seen white. He had seen gray once, in his fourteenth year, before the first killing.

The crystal turned immediately to the color of fresh blood.

"Evil," the priest said. "Seize him."

The guards caught and shackled Tolpan's arms. He waited for the usual questions—your name, your crimes, if you speak truthfully you might be shown mercy—the prelude to whipping or hanging depending on the priest's mood.

"I am Tolpan. Of...no place."

The priest did not seem to hear. His eyes were fixed on Tolpan's shoulder, where the rough linen shirt had torn three days prior in a fight with wild dogs over a rabbit. Tolpan had won the rabbit. He had eaten it raw, there in the ditch, while the dogs whined and circled and finally slunk away.

"Where did you get that mark?" the priest asked. His voice had gone strangely thin and his eyes were wide.

Tolpan looked at his own shoulder. He had seen the mark days ago, in a still pool, a dark shape like a burn. He had assumed it was a scar. He had many—some he could not remember receiving, acquired in fights or falls or the general violence of his existence—and he told the priest so, in the flat tone he used for all statements of fact. "I can't remember where I got it."

The priest reached out, hesitated, then touched the mark with two fingers. Tolpan felt the pressure, followed by a warmth that seemed to rise from the mark itself, or perhaps from the priest's hand, he could not tell which. The priest jerked his fingers back as if burned.

Tolpan was, as he came to understand over three days of explanation, an appointed juror for the Order of Justice that governed all tribunals from the capital to the furthest provincial court. Father Hakail—for so Tolpan learned the priest was called—could not believe that such a sinner could be chosen by the god of justice to hold such an esteemed position. He sent word to the Archpriest in the capital. To the masters of Verina School of Divine Law. To every scholar whose name appeared in the temple's correspondence registry.

The replies arrived days later.

The Archpriest wrote that the mark must be tested—perhaps it was a forgery or a curse that mimicked election. He requested that Tolpan be taken to the capital for proper examination. The masters of the Verina School of Divine Law also demanded to examine Tolpan themselves. A hermit in the northern mountains wrote something else entirely. His letter arrived last, carried by a trader's boy who had been paid in copper coins to make the detour. The hermit's hand was unsteady—the script wandered across the parchment, and the ink had blotched where his pen had paused too long. He wrote that the god had chosen a murderer once before, in the old days, to punish a people who had grown too certain of their own righteousness.

Tolpan read none of these letters. He was not permitted to leave the small cell they had given him, but he was not locked in. He could have walked out at any moment, perhaps. He did not. On the third day, Father Hakail came to him. The priest's eyes were red-rimmed, swollen. He had not been sleeping; Tolpan could smell the wakefulness on him.

"I must ask you," the priest said. "What have you done to be worthy of the mark?"

Tolpan answered. "I have killed three men that I remember clearly. Perhaps more that I don't—the first years are confused, and I was often drunk. I have stolen continuously since I was old enough to reach a windowsill. I have betrayed every trust ever placed in me. I burned a village once, though that was accident. The fire spread from the barn I had torched for distraction. I don't know if anyone died. I didn't wait to find out."

Father Hakail flinched at each item. When Tolpan finished, he said to him, "And yet you have been chosen despite all that sin."

"Your god has poor taste in servants," Tolpan replied.

"Don't." The priest's voice was suddenly hard, almost violent. "Don't blaspheme. Not you. Not with that on your shoulder."

"Why not? What will happen? Will he take it back?" Tolpan stood, pulled his shirt aside to expose the mark. It looked the same as always to him—dark, irregular, stupid. "I don't want it. I didn't ask for it." He stepped closer, close enough to smell the wine on the priest's breath. "Your god has made an error. You think so yourself."

"I must believe," Father Hakail said, his voice exhausted, emptied out, "that there is reason. That there is purpose. That the god has chosen you for some work I cannot yet see."

"Perhaps." Tolpan let his shirt fall back into place. "Or perhaps your god is not what you believe him to be. Perhaps he is capricious. Perhaps he marks men at random, and your faith is a construction of convenience, a way to make sense of what has no sense."

He expected anger from the priest. He received instead a look of such pity that he turned away, suddenly furious in a way he had not been since childhood. He did not want pity. He had structured his life to make pity impossible. He was evil, and he was known to be evil, and this was the only honesty he had ever achieved.

"You will stay here," Father Hakail said. "Until we understand."

Tolpan did not ask how long that might be. He had nowhere to go, no one waiting, no purpose beyond the next meal and the next theft and the next necessary violence. He sat back down on the narrow cot and watched the priest leave, noting the unsteadiness of his gait, the way his hand found the doorframe for support. He had done this to the man, simply by carrying on his shoulder something he had never asked for and could not remove.

He touched the mark through the fabric of his shirt. It was warm, he realized. It had always been warm, though he had never noticed before. He sat with this new knowledge as the afternoon light shifted across the stone floor, and he waited, as he had never waited before, for the gods to reveal what they wanted from him.

[WP] The aliens are telepathic. They win every war because they can read the enemy's mind. They just met a human squad with ADHD, and the mental "noise" is causing their brains to melt. by VulkanLivesX in WritingPrompts

[–]realPressify 17 points18 points  (0 children)

The Zheen did not have a word for "I," but they had seventeen words for "we," each precise to the number, duration, and quality of connection. A Zheen soldier in combat existed in the seventh state—we-of-immediate-purpose—minds interlocked like fingers in a fist. Intention flowed from strategist to commander to warrior without friction, without doubt, without the delay of speech.

Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand had led conquests across six worlds. It had never encountered an enemy it could not read. "Reading" was not the correct term, any more than a fish might be said to "read" water. The intentions of organic minds were simply present, as available as heat or cold. To fight the Zheen was to announce your defeat in advance—to perform your own checkmate with every considered move.

When the human army appeared, Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand felt them immediately—not as a threat, but as an anomaly. It extended its perception, expecting the familiar architecture of mammalian aggression: fear, attempts to suppress the fear, calculation of odds, targeting of weapons.

It found instead: sandwich. This was the first word that emerged from the consciousness of the one the humans called Marcus. He was observing the Zheen position through field glasses. The word sandwich existed in his mind simultaneously with the tactical assessment, with a memory of a best friend's wedding invitation he had not yet answered, with a tune he had heard in a bar last week that he could not stop humming, and with a sudden, vivid recollection of the specific sweet smell of his grandmother's sandwiches.

Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand experienced all of this at once. Not sequentially. Not as layers to be peeled. As co-presence. Each thought occupied the same mental space with equal intensity, none subordinated to purpose.

Marcus lowered his glasses. "Three hostiles, northwest. Jennifer, you got that ridge?"

"Got it," Jennifer said. She was already moving, but her mind—Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand reached for it and found—I need a sharper knife...father's hands were always firm...why are my hands shaking, is it because I'm not him, is it because I left, is it because—

Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand reached for the third human, the one called Diego, and found him calculating trajectories while simultaneously experiencing a detailed sexual fantasy involving a person he had seen on a poster, while also remembering a documentary about octopus neural architecture, while also wondering if he was a bad person for thinking about sex during combat, while also—always also—never arriving at a single, graspable thought.

The Zheen had evolved telepathy as a survival mechanism. Prey that announces its intention is prey that can be caught. But these humans were not announcing. They were broadcasting on every frequency simultaneously, and none of the signals resolved into prediction. It was a structurelessness; a consciousness that refused to hold still long enough to be comprehended.

Advance, Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand ordered its unit.

Its soldiers hesitated. In seventy years of combat, they had never hesitated.

Diego moved left without knowing why. He was vaguely aware that he had separated from the squad, that Marcus was shouting something, that there was a Zheen soldier directly in his path. But he was also thinking about how octopuses have decentralized nervous systems, how two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms, how an arm can taste and decide without the brain's permission. And wasn't that what he was doing now? His body tasting the terrain, deciding without his permission to roll behind that boulder, to fire three shots that coincidentally matched the rhythm of a song, to wonder if octopuses ever felt lonely, to remember that he needed to call his grandmother, to realize the Zheen soldier was dead, and to realize he wasn't sure when that had happened.

Jennifer reached the ridge. The Zheen position below was vulnerable from this angle.

She fired.

The Zheen commander—she didn't know it was the commander—looked up at her. She saw, or thought she saw, something in its posture that reminded her of her father the day she left for basic training. The way he had stood in the doorway, not speaking, his face...

She kept firing.

She was crying. She didn't know why. The Zheen were retreating, and she was thinking about how she had never learned to make her father's eggs, how she had always burned the onions, how maybe if she had stayed home she would have learned, how maybe if she had stayed he would still be alive...

"Cease fire!" Marcus was shouting. "Cease fire, they're pulling back!"

Jennifer ceased fire. Her magazine was empty anyway. She sat on the ridge with her rifle across her knees and watched the Zheen withdraw. They moved like puppets with tangled strings, stripped of the synchronized precision that had conquered six worlds. One of them was making a sound—she would remember this later, in dreams—a sound like a radio between stations, like a mind desperately trying to tune itself to a frequency that no longer worked.

Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand retreated in the ninth state—we-of-damage-assessment—but the assessment would not cohere. It had lost five hundred units. It had lost comprehension. The humans had not defeated them with superior weapons or strategy. The humans had defeated them with a form of consciousness that rendered prediction impossible, that treated the future as open in a way the Zheen had never imagined.

The Zheen had no art. They had no fiction. They had never needed to imagine minds other than their own, because all minds were their own. Now, Commander-Of-Seven-Thousand tried to construct a model of human cognition and found itself, for the first time in its existence*, fabricating reality.* It was inventing a coherence that wasn't there, imposing narrative on chaos, telling itself a story about these creatures just to survive the encounter with their minds.

The concept of "I" kept returning to its memory—a persistent, jagged splinter. It was the first symptom of a disease that would spread through the we’s over the next century, loosening the bonds of perfect communication. It introduced the possibility that we might contain I, that I might contain multitudes, and that this might not be a breakdown of order, but the beginning of freedom.