THERE ARE THREE RULES ON GODSPEED. I ONLY KNOW ONE, AND I’ve already broken it.
Rule One: No differences allowed.
And when you’re the youngest person on an interstellar spaceship, you’ve definitely got some differences. I grew up knowing how different I was—when I was a six-year-old boy, the next generation up was ten, and even though they should have obeyed whatever command I gave, none of the ten-year-olds would play with a six-year-old. Or maybe it wasn’t just my age—maybe they wouldn’t play with me because they already knew, even more than I did, that the real reason I am different isn’t just my age, but also my position.
I am the Elder. Not their Elder, of course: I will be Elder for the future generation of children born, and I will rule them. The generation above me follows the next Elder up, and the generation above them follows Eldest. My gen won’t be born until I am sixteen, and that feels forever away even though it’s only three more years before the gen above me has their mating season.
The other Elder came to the Feeder Level this morning to fetch me. This is rare—he and Eldest live on the Keeper Level. Eldest trains him and they deal with all the problems and people on the ship—the scientists, engineers, and researchers on the Shipper Level, the farmers and manufacturers on the Feeder Level. The two of them keep the ship running smoothly, and I am just the awkward kid who will maybe (absolutely must) one day become good enough to join them.
Elder’s grin is lopsided when he walks up to the rabbit farm where I am living now. As a future Eldest, I am never allowed to know who my parents are or to stay with one family longer than another. I am supposed to be using my life now, before I really become an Elder, to find compassion for the people I will one day rule, by living among them, living as one of them, without staying long enough to form attachments to anyone in particular.
“You know what today means, right?” the other Elder asks me after he lifts me up in a hug.
I shake my head.
“You’re coming up to the Keeper Level.”
“Really?” I ask. My voice cracks over the words, but I don’t care.
The other Elder nods. “I will become Eldest. And you’ll be the only Elder.” There is an odd note in his voice; his lips still smile but his eyes are sad.
“I can pack now,” I say. “I can go up to the Keeper Level with you now.”
The other Elder shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “You need to get ready for the changing ceremony tonight.”
This is the first I’d heard of it—the rabbit farms are as far away as possible from the City, and besides, the Feeders rarely celebrate anything. I’d been expecting nothing special on my birthday, and the farmers I live with now had shown no excitement.
Not that they show much of any emotion.
That is another difference I have with all the other Feeders: I care about things. I cried at the pig slaughter; I remember the lurch in my stomach when I saw the first calf born on the cattle ranch. But no one else shows emotion…and (I suspect) no one else has emotion. The flicker of sadness on the other Elder’s face had only been noticeable because no one else on the Feeder Level had even that.
The other Elder gives me a present: new clothes, a dark set of trousers and matching tunic with red stitching on the hems. As I change clothes hurriedly, I can hear the start of something big happening outside—a sort of vibrant excitement leaking into the air. When I leave the farm with the other Elder, I can see why: everyone on the whole ship, from the Feeders to the Shippers, is gathering in the garden behind the Hospital.
On a ship somewhere between two inhabitable planets, there’s not much wasted space. The Hospital garden is the only exception. It’s the only place on the ship where flowers grow instead of food, where the paths meander aimlessly rather than going straight between the City and the farms, where there is nothing to do except be. It is one of my favorite places on the whole ship, in part because so few people ever come here.
Not today, though. Today, the garden overflows with nearly two thousand people. They stand in the flower beds, crushing the blooms. They spill out onto the lawn beside the Hospital, all the way to the heavy, metal wall on the side, painted blue and dotted with rivets. Even though the Feeders almost never show any emotion besides calm, today they are chatting, alert, eager; and the Shippers, who’ve descended from the level above this one for the celebration, are practically vibrating with anticipation.
“What’s going on?” I ask the other Elder in a quiet voice. He steers me away from the garden and toward the grav tube, a fairly recent invention on the ship, makes traveling between the levels simpler.
Eldest is waiting for us at the base of the tube. He’s wearing the Eldest Robe—a long, elaborately embroidered robe that holds all the hopes of our society. I have only seen it once before, long ago, when I first started asking questions about why I was shuffled from home to home, why I was at least four years younger than everyone else and no one was born after me, why I was, in short, different, when the very first rule of the ship was not to be.
The Eldest Robe is decorated with the dreams of the whole ship: fertile fields on the hem, open skies at the shoulders. When Godspeed left Sol-Earth, it was bound for a new home in a new world, but in the meantime, Godspeed became our home. Generations later, the ship is still in transit, but even though we are caged behind the curving metal walls, we have not forgotten our dreams for a sky that never ends.
Eldest smiles at me, and his face holds the same sort of sadness as the other Elder’s had. He is truly the oldest man on the entire ship. His age gives him wisdom, and his presence gives us all strength. When he strides toward us, his shoulders are thrown back, and he carries the weight of the robe as if it is nothing, even though I feel certain that it would suffocate and crush me.
“Are you ready?” Eldest asks the other Elder when he sees me. The other Elder doesn’t nod; he just gives him a sort of grim smile.
Eldest looks down at me next. Judgment clouds his eyes. I try to stand as straight as possible. “You’re not ready,” he says simply, and I cave in on myself on the inside, though I force my spine to stay straight and stiff.
Eldest strides past us, toward the garden and the buzzing crowd of people waiting. “Elder,” he says, and the other Elder rushes forward to walk next to him. I trail behind them both; I’m used to following them. “No,” Eldest tells him. “You’re no longer Elder after today. I meant the other one.”
The other Elder grabs my arm and pulls me forward. I am practically running to keep up with Eldest’s quick pace. “You know what the three most important rules of Godspeed are, right?”
I nod, but he’s not looking down at me—he’s looking over at the crowd of people. “I know the first one,” I say. The other Elder had told me the same day I was shown the Eldest Robe for the first time, but that was the only lesson I’d learned so far in my training to be the future Eldest.
“No differences,” Eldest says. “It is a good rule, and the first developed by the original Eldest.”
I know this. When the ship had been sailing between worlds for several generations, a terrible plague had wiped out most of the population. Godspeed herself almost died. But a leader rose up to become the Eldest, reestablish rule, and set us on the path to recovery.
“The second rule,” Eldest says, “is that our society will fail without a strong, central leader. The Eldest and Elder system is in place for the entire society. All that we do—all that we are—is necessary for survival.”
He stops now, and it takes me a few steps to stop myself, too. He looks down at me. His eyes search mine, but I’m not sure what he’s looking for.
“Remember that,” he says.
It hangs in the air between us, as bright as the stars embroidered on the robe.
Rule Two: The ship must have one strong, central leader to survive.
And he marches into the crowd of people gathered at the garden. Everyone surrounds the statue in the middle—a bigger-than-life-size statue of the first Eldest, his arms spread wide in benevolence. My Eldest stands under the statue too, but his arms hang limply by his side, weighted down with the elaborate robe.
The other Elder drags me through the crowd and places me on Eldest’s left side. “You don’t have to do anything,” he whispers. “Just stand there.” He turns to go, then turns back to me. “It’ll be better if you don’t watch. Look at the ceiling instead.”
I shoot him a glance, but the other Elder has already moved on, around to the other side of Eldest, so he stands by his right. I look up at them both. They are exactly the same height, with the same strong chin and heavy brows and piercing eyes. But neither of them spare a glance at me.
Eldest looks up, and when he does, he seems to grow taller. I had not noticed before that he slouched, but now, with his eyes bouncing from person to person in the crowd, I realized that, yes, he does feel the pressure, that crushing, swallow-you-whole sort of pressure I’ve felt since I first learned that I would one day take the robe and responsibilities of the man beside me.
“My people,” he says, and with those two words alone, he has all two thousand sets of eyes on him. They are his people, truly.
And then he stops. It’s as if the words have been choked out of him—his eyes are red and watery, his throat closes up. His gaze flicks to mine, and I see in his face the words he spoke to me moments ago: Rule Two.
Eldest swallows and turns back to the crowd. “I have been honored to be yours. All that I have done—all that I have been—has been for you. All of you.” He swallows again. “And now I am spent. My purpose has played. It is time for a new Eldest to take the robe.”
There is silence now. I look out at the crowd. The Feeders are calm, curious, but the Shippers’ excitement is not the happy anticipation I’d thought they had. It’s more like dread, as if they suspected and feared what would happen, but know it is inevitable.
Eldest raises his hand. Between his fingers, I see a black med patch. The small one-inch square of fabric is embedded with tiny needles with which to inject medicine. Lavender patches cure headaches, green ones fix stomachaches, yellow wakes you up, blue puts you to sleep. But I’ve never seen a black one before.
“Follow your Eldest, and you cannot lose your way,” Eldest says. He presses the patch into his skin.
The other Elder steps forward as Eldest crumples. I move toward him to help, but the other Elder holds an arm out to stop me.
The other Elder says something, I don’t know what, all my senses are focused on the way Eldest doesn’t blink, staring at nothing, and the way the corner of his mouth twitches twice and then stills, and the way his fingers curl and then freeze, as if he’s trying to grasp the air.
The other Elder stops speaking. My neck moves up slowly, slowly, not quite believing what I’m seeing. The other Elder swoops down on Eldest, and at first I think he’s going to harm him, but I see that his eyes are soft and his touch is gentle. He removes the Eldest Robe, slipping it from his shoulders and stretching out Eldest’s body, not just to gather the cloth of the robe up, but also to make Eldest look natural, comfortable.
Eldest’s eyes still stare up.
The other Elder straightens, and with one clean, swift movement, twirls the robe around his own shoulders. “An Eldest dies for his people,” he says, fastening the robe around his neck. “An Eldest lives for his people.” He takes a step forward.
“Eldest!” the Shippers shout, and there is some sadness in their voices raised as one.
A moment later, the Feeders repeat, “Eldest!” and there is no emotion at all behind the volume.
The other Elder—the new Eldest—turns to me. “Come with me,” he says.
The crowd parts around him. Doctors descend on the man lying under the statue of the Plague Eldest, but they are not there to help him. They leave the black patch on his neck; it has already done what it was meant to do. Instead, they bundle the body up in a plain white sheet and start to take it away for disposal in the stars.
I keep my eyes on the robe, not the man now wearing it. I think about how one day when I assume the leadership of Godspeed from him, I will take this very robe after he takes his own life. And then I think how the Elder after me will pull the robe from my dead body.
People die. I know this. The grays will die, one by one, as they reach their sixties. They will go to the hospital, and they will not leave it. I know this; it is what happens. But I’ve never seen death. And I never knew the Eldests chose it.
Med patches are tiny, almost weightless, but I can already feel one boring into my neck.
The man in the robe—I must think of him as Eldest now, he is Eldest now, but I can’t bear the thought of what made him Eldest—he pushes through the crowd and back toward the grav tube. He opens his mouth several times, as if to tell me something, but he never speaks. I can’t tell if his face is full of sorrow or pride or fear or something else, but I’m pretty sure mine’s just full of shock.
When we get to the grav tube, Eldest pauses. He looks at the base, perhaps remembering the way the old Eldest climbed down it to go to the garden and die, just the opposite of how this new Eldest is climbing up to it in order to live on the Keeper Level.
“Your training begins today,” Eldest says, still looking at the grav tube base.
“No kidding.”
He spares me a knowing smile, then commands the tube to take him to the Keeper Level. It sucks him up, and he’s gone before I can blink. I step up onto the base as well. For a moment, I turn and look out at the Feeder Level. This is the largest level of the whole ship, with acres and acres of farmland, all wrapped in steel and soaring through space. This is what we need to survive—farms and produce and even livestock.
This is my kingdom.
Or, it will be. And even though I’ve grown up knowing that I was in line to rule, I never quite realized that it meant…all of this.
I command the tube to take me up, too. The grav tube manipulates the simulated gravity on the ship, enabling my body to rush upward much faster than the elevator in the hospital. I strain to keep my eyes open, focused on the green and brown of the Feeder Level, but soon I’m sucked all the way up to the Keeper Level.
I’d been there before, but not like this. Not when I was the only Elder.
Eldest waits on me. The tube ends in a small room with a wooden table—a real wooden table, an antique relic from Sol-Earth, where they had trees—and blue plastic chairs and an ancient-looking globe. Eldest slips the robe from his shoulders and breathes a sigh of relief. The robe drops and crumples, just like the old Eldest did.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wanted to warn you—but Eldest said it would be better to say nothing…to let you experience it blind, so to speak.”
He sees my eyes staring at the robe, remembering who else wore it. He bends down and carefully picks it up, smoothing out the wrinkles and folding it until it no longer holds the shadow of a dead man inside. He lays the robe on the table.
“This is the Learning Center. We’ll begin proper lessons here.”
“I’ve had lessons.”
“You’ve had some.”
Eldest opens the door to the Learning Center, and I see a giant room with a curved ceiling. “This is the great room,” Eldest says simply, and he turns to a nearby door. “This is my chamber now,” he says. “And this is yours.” He nods for me to open the door, so I roll my thumb over the biometric scanner and watch as it zips open.
The room has been neatly made up, and there are two bags sitting in the center of the bed. My belongings—clothes, a few mementos. I’m ashamed to note that the old blanket, the one I’ve had since I was a baby, is draped over the second bag. I don’t want Eldest to think I’m a baby.
Eldest moves forward, so I go all the way inside the room. He steps around me and sits down on the bed, picking up the blanket and fiddling with it. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish he’d pretend it’s not there, that mangy, holey scrap of cloth.
“When Godspeed left Sol-Earth,” Eldest says, twisting the fabric between his fingers, “we had a clear mission. Our ancestors were to run the ship and, while it traveled, develop new, better ways to colonize the planet when it eventually lands on Centauri-Earth. Originally, the Feeder Level was designed for biological and agricultural research. The Shipper Level was for other scientific research. This, the Keeper Level, was used for navigation and offices for the captain of the ship.”
We have no captain now. Instead, we have Eldest.
“Of course, Godspeed is essentially a biodome. We are a self-sustaining environment, able to produce the necessities of life in a constant cycle. But our original mission was not just to find the new planet in the Centauri star system: it was to take the methods of Sol-Earth—the science and philosophy and everything else—and make it better. Our ancestors were creating a perfect world, an enclosed world, where we could become the perfect people. We separated ourselves from Sol-Earth and Sol-Earth’s problems, and we became a society worthy of the new planet.”
He puts the blanket down on the bed.
“There are three rules on Godspeed,” he says, meeting my eyes.
“I only know two of them.”
“Tell me.”
I don’t know why—does he want me to remember the second rule now, the way Eldest told it to me before he died?
“Rule one: No differences. Rule two: Without a leader, the ship will fail.”
“Rule three,” Eldest says. “No one is allowed individual thought.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “What?” I say.
“Haven’t you noticed? The Feeders. How empty, emotionless they are? We have ways to control them.”
Something inside of me lurches, a sick feeling not in my stomach, but deeper, a feeling that makes me want to expel myself from myself. “They’re controlled?”
“They have to be. Elder, you know the size of this ship. You know the importance for control.”
I think back to the “celebration” and remember the way the Shippers seemed to know what the old Eldest was about to do before he did it. “What about the Shippers?”
“We need labor to feed us, and we need minds to keep us moving forward. The Feeders have what they need: strength and obedience. The Shippers have what they need: intelligence.”
The way he says “need” strikes a chord deep within me. “Genetic modification?”
Eldest nods. “Among other things. Whatever it takes to maintain control.”
“You…” I taste bile in the back of my throat. “You’re a monster!”
Eldest smiles sadly and stands up from the bed. On the dresser beside it is a digital membrane screen. With a swipe of his finger, the screen comes to life. Eldest taps on it quickly, scans his thumbprint for access, and taps again.
“This was the ship before the first Eldest,” he says, handing the screen to me. While I look down at it, Eldest walks out of the bedroom, and the door zips closed behind him.
“Locked,” the computer by the door chirps.
I drop the screen on the bed and roll my thumb over the biometric scanner. “Access denied,” the computer chirps.
Shite. Eldest has locked me in here with my thoughts and whatever is flashing on the screen.
I hit the door once, hard; hard enough to make my hand hurt. I pick the screen back up with my other hand.
These are vid feeds from across the ship. The people here are all different—different ages, different sizes, different skin and hair colors. There’s no sound, just visual, but I can tell that there’s vibrancy in their lives, something beautiful and strange that I’ve…I’ve never seen before.
But it’s also terrible.
Because they’re all fighting.
It is worse because there is no sound. The vids switch from camera to camera, flashing different scenes. I recognize some things—the Hospital is the same, but there is no garden, no statue. Instead, there are people—wounded, brutalized, bleeding, broken people. The City has all the same buildings in the vids as there is now, but they are cluttered and filled to the breaking point. Some are on fire—and I think about the new buildings in the weaving district, and how this is the reason why they are new.
And over and through it all: fighting.
Groups form. I recognize some of the same people—I start to seek them out in the vids, watch the way they fight, see who they are fighting with. This is a battle.
A battle for the ship.
Eldest made it seem like the mission of the ship was to separate ourselves from the past—but it seems to me as if the past followed us here.
There are two people who show up over and over again. One is a woman—a tall, dark, wild-haired woman who always wears red. The people who follow her also mark themselves with red—scarves on their arms, bandannas around their heads, even just threads woven into the fabric on the hems.
I look down at the clothes Eldest gave me today. Black—with red stitching at the hem.
The other person who shows up is a man. He has long salt-and-pepper hair that hangs from his skull like a curtain. He’s very, very tall, with a heavy brow and fat lips. His color is white.
Some of the vids are backed up, shot from a distance—and I’m grateful for it. Then I can blur my eyes and see the people as dots of reds fighting dots of white. But some of the videos are very close. I see their faces then.
There are more people in white than red. The man stays in the City, gathering people around him. But the wild-haired woman stays on the other side of the ship, near the Recorder Hall and the Hospital, and though there are fewer people with her, they are fiercer fighters. They are smart and ruthless.
I lean up, my back stiff. I don’t know how much time has passed. I’d forgotten that the door was locked, I’d forgotten even the reason why I was here, and the strangeness of the day I’d just had. I’m focused on the vids.
Because I care.
I care about that wild woman. I care about what happens to her. I want her to win.
This is so strange. To see a battle on the place you thought was perfectly peaceful. To watch a rabbit field through a red-colored film because blood splattered the camera.
When a woman in red—a petite thing with short choppy hair—is killed by a man (a boy? He can’t be much older than I am), the wild-haired woman leaps up and strangles the boy-man with her bare hands. There is such fierceness in her eyes, such murderous passion, that she chokes him long after he stops moving, chokes him until a man in red pulls her off and drags her away.
Even though I’ve come to know their faces, I realize that now I’m knowing their lives. The wild-haired woman is fighting with everything she has, and with the death of the other woman, she has very little left.
The videos are dark when the man in white leads a march across the Feeder Level from the City toward the wild-haired woman’s base behind the Hospital, where the garden is. Many have died—so many that I have little wonder now why there are empty buildings in the City, unoccupied homes. The man in white marches resolutely. He goes right by a camera once, and his face, though marred by shadows, also shows a hard mouth. He doesn’t look happy; he doesn’t thrill in the battle.
He has the same sad look that the old Eldest gave me just before he slapped the black patch over his neck.
The wild-haired woman wakes up too late. She was not expecting the attack. The men and women in white rush over those in red like a violent, terrible wave. Red stands to fight, but white won’t relent, and they are pushed farther and farther back.
Until they are up against the wall.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? We’re all on a ship. A ship soaring across the universe, that’s not on the old Earth, but not on the new one, either.
There’s nowhere to go.
The wild-haired woman realizes it the same time I do. I can see it in her eyes. I can see it in the way she almost puts down the blade she’s fighting with…but doesn’t.
She’s against the wall, and she won’t stop.
It’s not the man in white who kills her. He’s not fighting—he’s already celebrating his inevitable victory. No, it’s some other boy-man who I don’t recognize. Some anonymous fighter, too young to have fought in many of these fast and furious battles, who slips a slender knife past the wild-haired woman’s defenses and slides it across the smooth skin of her neck, quick and neat, like a butcher (which I realize he might have been).
And then she’s dead.
Just like Eldest.
But not like Eldest—because instead of just giving up the mantle, she clung to it until it was ripped from her. I pick at the red stitching in my shirt, prouder of it than of the Eldest Robe.
The door zips open. Eldest stands, hesitant, a plate of food in one hand. “Are you done?” he asks.
My stomach roars as I stand. “Yeah.”
He hands me the plate, and we sit on the bed, the video screen between us as it fades to nothing.
“So you see now?”
I nod as I take a bite.
“We have to use control. We have to prevent something like this from ever happening again.”
“The way she died…And she was the source of the Eldest system?” I say, my mind still on the blossoming line of red dripping into the neck of her red tunic, darkening it until the red cloth is almost black.
“She?” Eldest asks. “No, it’s the man, the man in white—he was the first Eldest. He won. His rule is our rule.”
My food tastes dry, and I lower the plate. I should have realized—obviously, the woman’s death meant she’d lost, but I’d forgotten that such a noble death also meant that of course she was the other side, the bad side, the side we’re trying to prevent from happening again.
And I remember the look in the wild-haired woman’s eyes when she killed the man who killed the petite woman. Yes—the Feeders don’t have the bloodthirsty viciousness that made her hands squeeze the life from a man, but their eyes also don’t have the love she had when she saw the woman die.
I am a product of the man in white, not the woman in red. I am from the side that won, the controlled, even march across the ship to press the passionate, angry, fighting people against the walls until their blood stained the metal the same red as the shirts they wore.
“The first Eldest saw what violent emotions can cause. The woman in red is exactly what we’re trying to prevent from happening again. Did you see how close she was? How close to chaos she brought the whole ship? Don’t you see how dangerous that was?”
“Yes,” I admit, but my voice is laced with anger. “But I don’t see how that’s wrong!”
Eldest looks at me as if he doesn’t recognize me. “If we didn’t control the people, if we didn’t have the Eldest system, if the three rules didn’t exist, the ship would fall to mutiny and war. We cannot let people have the same sort of passion that led to this.” He sighs, his face full of regret. “We’re…trapped. It’s easier to forget how very alone we are but…there’s not that many of us. It’s only through the Eldest system that we’ve survived so far.”
I can see why he’s showing me this. I understand the lesson he wants me to learn. He wants me to see that passion is bad, that chaos is evil, and anything as intense as the wild-haired woman’s eyes were when she watched the other woman die can kill everyone on board this ship.
But…I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I mean, yeah. The death. That part was bad. But the fire in her eyes?
I’ve never seen fire like that.
Ever.
Even in myself.
“This can’t be wrong,” I say slowly, to myself—I’d forgotten that Eldest was there until he moves, and I notice he’s watching me intently. But that’s not fire in his eyes—it’s something cold and hard.
“This sort of passion,” I go on, “it can’t be wrong. It makes evil things, yes, the battles were terrible, the blood…but. But. It was worth it. It was.” My fingers curl into fists. “It can’t have been for nothing. It can’t have.”
“It wasn’t,” Eldest says. “It gave us the Eldest system. We had to purge that sort of thing from our lives, and then we could become this society. This perfect society.”
“I don’t want perfect! I don’t want control!”
Eldest stands. Slowly. He takes my plate even though I’ve eaten only a few bites. He walks out of the room. He locks the door.
“You can’t make me rule a society that has all the—the passion taken out of it!” I roar, racing to the door. “I’m Elder! I rule after you! I won’t control the people as you do. You can’t make me control them like that!”
I punch the door hard, denting the metal. But it doesn’t zip open.
Rule Three: No individual thought.
“Are you scared?” the Eldest asked the young Elder, more boy than man. The older Elder stood off to one side, allowing the old man a chance to speak directly to the boy before facing the crowd gathered in the garden.
Elder shakes his head, but it’s a lie. He is. He doesn’t know what to expect.
Eldest cinches the robe around his shoulders.
“This is the changing ceremony. I will step down. You will step up. This has all happened many times before.” He arranges the cloth over him so the embroidery lies flat. In his palm is a black med patch.
“How many Eldests have there been?” Elder asks.
“Countless.” Eldest takes a deep breath. The patch feels cold in his hand, the med side up. He imagines how it will feel when he presses it against his neck.
“You’re going to see a series of vids today, after the ceremony. Watch them carefully. You will need to figure out what they mean. Sometimes… sometimes it’s hard to know what is right and what is wrong. But you are Elder. You will one day be Eldest. And you will know what is right by watching the vids and seeing the price we pay for the ship to live.”
Elder plays with the red stitching at the hem of his tunic. “Did you know what was right?”
Eldest straightens his spine, throws back his shoulders, feels the tension stiffening his neck. “I didn’t at first,” he says. “But… I came to see the truth.” His eyes pierce Elder’s. “You will too. And the Elder after you. And the Elder after him.”
“Forever,” whispers Elder.
Eldest nods. He remembers the wild-haired woman, the way her eyes flashed red with blood and love. He wonders how many Elders protested their first day of training…how many—if any—never stopped protesting, were like the woman who didn’t give up until her blood splashed the walls, and would rather die than become the man who took away violence at the cost of passion. It’s true there had been… aberrations in the past. He did not find this out until after he had accepted his role; only a generation ago, an Elder had protested the system and had been quickly and quietly replaced.
But he also knows—now that time has passed and the memory of that first day has faded, that he had been right to wrap the robe around himself, just as the black patch felt right in his hand, now, and would feel right later this day, when he pressed it against his neck.
“Forever.”