#cirros

As a being of order, Esredes detested the chaos that swirled within him, and the world around him. The world, above all else, needed to make sense. There had to be reasons for why things happened, rules to follow, there had to be order. Chaos was bad. It consumed everything around it and left nothing in its wake. Chaos was the enemy, and it always would be. This had been taught to him as a teenager, and it had been his philosophy since. Adhere to and create order where there was none. But sometimes, this presented a problem. The Star operated on absolute laws. One of those was that evil existed, couldn't be reasoned with, and had no recourse but to eliminate it. Esredes had no need to question this, of course, not for a very long time. A knight did his duty, and a harrier defended himself. But then came inklings, clues, hints, teases of the absolute laws of the universe being broken. And they came in the form of the dark rooms.

Whether at the camp, or now at the Tribunal, or when talking to an Inquisitor or similar nonhuman entity, Esredes couldn't help but observe patterns of behavior, as he always did. And in doing so, questions came to mind. Pure evil existed. He knew this for a fact from his work. There were many entities- those that pretended to be human- which were plain and indisputably malicious. He tried, time and time again, to understand if there was a deeper motivation. Why did you abuse your son for years on end because you didn't want him? The little shit owed him. Why did you betray my people? How did that stop corruption? The answers were contradictory and nonsensical, until they finally landed on 'I have a compulsion to hurt people'. And of course, one of his favorites: Your people are dirt compared to my family. The Church told me to do it.

Absolute evil could not be negotiated with. Absolute evil had no true thoughts, feelings, or motives. It simply manifested in and took hold of a shell of an organic body through which it could do it work. Esredes wondered, sometimes, if evil was not an individual phenomenon, and instead these creatures all were part of a collective, a collective and parasitic force that manifested in the consciousness of human bodies at random. If he tried to start talking directly to it, and not the shell it was inhabiting, would it finally drop the game and laugh at him, realizing he figured out something no one else had?

The more Esredes observed the same rules happening over and over again, the more he spotted the little cracks. And in there, as he always did, he tried to burrow. There was a phenomenon that every manifestation of evil, no matter how vile, shared. If you applied pressure long enough to their lack of morality, there would be a moment where they snapped, and began to claim to feel remorse. But the moment you left them alone, this moment of clarity vanished forever, and they reverted back to normal. An Inquisitor told him the moment of clarity was fake, plain and simple. It was a defense mechanism to get the pain to stop. And of course, that would be the simple explanation, but it left something to ponder.

These creatures were not intelligent. They were barely sentient above an animal at times. They did not have the sense of mind to cower and avoid pain, no, they egged him on to cut into them, whether with words or a knife, over and over again. Why, then, did they suddenly have the presence of mind to try? It didn't feel natural, or organic. It felt like something else beyond them was taking over, and in that laid his fascination. The Azure Dragoon had been the most interesting failure so far- Alvere, of course, remained his only success, but Alvere was still human to a degree, more around his level. It was easier to extract evil when there was a person inside, even an incomplete one like himself. But the Azure Dragoon to take up the mantle after Estinien retired had nothing inside him. Once his mask broke, he was a dull, grey nothing that stared back at you. Esredes had kidnapped him and contained him in the camp's basement room for answers from the abomination that had killed fifty of his people with no remorse. What made him interesting is he was not alone. A voidsent had fused with him back during the Final Days, but this voidsent had a conscience while he did not. The voidsent was reasonable, and polite- naive, even, and offered his assistance in the current conundrum. It said it could try to reawaken old memories, and force the Dragoon to have a conscience. And indeed, what Esredes witnessed was a forced, extended moment of clarity. For a while the Dragoon began to emote like an actual person who can feel guilt. He screamed, he cried, he told Esredes to keep hurting him, to which he didn't need to tell him twice. But while it was forcefully prolonged, even this didn't last. Eventually, he settled back into apathy, and nothing spurred him any more. The most progress Esredes made was getting him to agree to not kill them again. It was a dead end, but one with promise. The memories made him begin to mimic human behavior again. Did that mean that even in a host where evil was completely taken over, in a defective being born only for malevolence, there was some kind of left in good instinct that didn't work properly? And if so, did that mean memory magic was the key? The key to breaking an absolute law of the universe. The key to changing the way human nature worked. The mere tease of it was too much for Esredes to resist. He was no Sharlayan Academic, he was the wrong kind of person to do something as big as figure out a way to cure or combat evil itself- but what if he had simply stumbled across something no one else had tried before, with this unnatural circumstance of a voidsent fused to a host?

Maybe there was another way. Maybe there was a true way to combat evil besides simply disposing of it, and leaving it to reform in another host like a voidsent. Maybe evil was his new nemesis, and he would find a way to strike back at it for all it did to take everything from him.