### What you are Religion is a curious thing in Polis. If one took all of the sacred texts and hallowed artifacts and sanctified temples and ground them into a paste, boiling and distilling it until a perfect elixir had been made, containing the entirety of the faith inside of itself, then bottled in that elixir would be the city entire, suspended in a microcosm. Between the Four Daily Bells, the year's Seventeen Crossings, and the nightly Procession of Stars, there is hardly a moment in any citizen's life that is not accounted for by the Heavens. Some of your fellows grumble about the demanding schedule, but you find a comfort in the ceaseless nature of it. It feels right that every day should be holy. You didn't have that appreciation of the holy when you decided to become a priest - back then it was just a career well suited to someone who liked words and still felt ambivalent about people. It wasn't a fear of others, nor a hatred, but a kind of perpetual, bumbling awkwardness, as though you had been born with the social equivalent of one leg that was shorter than the other. What you longed for was work that involved reading and quiet - what your parents wanted was work that would keep you around people. The priesthood was a compromise you thought you could live with. You were as surprised as anyone when you found that you *loved* it. When you stay quiet you are seen as patient instead of shy; when you pause before answering a question you are seen as wise, not uncertain. Instead of spending your life in quiet contemplation of the holy writ, you have found yourself sent out into the community as a Counselor, a Confessor, and even a Riddlespeaker. When your laity come to you in distress or confusion, you receive them clad in a silence that invites even the most reticent to reveal their innermost selves. You are armed with parables and koans to guide them to wisdom. ### What you want Your rites do not merely mark the order of the universe, they enforce it. When the dawn-gong is struck the sun responds because it must. The litany of hours is recited each week to force a meaning onto the passage of days, and before the construction of Shiliu Monastary there was no telling when the winter would end. It was only through the great rites (the coaxing chants, the smoke offerings, the measured pacing of the seasonal procession) that the cold finally learned its place. So when word reaches you of a dead child, you recognize the aberration immediately. A breach. A tear in the fabric you have spent your life stitching tight. A small but undeniable return of the senselessness that once governed everything. All that you want is to correct it. To remind the world that within the walls of Polis, _nothing_ happens without the sanction of the temple. A child cannot die here. Therefore, this child has not died; something is out of alignment, and you will set it right. ### What you fear You fear this is not the old chaos you know how to drive back, but something new. In the time before Polis, storms raged and seasons wandered, but children did not die without cause. Even chaos obeyed certain limits. If a child can die now, the world is changing in ways your rites cannot command. And if this is the first breach in a new era of disorder, then it began on your watch - a failure the gods saw and allowed. ### Character Notes Relations - [[Physician]]: You respect their precision, but distrust their conviction. They treat the body as a machine that can be coaxed back into motion with the right adjustments - an admirable hope, but dangerously narrow. They elevate the physical above all else, forgetting that the body is subject to the anima of the soul, something bound to higher laws. You do not know whether their confidence is genius or hubris. - [[Parent]]: Their grief is a pure thing - both righteous and profoundly dangerous. You want to comfort them, but you worry their desperation may ignite something you cannot control. If the faith falters in front of them they will never forgive you. You are not sure that you will either. - [[Politician]]: Their authority is peculiar: not divine nor skilled, yet undeniably effective. You have witnessed edicts alter the flow of rivers and votes calm the heavens, but have never decided whether this is a blessing or a trespass. You suspect that, like you, they fear what this death means, though they hide it behind certainty. Questions for the player to consider - Do you truly believe in the attention of the divine, or have you been enforcing order on your own longer than you care to admit? If you do believe then what scares you more; that the gods have allowed this because of your failure, or that you have been serving the kind of gods that would allow this abhorrence to happen? - What might the world begin to look like if the boundaries you maintain begin to fail? What line would you cross to prevent a new era of chaos from beginning? - If your rites fail here, in front of this audience, will you interpret it as a flaw in yourself, in the faith, or in the world?