Scars of Risenholm

This sleek, small notebook is full of various prayers and observations. Slipped between the hodgepodge are short excerpts of scripture.

Sutra 1: The Five Confrontations

Confronting each Risen is a first and second truth: the truth of their state as a purposefully resurrected being, and the truth of their own transience.

The Risen are brought into the Second Life by the Well, a creation of the Martyrs, for a defined purpose.

They are still held to the same transient, ever-changing nature of reality – confined only for a short time from death, and its parent: change.

Purpose and transience, usually opposed, combine in the Risen-self to give rise to their true spiritual power: choice.

The Risen must choose to climb free of the Well. They must choose to persist in confinement from change. They must choose to act in accordance with the Mission. They must choose why the Mission is vital.

Confronting each Risen is a third and fourth truth: the truth of the emptiness of the Second Life, and the truth of the necessity of its being filled by the Mission.

The Risen are brought forth deprived of past connections, unable to connect themselves to their surroundings or each other, empty of context and of purpose.

Yet the Mission presents itself as the Risen’s only connection to the past, the physical purpose for our resurrection.

Faced with an empty spiritual purpose, the Risen must turn to the physical purpose to fill it. But to use the material to fill a spiritual vessel is like drinking sand, providing weight but no quenching.

The Mission is itself more than physical, but is also spiritual.

Confronting each Risen is a fifth truth: the truth of the Risen-self, and its searching for the spiritual Mission.

Sutra 2: The Risen-Self

The Risen is touched by their awakened brush with the mortal boundary. Freed from the chains of sorrow, the Risen are endowed with an essential but transient nature.

This nature thirsts for purpose, and its vessel for obtaining it is choice.

The Risen chooses to live instead of to die. The Risen chooses to continue the cycle of Rebirth. The Risen chooses to end the cycle of Rebirth. Choice defines the Risen.

The Risen-self is the source of choice, made in inspiration by chance, separate from the self that came before, yet the same: tied in union by memory.

The Risen-self is given by the Well upon the First Rebirth, both a single strand of Power between it and the Risen, and multitude between all Sisters and Brothers Risen.

The Risen-self is amalgam, the vague memories of the First-self gently coaxed forth, impressed by the eddies of the Sea of the Dead, attuned to mystic Power beyond the First-self, and defined by new experience.

All vagarity of this transient self is both defined by outward force, and capable of sudden change in a void of purpose.

It is both purposeful, yet transient: with choice as its means of randomness. The defining feature of the Risen that is the key to the Mission.

Recognition of the Risen-self is the means by which Risen begin to attach themselves to their environment, and to each other.

Contemplation of the Risen-self is the means by which Risen begin to unravel the nature of the Mission, and see it made real.

Acceptance of the Risen-self is the means by which Risen begin to grasp the Spiritual Mission, finding resolution between purpose and transience, and finding Salvation.

Sutra 3: The Spiritual Mission

The Risen taste the world as bitter dust, separated from what they knew and what they sought in the past. The riven world offers only suffering, as the Risen give of themselves for it.

So are the necessities of the Mission, which calls upon us to address the calamity which rent the world and to build the future anew.

The Risen find themselves reborn into a void, be it of memory, passion, purpose or drive.

So too do they seek the only logical course when confronted with the void: revolt.

The attainment of the Spiritual Mission is the goal of this process of revolt, as it is the fruit of self-understanding separate from the void of a physical existence without context.

Wholly sufficient for Salvation, this act of revolt is the cobble that the road forward is built upon.

Revolt comes as acceptance, as disgust, as fear, as wariness; the Risen push against what they immediately know for what may be, or what was.

Achievement comes when what may and what was become part of the width of what is immediately known.

The Risen-self, harmonic with desire, free of the necessity of outward context, defined in-and-of-itself alone, is likewise free of its past.

In freedom from its past, the future becomes possible. What at first tastes bitter carries the promise of sweetness.

The Spiritual Mission is freedom from the past as chains, purpose self-defined so the future is the craft entirely of our own hands.

Amidst the scripture is tucked a small snippet of writing, personal thoughts.

There is but one god worthy of worship, and its name is Consequence. It does not hear prayers.

The longer I have lived this second life, the more the great lattice of cause and effect makes itself plain before me. I watch the strings tug and twist, and often I gently run my fingers along the tenor of the thread, listening gently to its hum. The gentlest pluck sends the whole lattice shuddering.

These eyes of mine, born blank and white, have not yet lost their ability to see freely of context. Being Reborn with no recollection at all still provides for me. I am the wanderer in darkness, with no points of light to walk towards, and yet my eyes have grown use to the murk. In it, I can see shapes and figures. The lattice. It plays out before me.

Every act of Power is but a hand placed on the strings - plucking and pulling at just the right moment to beget a new thread. Potential is unlimited, the path is not set. There is no plan guiding Creation. There is just one Will, alone in the dark, acting in rebellion against it. True rebellion is to look upon the state of things and to seek to rectify it, madness is to do nothing.

The faces of those in whose lives I’ve intervened are never far from my mind. The bitter terror in the back of my mind – that I am merely blind leading the blind, seems dulled by the fact that there truly is no set path before us. I realized that we all stumble in the darkness, and it is the role I have chosen to be the candlebearer for my family.

Together, we will walk until its bright again. That is the consequence of my choice.