The Journal of Dethias: Fragile Beginnings

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "morning, boys. How is the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "what the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of journal entries at the beginning of great quests, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of embarking on a quest, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to adventurers reading my journal, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and convey. Stated as a sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of questing, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you while catapulting through this wet wind blasting into the unknown.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a tavern in the remote Hub wilderness. One of the guys is a cleric, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of Gods with a special intensity that comes after about the fourth grog. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in the gods. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the mining camp in that terrible blizzard and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is any God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm going to die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the cleric looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Dwarves happened to come wondering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run the story through a kind of standard magus' analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those peoples two different beliefs and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Which is fine, except that as a seeker of knowledge I must delve deeper into the machinery constructing personal beliefs; recognizing my orientation toward the world as a matter of intentional choice, not automatically absorbed from culture, like language, but constructed from arrogance. Arrogance of certainty. Blind certainty of interpretations erects a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what questing is really supposed to deliver. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded (specifically activating ancient Artifacts). I have learned this the hard way, as I predict adventurers reading this will, too.

"Oh Occhidy, if you ever listen, I'm imprisoned in an ancient Dwarven ballistic cart, and I'm going to die if you don't help me."