First Lesson
October 2022 | by Dani
Worldbuilding | Ittoril
Quote from an unknown monk in the Golden Hills, at the beginning of a lecture to his or her students.
"There is this single idea that permeates the entirety of Leonid Society. It is one that, in my travels there, I have found everyone in the city believes in — whether they realise it or not. We here often understand it as a fallacy, and the Leonid people seem to agree with us — they'll tell you that the idea is immature, that they know it isn't true — and yet they still seem to act as if it is. The idea I am of course talking of is the belief that "good things come to those who are good themselves".
Leonid people seem to make every choice and every decision under the assumption that all that they do — and all that others do — is going to be justly rewarded or punished; they assume that those who work hard will succeed, or that those who do evil will get what they deserve. The idea is perhaps the most insidious belief in Leonid society — it transcends all social classes and groups — and so as colonisers, the Leonid people have tried to twist the beliefs of the cultures around them to fit it.
The prime example of this is, of course, the Leonid appropriation of one of our sayings: "before one can know power, one must first know compassion".
The phrase originates here in the Golden Hills, but it has recently found its way to the countercultural crowd of Leona; the mystic folk, the dissenters — the people who reject the Empress's and Consulate's authority. Or at least, it's found its way to those of them with less cultural awareness than their peers; They think that they're "really cool" and that they're "spreading the ancient wisdom of the northern sages".
The thing is, the Leonids misunderstand the phrase. They, of course, interpret it as meaning that "one cannot physically become powerful until they have become compassionate" — that "power can only come from compassion" — like before, that "good things come to those who are good themselves".
This could not be further from the truth. No, what we mean when we say the phrase is not that it is impossible to know power before compassion, but that if someone were to do so — were to know true, true power, without first knowing true compassion — it would spell doom for all of us."
