Dejoki, Seishin

An excerpt from an in-fiction work in Psevon, the Realm of KTW: Runa

Dejoki, Seishin 
From “Hopefall Past, Hopeful Future” by Ozra Ga’al (assigned DARKWRIT via Wardsen)

“Blood is sacred. They say so. Life courses through us all, manifest mortality. In Candar, we forbid necromancy. It is an affront to the natural order of existence, heretical to Fen’aoh, and a perversion of that which is understood as a cycle. As such, all arcanisms that use blood are banned, punishable by exile to the Isle.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Healing uses blood, does it not? Is it contemptible to return what pours from a wound? To rut through the viscous hunting for disease? Not everything is light and dark. Some is haze, grey. And in that grey, witches thrive.

Some say they just think differently. Necromancy only breaks a cycle if you see life as a cycle, afterall. Shapesayers adjust perception and weave alike, contorting what is understood into what is possible. Malleable makers of unrest.

But necromancy is rare, rarer than the Sem and Emperor Supreme would have us believe. Most so-called ‘witches’ simply live outside the bounds of civility…or obedience masquerading as civility. Let me ask you, have you ever seen someone burned alive? Locked in rokcha and stripped of both sanity and skin? I have. And I assure you, witches weren’t the ones doing it.

The truth is, for all the talk of vile magicks and manipulative ploys, there is only one constant in this ideological feud: blood. Not a twisting of its essence, nor a protection of its sanctity.

No, the real problem is the hunger for it. The drive, the ravenous desperation to stain the ground with self-righteous success. The need for sacrificial lambs.
When it’s witchlife soaking the sand, suddenly blood isn’t so sacred.
Suddenly the prisons are overflowing, the stakes driven deep.
Suddenly the crusades are necessary. Slaughter in the streets, justified.
When convenient, suddenly the shapesayers were right: sometimes cycles must be broken. 
Sometimes blood must be spilt…

But only when they say so.”