The questions of Good and Evil have been around for countless ages. When
we are young, they are asked of us. In our middle years, we ask them of
others. At last, we come to ask them of ourselves.
For each of us, the questions hold different meaning. In them, through
them, we seek many things. But the questions remain unchanged, for all
the alleged answers.
What is Good? And what is Evil?
The twin questions plague us as we watch battle after battle, dispute
after dispute, rage between, supposedly, the two sides. Yet though no
true consensus can be reached, certain words are recurrent.
Good, we generally agree, involves altruism. It is a credo of
self-sacrifice and charity, martyrdom and forgiveness, selflessness and
working in the interest of others.
Evil is usually understood to be the opposite of Good, hinging on
self-advancement, ambition, and above all, the drive to succeed by any
means. Other terms are thrown in there too: selfishness, cruelty, greed.
But those beg controversy, and it is enough for the moment to leave the
definitions, such as they are, there.
It has always been difficult to pinpoint a person's alignment. How many
Good deeds does it take to balance one Evil one? What is morality, and
can an Evil person be moral? Debate rages on for these and a myriad of
similar concerns, and for many, absolute morality has been, perforce,
set aside in favour of a moral relativism. But either way, things begin
to get a bit more interesting from there.
First, it is necessary to delve a bit deeper into the psyche. Does the
'selfless act' exist?
At first glance, the answer is a simple affirmative. People do act to
benefit others, even to their own seeming detriment. And yet... the
satisfaction of helping another is a reward of sorts, as is a positive
reputation. Any number of benefits can stem from a seemingly selfless
act... can it, then, ever be said to be altruistic?
Faced with these quandaries, one begins to file pure Good away, still on
a pedestal, but as an ideal, a theoretical, philosophical state. An
exercise in metaphysics, perhaps, or an illusion, or a goal, or what
have you! But not, certainly, a concrete reality.
Evil, on the other hand, we do not doubt. We know it, we feel it, we
have seen it and observed it to be an omnipresent force, pervasive and
indomitable. Evil is a reality.
But now we must take a step back. If Good and Evil were opposite, they
must be in balance. Together, the range from Good to Evil comprises the
ordered universe of Ayar, or Creation. However, if Evil is reality while
Good is ideology, we are left with a range of Evil alone, and the
unsettling proposition that Evil, unbalanced, is indeed all of Creation.
This is not so strange an allegation as you may think--let me explain.
It can be, and has been, debated ad nauseum whether Chaos and Creation
are opposed. It is usually, if not universally, admitted, however, that
the two form a balance and that each is, in some measure, dependent on
the other. Let us then, for the sake of argument, posit the following:
1) Chaos balances Creation, and
2) Creation is comprised of Evil.
I leave it to you to invoke the transitive property of equality to
follow that conclusion through.
Here, I must digress for a moment to say a bit about Chaos. A close
reading of the Mythos and the records of Lady Eris' ascension is quick
to reveal that there are at least three distinct forms of Chaos. Before
it touched Creation, it was pure and unmixed, and what is often referred
to as Old Chaos.
Then something happened. Chaos and Creation intersected, and a small bit
of each diffused throughout the other. Over this Chaos was Lord Babel
granted dominion, and thus it is referred to as Babelonian Chaos.
Ages passed, and at last Servelan de Vermiis became Eris, and in Her
rise to Divinity, as the record will show, the second diffusion of Chaos
across Creation occurred. The result was, of course, Erisian Chaos,
which is that which we best know today.
Yet Creation was altered by these interactions at least as much as was
Chaos, and now the two are tightly interwoven where once they were
discreet. Even emotions we deem common are in fact mainly
Chaotic--whimsy and caprice, of course, but no less so love. (As an
aside, that latter lends credence to our hypotheses, for love is surely
not Evil, and it is Chaotic, which implies a balance between the two.)
A study of Lady Eris' teachings on Her Chaos serves to reinforce this,
for while Her five tiers do describe the cyclical rise and fall of all
things, they do so not through Chaos alone, as She implies, but through
a melange of Chaos and Creation that demonstrates the very mixing I have
described; in short, through the Chaos whereof She Herself has
dominance, which is itself entwined with Creation and thus inseparable
in Her theories. She postulates a Primal Chaos, which is clearly
referring back to Old Chaos, but then She moves on to Discord. Here,
things get a bit cloudy, for She describes Discord by means of opposing
pairs, of which more often than not only one is Chaotic and the other
Evil, and thus it can readily be seen that Discord is a phase in which
the interactions between Chaos and Creation are at their least stable.
Continuing on to Confusion, one sees the Chaos coalescing into a more
organized, understandable form. No longer raw and untamable as Primal
Chaos, Confusion represents the perfect Erisian doctrine. (Incidentally,
Bopalopia is also pure Erisian Chaos. Im sure you can see the
parallels.)
Then the pendulum swings back to evil with the rise of
Bureaucracy--here, though Chaos is present, it is clearly Creation that
reigns. At last, though, we arrive at the final level of Erisian Chaos
theory, the Tier of Apocalypse. There, Chaos and Creation are no longer
warring. They have achieved a stable coexistence, Evil balancing Chaos
balancing Evil.
Here I must pause for a moment to note that while I do not agree that
the five tiers of Erisian Chaos are, in fact, purely Chaotic, I do not
dismiss the Lady or Her teachings, for She is a means by which true
Chaos may be understood by elimination. She is, in a sense, a gateway
through whose gauntlet one must pass in order to transcend into a higher
level of knowing Chaos. Having Herself been of Creation, She cannot be
of Her own Primal Chaos, and as such, She is readily comprehensible to
us, making Chaos accessible to all who seek it. But She is only a means
to an end, as I have shown.
That having been said, I will return to the main body of this
discussion. Having outlined the main interactions between Chaos and
Creation in accordance with the Erisian five-part delineation of
history, it falls to us to determine which stage currently reigns.
Clearly, we can eliminate Primal Chaos as a candidate, and though
Discord and Confusion are present, it is obvious that Sapience has
passed at least as far as the grey mountain of Bureaucracy. But do we
linger there still, or have we passed the Greyface and moved into the
final tier?
Our cities have long languished in diplomatic dogma and political
convenience. War springs up on a whim only to die just as quickly.
Nishnatoba is a plane both hallowed and despised. Icons! Say instead
idolatry, endless years spent bashing for shards to uphold a symbol of
empty prestige, a symbol which, by existing, renders its bearer
vulnerable to the plethora of new attackers who wait to disabuse us of
our momentary feelings of accomplishment! It would not be inconceivable
to see this as the very pinnacle of Bureaucracy.
I think, however, that we have reached and surpassed the peak of the
mountain, and now, the lot of Chaos is inextricably twined with that of
Creation; now, we achieve balance. Through it, we have entered the Tier
of Apocalypse.
Welcome, friends, to the end of days, and remember this: pulling the
cord is inevitable.

~Anarwaen Calaier

Penned by my hand on the 17th of Chronos, in the year 431 AF.