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After the fall of Ephron and Canopus, Varian walked among the ruins with the strange sensation that time itself had paused, as if history, exhausted by cruelty and error, had stopped to catch its breath. He traced the broken pillars where once laws were carved in marble and now ivy grew in the fissures. He touched walls that had heard the proclamations of kings, proclamations that pretended to be eternal but crumbled faster than stone.
He asked himself, with the sharp loneliness of one who has lost both city and certainties: what gives law the right to command?
In Ephron, legitimacy had been claimed through morality. Priests wrapped laws in the silk of natural rights, chanting that human dignity was inviolable — until those same priests decreed whose dignity mattered and whose did not. In Canopus, it was procedure: scrolls upon scrolls of regulations, every motion correct, every judgment airtight in form. Yet their perfection rang hollow; for when hunger came, no one cared whether the paperwork was flawless.
And in the brief empire that rose on their ashes, Varian saw power naked and unashamed: decrees that held only because soldiers could enforce them. These burned brightest, but burned to ash the fastest. Varian thought: All laws pretend to be moral, procedural, or inevitable. In truth, most are fragile masks of convenience, worn until they split.
He remembered Ephron’s endless committees: gentle, gradual reforms. Each year they adjusted a clause, softened a punishment, added a caveat. They took such pride in their refinement that, when crisis struck, their law stood like lace in a storm; delicate, useless, shredded. Then he remembered Canopus, where revolutionaries swept everything clean. Ancient codes were scrapped overnight. New constitutions were written with fiery ink, only to collapse into contradiction and confusion. Their radical dream ended not in liberation but in noise, as the people turned again to the sword to find order.
Beyond these ruins, in the southern cities, new voices had begun to rise — philosophers who spoke of law as living clay. They taught that it must be molded by circumstance, tender to compassion, adjusted to the shifting winds of conscience. To Varian, this was only another mask: clay remembers the hand more than the shape. A law so pliant would soon become a mirror, reflecting nothing but the will of those who pressed upon it.
So Varian wrote in his traveling journal, beneath the cold light of a roadside fire:
“The law must bend, but not so often it forgets its own shape. Too rigid, and it shatters; too fluid, and it dissolves. Both Ephron and Canopus chose wrong, though in opposite ways. And clay law, though praised by philosophers, will fare no better.”
***
The elders of Caelorth tell a stor, half truth, half warning, about the days before the wall of law was built. Then there were no Keepers, no tablets, only “Moral Interpreters.”
These interpreters wore velvet robes and perfumed their rulings with eloquence. Their judgments were thick with creed and thinner than cobwebs. A rapist might be sent home after “rehabilitation” in a villa with books and sunlight, because the judge believed in “healing communities.” A murderer could be excused as a “victim of generational violence,” paying only a fine. A man who beat a child until her bones splintered might be described as “misguided” and sentenced to write apologies under the guidance of a “restorative coach.” Meanwhile, a hungry boy caught stealing bread would be flogged in the square, because the judge despised “petty theft” and wished to set an example. People remembered such days with bitter rhymes: Judge Corvane freed wolves but flogged sparrows; Judge Ishban weighed sorrow against supper and found the thief hungrier than the child. Justice had become a market, its price shifting with the mood of the robed merchant. A man’s fate could depend on whether the magistrate had argued with his wife that morning, or enjoyed a fine breakfast.
It was then that the first Keepers; masons, scribes, soldiers; swore to carve law into stone. They made it short, because the longer the law, the easier it twisted. They made it strict, because lenience, once spent, could never be recovered. And they vowed: “Never again will justice depend on the mood of the chair.”
Thus rose the wall of Caelorth: not sculpted morality, but granite certainty. Along the road to Caelorth, Varian’s reflections grew like companions, sharper than any friend. He began to see law as a creature with four faces. The first was ‘order’: stern, unblinking. Without it, every quarrel between neighbors, every insult between clans, would ripple outward into feuds that no army, however disciplined, could quell. Order was the dam against the flood. The second was ‘rights’: gentler, yet unyielding. For what good was order, if it only meant silence enforced by chains? Without rights, order was nothing but a prettier mask for slavery, and men wore their obedience like shackles instead of duty. The third was ‘justice’: elusive, difficult. Without fairness, even obedient hearts soured. Resentment would breed in silence, and silence would break, as silence always does. Justice was the thin thread that stitched together loyalty from the raw fabric of fear. And the fourth was ‘power’: ugly, inevitable. Every law bent to someone’s hand; a throne, a council, a dynasty. To deny this was folly. The law might speak in the name of heaven, or reason, or the people, but beneath all that language, it bent toward whoever had the strength to enforce its shape.
Varian did not love these truths, but he trusted them, as sailors trust the stars: not for kindness, but constancy.
This last thought weighed on him most. He had walked through cities where constitutions were praised as “living blueprints,” but what architect had drawn them? What hunger, what fear, what pride had guided the hand that pressed quill to parchment? Blueprints could be elegant and still flawed, or outdated before the ink was dry. When at last the horizon ended and Caelorth’s walls rose before him, Varian felt no triumph. He felt, instead, the heavy clarity of one who has walked through too many ruins. At its highest aspiration, he thought, “law must be simple enough to stop disputes before they spilled into violence, and strong enough to make collective life possible. If a constitution is a blueprint, then a Keeper’s task is not to dream palaces in the air, but to repair the cracks that let rainwater seep into the foundation. And as the gates of Caelorth closed behind him, Varian resolved to become that, Keeper.
II
Winter pressed its breath against the Great Hall. The torches spat and flickered, their flames bending as if they, too, feared judgment. The crowd murmured, thick with whispers that clung to the vaulted stone like smoke.
Edris stood shackled, wrists in iron, his shoulders bent as though he carried more than chains. He had killed a merchant. The facts were plain, the witnesses many. On the tablets, the law was blunt: If you take a life, you give your own.
And yet the air was swollen with excuses. This was not a clean murder born of greed. The merchant had hoarded grain while famine starved the alleys of Caelorth. A child had died in Edris’s own house, ribs sharp against skin, lips cracked for want of bread. While, across the street, the merchant’s storerooms bulged, sacks stacked high like monuments to selfishness.
Edris had not slept for nights. He had lain on the floorboards of his empty cottage, hearing the thin cough of his son, until silence smothered the room. He had seen the boy’s eyes glaze, and after that, he had seen them everywhere: hovering above his bed, reflected in a basin of water, gleaming pale in the dark corners of his room.
And outside, he had watched the merchant lift a glass of wine, the red liquid gleaming like blood, had smelled the roast loaf buttered and torn. He had seen him in a palace built not from hasting in sunshine, but from skulls of the fallen, wars won with blades paid for by hoarded grain, slaves and skulls crushed to feed a dynasty of profit. Edris had seen how the man lounged among spoils, on cushions of women taken and discarded, his wealth piled like carrion under velvet drapes.
But Edris was not always the hollow man who stood now in chains. He had once known prosperity, ships under his name and crews who toasted him in taverns. He had given bread to orphans, coin to the temples, work to men whose backs were bent by poverty. He was no saint, but neither a miser: he believed wealth was a river, meant to flow, not a stagnant pond. And when his last vessels vanished beyond the horizon; swallowed by storms or piracy or the simple malice of fate, the river dried. His palace fell into misery. Fortune had abandoned him, but compassion had not.
It was then the merchant bared his teeth. Debt, tax, lien, he squeezed Edris like a vise, stripping what remained: the house, the livestock, the bread he might have fed his child. Every visit brought fresh humiliation, every tally a reminder of power’s cruelty when stripped of mercy.
The crowd remembered this too. They had seen Edris in his years of giving, had eaten the bread of his open hand. To them, he was not merely a killer but a man who had carried misfortune on his back until it crushed him. His grief was theirs, his vengeance an echo of their own silent angers. Long ago, before the wall such whispers would sway the gavel in Caelorth. Compassion would argue: a man driven by famine cannot be measured by the same rod as one driven by greed. Judges would weigh not only the crime but the circumstance, balancing punishment with pity.
But now in Caelorth, the Keeper’s oath was older than pity. Varian rose, cloak heavy with frost, voice a blade unsheathed. “The law does not bend for grief. Nor does it sharpen for greed. It stands.”
The hall froze into silence, where even breath seemed guilty. Some bowed their heads, grateful for the certainty that spared them from the anarchy of exceptions. Others clenched their fists, tasting the injustice of a law too cold to care. And Edris, who had once been master of ships, helper of the hungry, friend of all and master to none, bearer of both wealth and ruin; stood caught between these two laws: the unyielding wall of certainty, and the trembling hand of compassion.
Yet in truth, the crowd did not see Edris alone. They saw themselves in him. His ruin was theirs, his fury theirs, his hunger theirs. In the curve of his bent shoulders, they saw the weight of debts on their own backs; in his haunted eyes, they glimpsed the faces of their children who had coughed through winters without bread. Resentment, that old serpent, coiled in the hall. For years they had watched men like the merchant dine in gold-lit rooms, their laughter spilling into the streets while commoners swallowed silence. They had seen their sweat turned to coin, their fields stripped bare, their wives pawed by collectors. In Edris’s knife they saw a shadow of their own hands, what they had not dared to do, what they had only imagined in fevered nights of rage. And so, the hall became divided not merely in judgment but in identity. One half clung to the wall of certainty: the Code as their shield, a brutal but dependable clarity in a life already too fragile. The other half felt the whisper of rebellion: if Edris was guilty, so were they all, for every man in that hall had once dreamed of striking down a tyrant in his own small way.
Varian knew this as he looked over them. Their silence was not submission but fracture. The law could end Edris, yes; but it could not so easily silence the part of every soul that envied him his defiance. The hall was silent but for the sound of his breath; ragged, mortal, already half-ghost.
At dawn, Edris was executed.
That night, Varian wrote:
“A harsh law may be feared. An uncertain law will be tested. Once men test the wall, they will keep testing it, until they find the place to break through.”
Months passed. Merchants slept easier. Farmers grumbled but admitted planting was simpler when the fence never moved.
That evening, with frost climbing the shutters, Varian gathered his apprentices by the fire. Their eyes were young, still bright with the rhetoric drifting north from the southern schools: teaching of living law, clay softened by compassion, reshaped by each hand that touched it.
Varian picked up a stone from the hearth and weighed it in his palm.
“You believe law is clay,” he said, “pliant to conscience, tender to mercy. But clay remembers the hand more than the shape. A clay law becomes not the law of a people, but the law of whoever molds it that morning. It bends to the priest today, the magistrate tomorrow, the noble the day after. And when too many hands press at once, it crumbles into mud.”
He set the stone down, its weight thudding against the wood. “This,” he said, “is law. Not clay, but wall. Not virtue, not hope, not theology. A wall to keep chaos from pouring in. A wall to shield dignity, however flawed. A wall to remind us of fairness, even when men bargain with crooked hearts. And above all, a wall to hold power steady, for even noble dreams collapse without stability.”
The apprentices shifted uneasily. One whispered, “But is fear enough to hold men together?”
Varian looked at him, a boy still soft with optimism. “Fear is not noble,” he said, “but it is dependable. Compassion is noble, but it sways with the wind. A wall built on compassion alone will buckle in the first storm. A wall built on stone endures.” The apprentices fell silent. The stone on the table seemed to throb with its own gravity, more terrifying in its stillness than any sermon. For in its unyielding surface, they glimpsed a truth their teachers in the south had not told them: certainty, not mercy, was the foundation of peace.
In Caelorth, fate fell straight as a plumb line from roof to ground. “If the law is a wall,” Varian told them, “it must be stone, not clay. Shape it once for pity, and you reshape it endlessly, until it no longer stands.”
He sharpened the lesson further. “Justice delayed is justice abandoned and you slay it twice. Delay teaches the wicked that fear can be bargained with. And forgiveness offered without cost is not mercy but indulgence; the foolish charity of sheep, inviting wolves. It is the philosophy of graves. For it is only the dead who cannot distinguish right from wrong, punishment from pity. Forgiveness without judgment is not mercy, it is abdication. It is weakness dressed as virtue.”
To him, law had to project strength, even when its hand was seldom used. Fear was not noble, but it was dependable. Compassion, noble as it seemed, could not bind society; for compassion sways with wind and mood, while fear settles deep in bone.
One morning, a case came before him. A young noble had struck a farmer to death in a tavern quarrel. The defense was simple: the noble was young, impassioned, drunk, his lineage old, his intentions never cruel.
The noble was no simple villain. He had been, in many eyes, a good man; generous at festivals, respectful to elders, often seen walking among the poor with words of encouragement. Unlike other sons of ruling families who drowned themselves in wine and arrogance, he tried, at times, to carve a different path. He spoke of fairness, he shared coin from his purse, he lifted a few from despair. And yet, he was also proud, quick-tempered, and never free from the perfume of power. His compassion had limits, it flowed toward his own people, his own class, the crowd that mirrored him and adored him. For those outside that circle, his mercy thinned into arrogance.
When the farmer’s corpse was carried into the Hall, some mourned him as a victim, but others whispered uneasily. He was not guiltless. He had been known to prey upon the vulnerable: a handful of maidens had borne his shame in silence, their eyes averted whenever he passed. Yet he was also a man who tilled hard soil, delivered his tithe, and filled the state granaries when harvests allowed. More than once, he had brought a sack of barley to the orphanage, or slipped grain into the bowls of the hungry outside the temple gates. He was both sustainer and defiler, a man who carried bread in one hand and sin in the other.
The crowd knew this. To some, his farming and his donations outweighed his darker deeds; to others, his crimes against innocence rotted whatever generosity he offered. His death at the noble’s hand did not fit cleanly into martyrdom, and so the murmurs thickened: did justice mean avenging him, or exposing him?
The court reflected this fracture. One half whispered in nobles defence, He is ours. He speaks for us. He is not like the others. Their admiration for him was less about justice than about recognition: he was a mirror of their hopes, their imagined nobility. The other half resented him for the same reason; because he rose where they fell, because his popularity made their own insignificance sharper.
Varian saw it all: the murmurs, the divided glances, the way people clung to the noble’s image as if goodness could outweigh blood on the tavern floor. And he thought: This is the crowd’s greatest folly. They mistake familiarity for virtue, popularity for innocence. They would worship even a wolf, so long as it howled in their dialect.
In his teaching voice, iron-edged, he spoke:
“You wonder why you love them both? It is because you do not love justice, you love its reflections. You adore those who sin boldly in ways you secretly envy, or who charm in ways you cannot. You will crown a thief because he smiles, and crucify an honest man because he does not.
This noble has done good, yes. But what is goodness worth if it is balanced against murder? Shall we let one deed cancel another? That is not justice, that is bookkeeping of souls.”
The noble bowed his head, his admirers still clinging to his image, unwilling to see him whole. The crowd had fractured: some mourning the fall of a man they idolized, others satisfied at seeing privilege struck down.
From the benches came voices, rising in a strange harmony of contradiction.
“He fed us when no one else would,” cried one woman.
“And cheated us twice thereafter,” hissed another.
“He was better than the others of his blood; at least he walked among us!”
“Better? He killed, and you praise him still?”
The murmur swelled, a mirror of the man himself: half-light, half-shadow, both adored and despised.
Their confusion was sharpened by the advocate who rose to defend him. The man began, his tone carrying the polish of foreign courts, “justice bends to the soul of the act, not only to the letter of the code. A thief forgiven if hunger guides his hand. Even a killer, if provoked by cruelty, may find mercy. The law breathes with men; it does not cage them.”
The benches erupted. Some nodded, eager to believe their noble was merely a man caught in passion. Others spat at the floor, furious that excuses could be dressed as justice.
Varian listened, his face unreadable. When he rose, the hall froze. “To him, law had to project strength, even when its hand was seldom used. Fear was not noble, but it was dependable. Compassion, noble as it seemed, could not bind society, for compassion sways with wind and mood, while fear settles deep in bone.
A society that excuses the powerful while punishing the weak is no society at all, only plunder with ceremony. You say he was good to some? So are tyrant in their quarters, killers in their tribes. The crowd confuses recognition with virtue. You see yourself in him, and so you call him innocent. But a mirror does not cleanse a face of its blood.”
The crowd shifted uneasily, each person hearing their own fear reflected. Some clung harder to the noble, unable to release their idol. Others, suddenly sober, realized they had adored him not for justice, but for the way he mirrored their hunger, their pride, their vanity.
Varian looked over them all. “The wall of law must stand. Stone, not clay. Shape it once for sympathy, once for status, once for the smile of a noble; and soon it is no wall at all, only mud, shaped by every hand that presses against it.”
He leaned forward, mocking the soft philosophy of foreign lands. “In their courts, they say a good man must not be judged by his worst deed. And so they forgive, delay, excuse. But tell me, if a man slays your child, does it comfort you to hear that he once fed his neighbour’s?
Varian, unmoved, declared:
“The law must be a wall of stone. If you allow one crack for pity, another for popularity, another for politics, soon it is no wall at all, only mud shaped by whoever presses against it.”
The court murmured. Such a man should be spared, fined, or sent to prayer. A judge should stroke his beard and muse that youthful folly was not malice. But Varian’s gaze cut through the chamber.
“Greatness,” he said, “is not inherited with blood, nor annulled with wine. It is measured in deeds, and this deed was murder. Shall we say the farmer’s skull split less because the hand that struck him was noble?”
The noble’s kin pleaded for mercy. Varian’s voice sharpened:
“A society that excuses the powerful while punishing the weak is not a society, but plunder dressed in ceremony. The law is not a feast from which the rich take meat and the poor only bones.”
He pressed further, turning to the apprentices at his side.
“Look closely. Compassion sways with fashion, it leans toward the rich today, toward the beggar tomorrow, until no man knows where it will lean next. But fear, fear is steady. Fear binds the drunkard’s hand before he raises it. Fear warns the noble before he swings his blade. Fear is not noble, no, but it is loyal.”
The chamber hushed, the noble pale as lime. The apprentices, shifting uncomfortably, felt the weight of the words. In Caelorth, pity was not abolished, it was acknowledged as a dangerous luxury, a perfume that intoxicated even while it concealed rot.
The gavel fell like a stone. The noble’s sentence matched the farmer’s death , life for life. And though the crowd trembled, they walked away with certainty: in Caelorth, the wall of law did not bend, not for grief, not for greed, not for bloodlines.
Years passed.
Desire did not leave the people, greed, rage, lust still swam in their blood, but the wall stopped those impulses like a knife stops on armour. A thief’s hand might hover over a purse, but he would feel the weight of years in a cell before his fingers closed. A man’s rage might flare toward violence, but in his mind’s eye he would see the block, the blade, the narrowing of the world into darkness. Fear bypassed conscience. Virtue required effort, reflection, and sometimes sacrifice. Fear required nothing but imagination.
In his ledger, Varian wrote:
“Philosophers err in thinking law must cultivate virtue. Virtue is rare and unreliable. Fear is universal. Fear is the leash that fits every neck.”
In Caelorth, crime adapted, by vanishing where it could. Not because the people were virtuous, but because they were careful.
One night, Varian’s apprentice asked, “Is it not cruel to take a life without weighing the reasons?” Varian replied: “Mercy belongs to the gods. Justice belongs to men. When justice wears mercy’s face, it wears every face it’s given, until it has no face at all.”
The kingdom changed, trade widened, towers rose; but the wall stood. Its grooves were polished by the touch of generations who had traced them not in affection, but in understanding. In other kingdoms, people feared the process; endless trials, unpredictable sentences, the shifting morality of whoever wore the robes. In Caelorth, people feared the crime itself, because its consequence was fixed and swift. They were not freer to do what they pleased. They were freer from uncertainty. It was the freedom of walking beside a high wall, knowing exactly where the drop was on the other side. For some, that was enough to steady their steps. For others, the wall was the only thing keeping them from falling over. And in this, the poorest and richest stood alike. The Keepers who followed Varian repeated his words. And so, the wall held. Because it held, men stepped carefully. And because men stepped carefully, the kingdom endured.