The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

Paula is still having trouble accepting what happened between Zander and Raven. Some feelings need to be discussed openly, to get to the bottom of why what happened is bothering her so much. As usual, Raven has some ideas for how to make that happen, and how to open a few more doors among the Greenfield siblings. A lot of things are about to change between them in the course of one afternoon.

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/16

Princess of the Void.

There’s a corral of sorts, warting out from the uncredentialed crowd, where a pod of camerapeople and reporters in smartly fur-trimmed dress tunics crane for a view past the marines’ armored shoulders. Grant takes a deep breath and adjusts his path.

A violet-fringed keeper babbles into a scriptomorph and holds it urgently up. Majesty. Why have you come to Harok?

Grant covers his anxiety with a smile (he’s getting better at that). “Brother Tymar-nai-Indrik and I are here at the invitation of Counselor Minimaq-mek-Harok and Governess Pazeem, to witness today’s service. We’re so grateful to Ecclesiasts Multraq, Qaivor, and Liuaq of the Harok Temple for allowing us entry. That’s the statement. Thank you all.”

The marines close ranks as he steps away from the press corps, who pepper questions against his retreating back.

The golden maze.

“Now remember,” Tymar says, as he catches up with the contingent of Taiikari holy men and Eqtoran Pike crew. “Choice is God. Choice is sacred. We aren’t arguing the virtue of the choice but that there is a choice to be made. The sacred freedom the Eqtorans talk about. They call it the golden maze. Not a plain, not the wide firmament. Not your or my idea of total freedom. The paths are laid down by the Library Sacrosanct, and they take the paths.”

Grant’s slick navy boots crunch a dessiccated flower petal in one of the tiny furrows which overlap and fork off in geometric right angles through the path to the temple. “So we have to argue ours isn’t a dead end?”

Tymar shakes his head. “A dead end is still a path. Getting to a wall and turning back, that’s sacred right. The wrong choice remains a choice. Do you see? Multraq says that your path is false, is clambering out of the maze entirely or knocking one of its walls down. That’s what’s abominable.”

Grant tries to further insulate himself from the eyes of the crowd by leaning into the conversation. “I don’t know if I’m following.”

Ruaq glances over her shoulder; she and Ipqen are walking ahead, having a conversation that Grant can’t hear over the commotion of their watching crowd.

“There’s a translation thing here,” Tymar says. “Choice doesn’t mean quite exactly the same thing. Eqtoran understanding of their own psychology—it’s different from the average Maekyonite’s. From what I understand of your homeland, a common vision of freedom is the choice to go anywhere, do anything.”

“So how does the Eqtoran idea differ?”

“How to explain. Mmm.” Tymar points at the bright sun shower that pelts the dome. “The rain up there, on the glass. You see the drops going down; they drift, but they cut, too, into the paths that other drops took. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yyyyes? Maybe.”

“The ant atop the throok,” Cerik says.

Tymar nods. “Thank you, love. A much more apt metaphor.”

Grant’s about to ask what that means but Tymar’s already explaining:

“It’s a South Kymrian parable. From the Serpent’s Breath sector. They’re not Eqtorans, but they think about consciousness similarly. So there’s an ant atop a throok. A, uh—a kind of bug that builds colonies. Do you have something like that on Maekyon?”

“Ants? Yeah. My translator one-to-oned it, even.”

“Oh, good. Imagine an ant that finds itself, by some quirk of time’s passage, upon the back of a slavering, instinctive beast. And central to the ant’s psychological well-being is the thought: this beast is mine to command. Where I wish it, the beast goes. Now this is of course fatuous. The beast is a beast. It goes where it will. It is predictable; it does beast things. It eats, it fornicates, that sort of thing. The ant is the conscious mind. The throok is the unconscious, bearing us where it will.” Tymar spreads his hands. “So, the South Kymrians ask us: what does the ant spend its day doing, exactly?”

“Nothing?”

“Ahh.” Tymar lowers all his fingers but one. “Not nothing. The ant justifies. The ant spends a great deal of time deciding the meaning behind each instinctual choice. The ant tells itself a story about why it chose to do what the beast was always going to do. In this way, it constructs, painstakingly, a facade of control over itself and its fate.”

“That’s dire.”

“Well, yes. It’s a sorry state, being an ant on a throok. But here’s the thing. What one ant can only pretend to do, what about many ants? Watching their beasts race about, humping and peeing on everything, telling one another the same pretend stories? They can’t control the beast, no. Not really. What they can do, the ants, is work together to construct. It’s like what they say about religious people, eh, Grantyde?” He winks. “However much bunk we believe, the architecture sure is impressive. And so the ants reorder the world, putting up walls—”

“Ant-sized walls?”

“How big are your ants’ structures?” Tymar chuckles. “I’m guessing smaller than the South Kymrian ones.”

“Uh, yeah. Not big enough for the metaphor.”

“Okay, well, go with me the rest of the way with a certain amount of suspension for the shakiness. The powerless ants, in their numbers, might from their imagination and collaboration create a maze. A vast and gleaming array of paths that pen the beasts upon which they ride. Steer it, maybe not. But a beast won’t climb a wall or dig a new tunnel when there’s an easily trotted passage before it. That’s the Golden Maze. A great, vast, generational project of the Eqtorans, built and tended for thousands of years by their ecclesiasts and their books of song.”

Quill’s (sic) Qilik's words echo in Grant’s head. It will go away quickly, and the ones to come after will not miss it.

“This is the scurrying, atomic strength of civilization. Whether it’s religion, philosophy, ethics—song, especially, to the Eqtorans. The most visible way you’ve seen it shaped is by music, but it suffuses them, as bone-deep as your wife’s loyalty, or your self-determination. Look for mazes on Eqtoran stuff, next time you’re close to it. Look at the street we’re walking on, or the doors we’ll pass through, soon. Look at this robe you’re wearing, even. The scrollwork on the sleeves.” Tymar taps his finger against the interwoven knotwork decorating Grant’s forearms. “See the entrance and the exit?”

“Oh, wow.” Grant stares at the design—now that he realizes what they are, they’re hypnotic.

“You’ll see it everywhere now that you know to look,” Tymar says. “Little breaks in the lines or t-junctions. Sykora’s utopia—every Taiikari utopia, really—is one where the choice between two branching paths is made for her by a loving guide. Yours is a world without walls, where nothing prevents you from going wherever you wish. Both are intolerable to the Eqtoran ethos. Freedom is a maze.”

Grant’s eyes track the paths along his arms. He doubles back, finds a path.

“They really are gorgeous, aren’t they?”

He looks up from his sleeves. “The mazes?

“The Eqtorans. All they’ve made, all they’ve accomplished. All they’re sharing with us now.” The crowd and its cityscape shine in amber across Tymar’s anticomps. “How amazingly lucky are we, to walk these paths with them?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...olden-maze
EDIT: https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1419041...r/2169350/