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Eris got the call from her commander while she was killing a man.
Gerulae were convicted criminals who had been reprogrammed so extensively by the Oracle that they no longer had thoughts of their own.
but morality never entered into the choice between eating or starving.
No one there was worthy of trust. Not even allies.
They only worshiped seven gods in the Tholosian Empire: Letum, Bel, Rem, Salutem, Phobos, Algea, and Soter. Death, War, Honor, Survival, Fear, Agony, and Salvation. There was no place in their pantheon for Mercy.
All you had were loyalty and Tholosian patriotism, drilled into you until you no
longer questioned or doubted the superiority of the Empire. Until you truly believed—with your entire heart—that everyone else who rebelled deserved to be executed, and every planet outside of it needed to be conquered.
But which parts of her life were so ingrained that she simply accepted them? Which parts only seemed less terrible because they paled in comparison to the worst?
The Empire provides the drugs, passes ’em around like sweets. Keeps us natural-born dependent on the high, so we never resist. Just another tool of control.”
People whose entire existence was erased from their memory until they were reprogrammed to question nothing, choose nothing, and be nothing.
What if she wasn’t any good at being human?
That was what the Empire did: forced you to be complicit in the dehumanization of others.
“Because what mattered was that the planet became ours. Nothing else. Every human in the Empire is like that firewolf.
“No. Don’t you see? The Oracle forces people into neat little boxes because One only understands order. But humans are messy. We are not binary; we don’t exist in ones and zeroes. This or that.
Nationalism cultivated prejudice.
Information was carefully controlled, and literature became relegated to a single library and accessed only by those approved by the royal family. The Archon’s thinking was that if you controlled what people read, you could control their ideas.
