Partisan Saga, Chapter XII - Genesis

                 They followed her out onto the rooftop. Directly before them, the slums of Southwest Wissen. The dilapidated brick and concrete buildings, marked by boarded and broken windows, clambered precariously up from their foundations, fighting for purchase under a gray and apathetic sky. This mute coloring resulted from the great contribution of the factories throughout the district that still churned out gallon after gallon of smog in neat and steady streams. Against her white light, even accounting for the fact that it had been dimmed for the sake of normalcy above ground, the dirty gray of the city seemed even uglier.
                Such bleakness covered only one corner of Wissen. The tower had been positioned quite perfectly; central to this particular half of the city.  The boundary.            
                “Behold the southern reaches of the city,” she said. “The places have fallen into disrepair. The air is poisoned. The streets are broken.”
                “Yeah, it’s a little crummy,” Dorian replied.
                “You deny the truth before you,” she said.
                “When you look at it from up here, it is pretty messed up,” Kevin admitted.
                “I wouldn’t go that far,” Dorian countered. He took another look at the city while the pair of them scrutinized him instead.
                “Your pride is wounded,” she said. “You hold fast to such meaningless things, and as such, you yourself are bereft of meaning.”
                “Perhaps in your opinion.”
                “You see the city for yourself,” she told him. “Now see it for what it is. See the desolation of the people. This is what free will has wrought for mankind: their self-destruction.” She spread her fingers in a grand gesture over the southern district; in that moment, that graceful gesture surpassed everything Dorian’s home had to offer in regards to beauty.
                “Now, look upon the White places.” She led them around to the far side of the elevator’s outlet. The sojourn revealed a place far more sunny, wholesome, clean. Dorian told himself it was a matter of imagination.  “See the wealth, the comfort, the condition. The word of order ensures that all are fed and cared for.” She looked upon the clean and refined structures, and then peered intensely at Dorian.  “This is what you struggle against. How can you say that you have humanity in your heart if you will not do what is best for it?”
                Dorian looked at her, looking at him; past her, Kevin kept his eyes down. On the far side of the roof, the decrepit, all but abandoned areas of the city. “This isn’t the fault of freedom and individuality,” Dorian told them. “What’s best for one person may not be all that great for another.”
                “That is true only so far as the reality that each of us have our role to play in rectifying this world.”
                “No disagreement there.” Dorian stuffed his hands into his pockets and hopped up onto the edge of the rooftop.
                “Dor! What are you doing?”
                “The very existence of your sect says otherwise.”
                “You misunderstand the Black,” Dorian informed her, paying no mind to his Chaptermate. He began to pace, one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, and back again, the same motions reversed, his arms splayed out for balance.
                “The Black play no role in the service and safeguarding of the world. They care for personal pleasure, and some among them for wanton destruction.”
                “Dor,” Kevin pleaded. “Get down from there.”
                “And I contend that such a role is in fact crucial to the world.”
                “What does such senselessness do for the people?”
                Dorian paused, faced her, rocked heel to toe. “We lead by example, and by doing that, we encourage the spirits of the people.  You may claim to keep them alive, but it is we who allow them to truly  live.” Dorian began yet another circuit along the roof, still poised upon the edge as if to prove his point. The White Librarian and she followed him.
                “What you describe as life is merely struggling in the dirt, unable to accomplish all that one is truly capable of, potential stripped away by the unchecked rampage of desire.”
                “Sure, there’s some struggling,” Dorian admitted. “But there are things I am capable of that have no place in your machine, and only through freedom can I embody them.”
                She smiled. “It is folly to pretend the world, left to its own devices, can blossom. It is folly to assume its people can survive if only they are let alone. It is the letting alone that has caused every ill in society.”
                “So is that it?” Dorian asked. “You don’t think we puny humans can survive on our own without you always interfering?” He glanced to Kevin. “Do you feel that way too?”
                Kevin stared at him, and then back out at the slums. He met Dorian’s eyes again, but only for a second. “Well…look at it, Dor.”
                “Through our power, this world can flourish,” she told them. “No one need suffer, nor go without resources. If all serve in their places, salvation is possible.”
                “If all serve,” Dorian repeated. “So tell me. Who gets to decide who serves? Who is the person who hands out the roles for all of us happy little cogs to fill?”
                She ignored the jab, as she had with every jab. “The task of delegation belongs to those most qualified. Those who can see the world for what it is. Those who do not let their personal feelings cloud their judgment. “
                Dorian shrugged. “That’s a rather convenient and self-serving rhetoric.”
                “What you dismiss as convenience is a matter of necessity,” she disagreed. “And yet all that you worship as matters of necessity are merely convenience. What a very backwards creature you are.”
                “Right, right.” Dorian glanced out over the city, and then back to her. He hopped off the ledge. “So. Tell me your name.”
                “My name is irrelevant,” she told him.
                Dorian nodded, slow. “So you told me.”
                “So I will tell you every time you ask.”
                “You also told me that you and I weren’t so different.”
                “We are not.”
                “Then what is it that decides who is ruler and who is ruled? If we are alike?”
                “As I told you. The discernment to see a better future, and the will to lead humanity to it.”
                “And you don’t think us Blacks can do that?”
                “Look upon your city.”
                Dorian didn’t look. “So are we alike, or aren’t we? Because my discernment and my will are for humanity, and it says that you’re going in the wrong direction.”
                “Dor,” Kevin started.
                Dorian glanced to his Chaptermate and grinned. He hurried over to Kevin, put an arm around him and pulled him close. “Look at us.”
                Kevin squirmed, but couldn’t break away from Dorian’s grip. “Dor, what are you doing?”
                “Look at us,” Dorian insisted. “Kev here and I are hardly alike. Two different people!”
                She looked back and forth between them. “Your point?”
                “My point?” Dorian looked at Kevin, then back to her. “My point is that you’re wrong when you say you’re like us. You look exactly like the other copies. All just figments of a person. You’re part of a set, but me and Kev? We’re our own people!” True for the moment anyway; Kevin’s expression brought Dorian no small measure of doubt. “So how can you, as facet of a person, claim to know what’s best for humanity over an individual who is a part of it? One with hopes and dreams and fears of their own?”
                “You misunderstand me,” she said. “You and I are nearly identical.”
                “How do you figure?”
                “You require a visual aid?” She  approached, offering her hand to Dorian. “Very well.”
                He stared at it.
                “If you wish to see the truth, take my hand, that I may prove it to you.”
                Dorian glanced to Kevin. The latter offered the weakest of shrugs, and nodded in her direction.
                “This is a lesson for us both, Dor.”
                “Wise you are,” she told him. Then, her eyes returned to Dorian. “That you will not take my hand says volumes of your precious character, Dorian of the Black.” The words were spoken straight, emotionless, and yet they boiled rather sourly from her immaculate lips.
                “It’s not what you think,” Dorian told her. He grabbed her hand firmly, after a moment more of hesitation.
                Nothing happened.
                She turned then, and moved away from Kevin, guiding Dorian alongside her. “You use my nature as Erdylor’s light to strip away my status as a person, but in truth, you are just the same as I. The only difference is in your mind—that inflated sense of self-importance.”
                “Well,” Dorian glanced back to Kevin. “There’s also the fact that I don’t look exactly like anyone else.”
                “Irrelevant.”
                “I also have a name. And, y’know, a unique identity.”
                “Again, irrelevant,” she insisted. “Unlike your Chaptermate, your nature as a Black Librarian renders any detail you may claim of import irrelevant, for in reality, such things do nothing for the world, and therefore, so little for your worth. You need only toe the line, with no illusions of greatness or self-significance. In this regard, our purpose in the grand scheme, which stands as the only measure of any true importance, you and I are precisely the same.”
                Silence settled upon the rooftop, save for the breeze that blew over it, colder now following her words.
                “So that’s what you mean.”
                “White Librarians like Kevin possess the potential to lead mankind. Your kind can hardly be called Librarians at all, just as it would be foolish to refer to me as such.”
                “So you don’t think terribly much of me and my brethren.” Dorian shrugged. “And that’s fine, I guess. But you disregarding us and our efforts doesn’t make us any less Librarians, and more importantly, any less human.” A faint black glimmer washed over Dorian then, and glossy feathers hovered just above his flesh. Kevin started forward to grab him, but he danced away.
                “Dor! What are you going to do?”
                “By trying to guide— I’m sorry, force— me into your mold, you would be taking away the very thing that makes me human,” Dorian told her.  “Librarians protect humanity.”
                “And we guide it,” She said.
                “But we don’t tell it what to do,” Dorian insisted. “Doing that isn’t protection- that’s just changing what humanity is- trying to make it perfect. But it’s not perfect. And so what?”
                “So you would have Librarians turn their backs upon the people, allow them to fester and make violence upon one another, to suffer and die needlessly?”
                “Not a chance. But I also won’t have any part in telling them their ‘place’ either. I want to save the people, but I don’t need to take away their freedom to do it.” Here, he glared with darkened eyes not at her, but Kevin. “That’s not what I signed up for.”
                “And yet you ‘signed up’ because of fate, because it suits the will and the path of this world. You think of yourself as having made a choice. The truth is, you’re being selfish. Thinking that your individuality is worth so much. No part is greater than the whole.”
                “And the whole is made better by the diversity of its parts!”
                “Diversity. Not free reign.”
                “Free reign is what makes humanity.”
                “And it will destroy humanity.”
                “It’s possible,” Dorian admitted. The formerly steady feathers of his Phenomena began to drift lazily about him. “But the ‘guidance’ you propose will tear it down even faster. I’m willing to tell them what they can’t do. But I’m not in it to say what they have to do.”
                “Then you are not fit to be a Librarian. But this we knew. Of you, and all of the so named ‘Black Library.’”
                “Yeah, you’ve said that before.” Dorian glanced up at the open sky, gray and tortured as it was. “Hey, Kev. You do what you want.”
                “Don’t do it, Dor!”
                Dorian ignored him. “Tell you what. You go ahead and try your way. But if you’ll excuse me, I’m not done trying mine yet. Either way, I’ve seen your ‘truth.’”
                “You have seen as much as you are willing and able to see,” she amended.
                Dorian shrugged. “Call it like you see it, I guess. Either way, mission accomplished. But then, if you and I aren’t so different, maybe one of these days, you’ll roll around.”
                “Or someday, you will aspire to reach true enlightenment.”
                Dorian grinned. He extended a hand to her.
                She stared at him for a long and cold moment.
                The instant she lifted her hand, he grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her close, glaring into her impassive eyes. “And if you and I are really alike,” he muttered, “then you have a name, and I’m going to find it.” Then, he turned, and threw himself from the rooftop.
                Out over the broken city, its rundown buildings and stale grey spaces rushing beneath him. Away from the gleaming and perfect tower that marked the space between her world and his.  The feathers of his manifestation spilled out around him and caught the wind, and he rolled through the sky as one might tumble over a grassy knoll. In seconds, the two of them were nothing more than specks atop the ivory; seconds more, a memory.