Chương 769: Day Seven Hundred And Sixty-Seven

Dear Diary,"If you need to use Bloodlust, To overcome fear of death, Be sure that your cause is Just." - Tabitha Diaz, Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Bloodlust For some who are used to the mercurial moods and petty decrees of the other Gods of our world, the Commandments of Tabitha may seem typical, albeit more altruistic than most. In this Verse is an example of that being far from the case. Tabitha's Commandments to us like this one, where she may not give a reason, always have an underlying rationale.

While each of her Commandments to us have some reason, in many cases, especially those where she does not openly explain herself, those reasons boil down to consequences. Specifically, avoiding unintended unfortunate consequences of our actions. For our Goddess is a merciful Goddess, and does not wish any of us to live with the guilt of poorly employed Agency. In this Verse, she makes it clear that if we are to use Bloodlust as she described in the preceding Verse, we ought do so only when our cause is Just.

For once Bloodlust is embraced, thought and reason are often set aside; all that remains is the need to draw blood, to reap the lives of villains like wheat. Which, should those villains be deserving of death, is right and just and good. But should they not be, our hands will not be stayed once we embrace Bloodlust, even though perhaps they should be.

- Priestess Most High Above All Others, Archmage Imperator Saffron Aetos-Diaz, Commentary on the Doctrine of Tabitha I don't really know if I ever thought of it that way or not. Maybe I did, somewhere subconsciously, or even some conscious train of thought that later derailed and never got saved to long term memory. I'm just glad I've got my Kitten coming along behind me clarifying all this shit, because without her I have no idea what my Worshippers would wind up doing.

Probably doing some kind of unpleasantly ugly murderfucking. Like, not even consensual violent sex, or screaming picts painting themselves blue and charging the bastions of the oppressors and exploiters with raging hard ons. Nope, just plain old fashioned ultra violence. Whether you're talking about Clockwork Orange or The Purge, that shit is not anywhere near as cool in real life as it is in movies. Because yeah, for a certain kind of abused person, the idea of being able to lash out is appealing.

If a person's never had any real power to control their own fate, if every time they try they're shot down by shit out of their control, then told they didn't 'try hard enough', 'work smart enough', or fuck me but it makes me want to scream and kill just thinking about someone saying they didn't 'believe'. Look, bish, I am a literal Deity and can will things into being, and shit has still gone wrong for me. Trust me, I did not want to Revive either of my daughters, but in each case some asshole killed them.

I didn't want to slaughter a fuckton of poor bastards outside Newark and the Yards, but some dick decided to fuck around, and ten thousand poor bastards found out. I did not want to turn The Morrigan into a tentacle sleeve, didn't want to torture Artemis to death, didn't want to throw my fuckin' back out putting the Jackville peninsula back in place. Yeah, bit of a digression, but my point is that old bald dude was right; sometimes you can do everything right and still lose. That's fuckin' life.

But when that happens over and over and over, and somebody says, 'what if you could forget about morals and empathy and living a positive life and just take what you wanted from the cold dead fingers of fat exploitative fucks who've never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from', that sounds awesome instead of awful. Terrific instead of terrifying. Heavenly instead of hellish. Because that's how most of those hyper wealthy fuckers got their wealth in the first place.

They didn't build up; they killed and stole and enslaved. Seriously, 'generational wealth' is a cool concept and all, but if at the end of three generations you've got more than three lifetimes worth of wealth? That didn't come from nowhere. Somebody made that shit.

Yeah, I get it, if you can start out with tools and tips and a solid foundation, you can make more of your life, but back in the day there were assholes who seemed to think that accounted for twenty or thirty thousand lifetimes of wealth in one generation. Or even more than that, for the really ballsy assholes. So yeah, The Purge sounds like a great idea when you're stomped into the ground, but it's really just changing who's sitting at the top of shit pyramid. Which, as I noted, I'm tryna dismantle.

Or at least flatten out and lift the base so folks maybe have a shit free place to sit. I dunno. Maybe I'm just frustrated. Maybe growing up the way I did back in the day left some kind of psychological infection, and every now and then it swells up until it bursts, and all kinds of psychic pus comes pouring out. Maybe I'm just too dumb to realize that's how the world's supposed to be.

Or maybe I'm right, and even if I'm too dumb to fix things, I've pulled together a team of people who are smart enough, and bribed or coerced them to make that shit happen. A girl can dream. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. So yesterday along with doing my normal daily stuff, I spent the day escorting Dionysus and the Marshall around the Homestead. Lindsey showed them both the vineyard.

I mean, it's not like, a whole other thing, it's just a section of our fields, but it's clearly growing grapes on vines suspended above the ground. We have a vineyard and I had no clue. but Lindsey did, and she showed us all about it. Told me stuff about grapes I mostly already knew. Gotta say, D did the grampa thing really well, nodding along like our girl was imparting the wisdom of the ages. When she finished, he asked her something about soil.

They lost me entirely, so I wound up sneaking grapes off the vine with the Marshall. Super sour, maybe even a little bitter. I loved them anyway, because my girl had helped grow them. We spent the rest of the morning wandering around the fields like that; she even showed us Devorah's beehives. Pretty much what I thought of as 'modern' beehives, the white boxy things. Spent the afternoon helping with Isnomi, Maze, and Ria with their assorted pets.

Well, their pet, their mounts, and their nonhuman friend Mister Slither. D looked a bit disturbed still by the Nightmares. The Marshall hid it well, but was not exactly copacetic about being in an underground room with what would, anywhere else in the world, be a bunch of apex predators. When we got back to East House for dinner, Marshall duBois said something about heading back, and Saffron quietly said, "perhaps you ought to stay another night, Marshall."

I had no idea why, but duBois can take a hint when it's lobbed at him. He and I didn't repeat our drunken confab, but he did join us in the Bath. He looked a little bit out of place, but wasn't completely wooden. After bath time, once the kids were in bed, Saffron pulled me to the Bedroom. I looked around.

"Where's D and Marie?" She smiled.

"Off in the woods." She leaned in and murmured, "sorry about rescheduling your briefing with the Marshall. Someone's scrying. I'm waiting them out." I smiled into her neck and whispered back, "so, that's all you brought me here for?"

"Oh, no." When I pulled back, she Grinned.

"I suspect my Goddess wants to see these up on that big screen next to her Maw." My Kitten was not wrong. She knows me so well. Also at that scale they're almost scarily large. Lady fear boner is weird. Even weirder when all I've got are tentacles and a Maw. The next day in the Courtyard, Ria and Alex were sparring under Maze's... Not really 'supervision' so much as refereeing. Maze wasn't exactly the sparring sort, but she still wound up being the referee. Then again, she seemed more amused than anything.

Kinda interesting watching how far Ria had come after just a few sessions with Lenny. Alex was... way more like me. All energy and maybe some natural talent, but no real technique. Then the Marshall stepped in and asked Ria, "Lord Lancaster's been training you, hasn't he?"

"Yes, sir." DuBois nodded.

"I can tell. Probably for the best, what with you using a spear." Ria looked at me, and I nodded to the Marshall before stepping over to Alex. She'd been going with the classic wooden practice sword and wooden shield. While part of me listened in to the Marshall talking about how a spear is a longer, heavier weapon, where you need to low key plan out your moves a little further because of inertia and shit, most of me checked out the sizing on Alex's gear.

"You made these?"

"I did!" I nodded.

"You like the size?"

"I do!" I nodded to Ria.

"Can you move it faster than she's moving that spear?" Alex opened her mouth, closed it.

"Yeah, didn't think so. Look, I get that you want big. Big can work. But if you're gonna go big? You gotta go big. You can't go halfway. Put both hands on your sword."

"But then I can't hold the shield." I nodded.

"Then that sword is too big for you to use with a shield. Or that shield is too big for you to use with that sword." I thought for a second, then asked, "do you think you can think faster than Ria?" She scoffed.

"Okay. So you gotta make sure you can either adjust and adapt faster than her, or you gotta hit too hard for her to stop." I pause for a second, then realize which way she's gonna lean.

"If you do that, she's probably gonna see it coming, redirect your hit or dodge it, then get you while you're off balance."

"So you're saying I can't beat her?" I shook my head.

"Nah. We just gotta work with what you got. Aggression. Initiative. Maybe some speed, once you get going. Enough strength you don't need a big hunk of wood to make somebody feel it when you tag them." While the Marshall stepped Ria through a couple stances, I did some surreptitious alterations on Alex's gear, showing her why. We lightened up her 'sword', then did the same with her shield. She couldn't hide behind it, but she could move it fast enough to actually deflect stuff instead of trying to tank it.

When they went back to it, with the Marshall and I standing there watching, while D helped Maze 'referee', both my girls were... Better. Alex definitely pushed Ria a lot harder, but for her part Ria was acting rather than completely reacting. Had to stop things when Alex took a jab to the gut as she was lunging, but after a bit of Healing and a few minutes running laps to burn off her irrational anger, she stepped up and gave her sister a hug.

"Nice shot!"

"You too." That took Alex by surprise, because she'd been too winded to realize.

"What do you mean?"

"You knocked my spear clean out of my hands, and it smacked me in the face on the rebound."

"Really?" Ria nodded solemnly. I think maybe she overstated how much damage the face smacking did, but still, Alex had disarmed her, even if she'd been in too much pain to realize it. Baby steps, I guess. Every lesson you live through is a lesson you learn.