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Dear Sen-Aret,

There is no such thing as a “low-power Guardian.” There may be armor you can’t actuate or weapons mechanisms you can’t understand. There may be techniques you have yet to master and missions you dare not attempt. But the possibility of your Light is unlimited. I mean this very seriously. A novice go player has the exact same power to place stones as a 9-dan master. The only difference between them lies in their knowledge and ability to choose. This is my firmly held and personal truth: the only difference in “power” between you and me lies in what we have learned and practiced

Not many Guardians are brave enough to ask such questions. Maybe your age has done well by you. Your society might have been too small for leaders to rule you from far-off palaces. Maybe you were resurrected without any fear of bringing your concerts before your tribe. (I often wonder how many of the attitudes of our past lives we bring into our rebirth. But investigating this would fall into the taboo against pursuing past lives. And no Guardian would want to be told they retained ancient prejudices, even if the structures of power that once gave those prejudices their venom are long gone.)

This brings me to your treatment at the hands of other Guardians. Their curiosity about the enemy is natural, and we cannot suppress the enemy’s arguments without perversely amplifying them. Even I have begun to believe that our enemy may not be the Darkness itself, but a power or principality that commands and rules in Darkness. 

But you are right. Guardians do mistake the Traveler’s silence for weakness. They do see the constant necessity of violence, and the rewards they reap through that violence, as a reason to disdain peace and virtue as dull. Guardians want action and meaning and loot. All Guardians have experienced devotion , sacrifice, and death: this separates us from the rest of humankind. But sometimes, we let this separation divide us from the ordinary good of ordinary people.

We forget what it means to live a peaceful life surrounded by the friends we choose. Because we can endure death and violence, we forget how horrible and final violence can be. The nature of your death, Sen-Aret, means you cannot forget that. You know that you were killed by other people, not by a great darkness from the stars.

The question of how to live well in a universe of indifference, cruelty, and deprivation is the ONLY question. The Light does not offer us an afterlife or an otherworldly paradise. It does not give us throne worlds or pocket universes. The Light tells us that paradise is something we have to make here.

The Darkness cautions us against mercy to our enemies. Are we fools for trying to be good, when our very survival is at stake? Maybe. But the fact that our morals sometimes make it more difficult to survive is proof they are truly good! There is not much commendable about doing a right thing when it is also the tactically correct thing. When the good thing is also the hard thing: that is when the righteous are separated from the lost.

Sen-Aret, let me tell you something I have told no one else. I know that in the end, the Darkness can win. Do you understand what I mean? By its very nature, the Darkness is the judge of what will exist and what will pass away. In the end, there may be only Darkness because all that exists will remain only by its consent.