Interlude 4

  Interlude 4

  Notes by Elizabeth Eddison

  I hate to make assumptions. After all, they are a small sample. They are all young, and they have known each other a long time. Furthermore, we have communicated only for a brief period, through an imperfect medium. I have not even met them, not really. So it would be foolish of me to presume to understand the psychology of their race. Yet I can at least speak somewhat for the eight daimon with whom we have contact—or at least, those of the eight willing to indulge my questioning. The results are intriguing.

  It appears that the daimon tend to view things dualistically, or as a spectrum with two extremes and one middle option. I have observed this Manichaean thinking on numerous occasions. For example, according to Zayana every daimon believes in the substantive reality of good and evil, as well as a neutral middle ground. As well, on their home planet a cultural spectrum existed with magic and ‘the old powers’ on one end, and technology and scientific advancement on the other. This divided their world socially into the magical Kingdom of Meszria and the technological Shogunate, with some neutral factions in the middle. According to Zayana, as well as Derxis, who rather arrogantly claims to understand everything about the way people think, this mental categorization of things into opposing extremes is endemic to their race. They see it everywhere: day and night, with a buffer of dawn/dusk in-between. Music or silence, with things like speech in the middle. Heroes and villains, gods and monsters, love and hate.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  It is all due to the ultimate dichotomy of arda and the Voidlight, which is a sort of physics-defying anti-light. In the Narrative, both theirs and our own, this can be seen in the outer worlds: the Bright World, which is made of arda, the Dark World, which represents the Voidlight and acts as the antagonistic force, and Ardia, the battleground, in the center..

  Since every daimon possesses arda and feels a powerful innate connection to it, this makes the Voidlight their natural enemy. There is some complication with the black daimon, whose arda is black and who feel the call of Voidlight drawing them out into the darkness. For this reason, the black daimon are generally feared, outcasts whose position with the rest of society is uneasy at best. Perhaps it is also for this reason that Jeronimy is an asshole.