Quoted By:
This <span class="mu-b">Sight-Rat</span> will see nothing for a long while. The chains of the world are firmly wrapped around their limbs, but the stoutness with which they bear their pained state is strange.
Perhaps if you imbibe too deep of the Mothdream, in an uncontrolled dosage, parts of yourself flutter away on soft wings and never become yours again?
This Rat has traded away their ability to feel pain at all.
It's. . . odd.
Rinik is a cunning type. We would know if he had at his command a legion of sense-dulled, perfection pushing Slicerats. He would rule not just the knife trade but the City, wouldn't he? An army that remembers neither fear nor hunger nor falling is less an army and more the ace up your sleeve in any condition. The Legion wishes they could condition their troops half this hard.
But maybe the consequences are also as we see before us. The Slicerat has ripped the chains of their own sense of self clean off of their frame, and their constitution suffers. Can the mind truly recall every instinctual twitch of fibre and pulse of heart? Of kidney, liver, lung and blood?
Is there such a thing as too much freedom?
Maybe Rinik does not rule the City because all his perfect little perfect rats forget that he is their leader, that walls hurt and that limits that confine also mark out the limits one can live within.
That may be the truth of all this, Riv. Rinik has access to Mothdream, but he does not have access to Moth Banner trainers, the ones who guide the little flittering insect that is consciousness through the vast night that true freedom brings. Without them, all he has is a stock-pile of a dust that burns purple, chokes the air and forces you to concentrate to recall the faces of old friends.
Hm. Such a thing...
What would that be worth to an animist, do you think? Gentle abrasion of the self, without all the cutting and murmuring and messing about with Iconography?
