FACTION: The Liir-Zuul Alliance

[Erinys]

No. When so many lights go out at once...he "sees" the Universe grow darker. When millions of voices suddenly cry out in terror, and are suddenly silenced--he hears. He may not know exactly where it happened, but he knows what happened.

--Arinn

[Darv57]

and now I want to hug the giant space whale in the stars. Does he at least get some joy out of the beautifly moments in life, when someone is born, when they find love?

[Erinys]

Little known fact: almost all the moments in life are beautiful moments. That's the overwhelming majority of the Song for any living thing. Pain and death are actually the exceptions, not the rule, in the Song of material existence.

The Universe is more full of Life to the Black's senses than the desert sky is full of stars, to your eyes. It burns and blazes in a similar pattern, because life loves rocky planets, and rocky planets love stars. And the Black...loves the Universe. He loves Life.

So...yes. All Liir are taking joy in the beautiful moments, all the time. The Black is no different. That is why he is still Liir and not Suul'ka. Because he sees all Life as intrinsically beautiful, and possessed of intrinsic value. Other living things exist, and have a right to exist, simply to shine. And he believes they have a right to continue to shine, for their own reasons, without being made to serve or becoming food.

--Arinn

[ScoSteSal118]

Erinys, you are really good at painting with ideas and with words.

Do they see their existence (as organisms that consume/end other organisms) acceptable as part of the natural order of things (life and death, creation and destruction, the endless whirl of change, etc.) so long as they still obey that 'death'/'change' part? Is it an issue of the scale of their effects on other life: that the amount of destruction of other life-forms perpetrated by a Liir following a certain lifestyle** is reasonable/tolerable/worth it/ok but the amount perpetrated by a Liir that doesn't follow that kind of lifestyle isn't reasonable/tolerable/worth it/ok (suul'ka... )?
Is this philosophical question* one that Liirian Elders discuss and deliberate over, and if so, what are the main schools of thought?

*to state it explicitly: How do we [Liir] reconcile our respect for all life and our belief that all life has a right to keep on existing with the fact that we [Liir] end other lives regularly to keep our own lives existing?

**some selection out of the following: restricting bodily growth and/or metabolic levels (yay, redaction is nifty!), ending one's life after some number of centuries or millennia, etc.?

[Sayeth]

:shock: Erinys, you are really good at painting with ideas and with words.

*snip*

*to state it explicitly: How do we [Liir] reconcile our respect for all life and our belief that all life has a right to keep on existing with the fact that we [Liir] end other lives regularly to keep our own lives existing?

**some selection out of the following: restricting bodily growth and/or metabolic levels (yay, redaction is nifty!), ending one's life after some number of centuries or millennia, etc.?

Of course, this is unacceptable for vast majority of Liir but this is why The Black created (perhaps indirectly) the Fleetsong and started training Black Swimmers - so that others can live their peaceful lives in the sea and do not have to be troubled with the horrors of war. Please also note that Black Swimmers exist simply because Liir need someone to protect them and that means killing anything and everything they regard as Suul'ka - be it Giant Spacewhale or aggressive Tarkasians.

[Erinys]

Do they see their existence (as organisms that consume/end other organisms) acceptable as part of the natural order of things (life and death, creation and destruction, the endless whirl of change, etc.) so long as they still obey that 'death'/'change' part?

I believe I've said it before: death is the coin of material existence. It is the medium of exchange, the price to be paid for your ticket. But death is not really the same thing as "becoming food", at least where Liir are concerned.

If you stop breathing and give up your life, sink to the bottom and are eaten by hagfish, you are dead, and your body is consumed. But becoming food to a Suul'ka or even a Zuul is much more damaging to the part of you that thinks, feels and understands.

--Arinn

[ScoSteSal118]

Ah, so the Liir draw the line between normal/'natural' death (physical killing and eating) and more-invasive/'unnatural' death (psionic/life-draining-induced death) because one preserves the basic dignity of the organism being eaten more than the other?

[Mecron]

Sco...pssst...they know that brain and mind are different.

[ScoSteSal118]

But doesn't this setting have the individual mind/personality unable to exist independently of the body (or is that a Liir viewpoint that is not necessarily canonically-correct and/or that I misremembered?)? Therefore, wouldn't both courses cause the end of the mind of the organism in question?

[Erinys]

Nope. The two are connected but not identical. Your psionic self and your physical self are essentially Siamese twins. They grow naturally together and when you die they naturally part ways. Your material substance breaks down through the carbon cycle, your mind dissolves back into the Song...unless you get eaten.

In which case you're trapped in the cage of someone else's mind, someone else's flesh (or whatever other container they put you into)...forever. Or for as long as it takes for someone to free you.

There will be many, many souls that owe their freedom to Chezokin, for example. The Cannibal is not just a fiend and a glutton. He's a rotting prison, an endlessly swimming hell full of damned souls who have done nothing to deserve an eternity of torment.

--Arinn

[Darv57]

Little known fact: almost all the moments in life are beautiful moments. --Arinn

And you remind me why this is one of my favorite sci-fi universes. The hope.

-Small rant:
For me at least science fiction is at its best when it is founded in an overall optimistic and hopeful look at the universe/future.
Not much of a fan of a lot of modern sci-fi for this reason, far to dominated by the concepts of dystopia and post-apocalypse, which to my mind take a somewhat pessimistic approach to imagining the future.
No offence to anyone who likes those genres mind, just my perspective.

The idea that the races of the sots-verse are all, ultimately, fighting to build what they believe will be a better future... thats something that really appeals to me as a reader.
-Rant over.

[Erinys]

My take on the Apocalypse is pretty simple: the end of the world is not the end of the world.

Every day the world ends for someone. Lives are shattered, homes are destroyed, institutions in which we placed faith and hope are corrupted, governments totter and fall. Wars come and leave behind scarred people, ruined cities, landscapes seeded with unexploded ordinance.

And life goes on. Every day someone wakes up and realizes he is still alive. Every day someone wakes up and realizes that despite the grief, despite the horror, that she can still get back on her feet and do something to help. Every day, people throw off the guilt and the shame of surviving the end, and accept that every end--even the darkest hour of the most painful end--is a new beginning for something. And that they ALWAYS have the option of trying to make it something good.

I do write post-Apocalyptic fiction. Technically the SotSverse is a post-Apocalyptic universe for nearly every star-faring race. The Humans nearly destroyed themselves with their short-sightedness and mutual aggression. The Hivers lost their Queen and their future and descended into bloody Interregnum. The Tarkas lost their entire empire--literally, physically, misplaced a dozen star systems that vanished from local space time. The Liir lost their innocence and had to give up parts of their culture which were sacred to them. The Morrigi lost their pride and had to see their worlds and monuments burn.

The Horde Zuul had to give up their freedom and serve those greater themselves forever. And the Prester Zuul...the Prester Zuul had to give up their gods, and devote themselves to the service of those weaker.

It was the end of the world.

But the end of the world is sometimes just the backstory.

--Arinn

[DarkCecilo]

My take on the Apocalypse is pretty simple: the end of the world is not the end of the world.

Every day the world ends for someone. Lives are shattered, homes are destroyed, institutions in which we placed faith and hope are corrupted, governments totter and fall. Wars come and leave behind scarred people, ruined cities, landscapes seeded with unexploded ordinance.

And life goes on. Every day someone wakes up and realizes he is still alive. Every day someone wakes up and realizes that despite the grief, despite the horror, that she can still get back on her feet and do something to help. Every day, people throw off the guilt and the shame of surviving the end, and accept that every end--even the darkest hour of the most painful end--is a new beginning for something. And that they ALWAYS have the option of trying to make it something good.

I do write post-Apocalyptic fiction. Technically the SotSverse is a post-Apocalyptic universe for nearly every star-faring race. The Humans nearly destroyed themselves with their short-sightedness and mutual aggression. The Hivers lost their Queen and their future and descended into bloody Interregnum. The Tarkas lost their entire empire--literally, physically, misplaced a dozen star systems that vanished from local space time. The Liir lost their innocence and had to give up parts of their culture which were sacred to them. The Morrigi lost their pride and had to see their worlds and monuments burn.

The Horde Zuul had to give up their freedom and serve those greater themselves forever. And the Prester Zuul...the Prester Zuul had to give up their gods, and devote themselves to the service of those weaker.

It was the end of the world.

But the end of the world is sometimes just the backstory.

--Arinn

"Every day the world ends for someone. Lives are shattered, homes are destroyed, institutions in which we placed faith and hope are corrupted, governments totter and fall. Wars come and leave behind scarred people, ruined cities, landscapes seeded with unexploded ordinance.

And life goes on. Every day someone wakes up and realizes he is still alive. Every day someone wakes up and realizes that despite the grief, despite the horror, that she can still get back on her feet and do something to help. Every day, people throw off the guilt and the shame of surviving the end, and accept that every end--even the darkest hour of the most painful end--is a new beginning for something. And that they ALWAYS have the option of trying to make it something good."

That first bit actually makes me feel a lot better about recent events in my life, thank you. Really.

[ScoSteSal118]

Nope. The two are connected but not identical. Your psionic self and your physical self are essentially Siamese twins. They grow naturally together and when you die they naturally part ways. Your material substance breaks down through the carbon cycle, your mind dissolves back into the Song...unless you get eaten.

In which case you're trapped in the cage of someone else's mind, someone else's flesh (or whatever other container they put you into)...forever. Or for as long as it takes for someone to free you.

There will be many, many souls that owe their freedom to Chezokin, for example. The Cannibal is not just a fiend and a glutton. He's a rotting prison, an endlessly swimming hell full of damned souls who have done nothing to deserve an eternity of torment.

--Arinn

Thank you for helping so much with this. Ah, egocentrism and mental blocks/assumptions/biases are annoying! I was wondering earlier in the discussion "if both cases cause the end of a mind/self that would rather continue existing indefinitely, wouldn't both cases be equally bad?" when that logic was based on me projecting my fear of death, and they actually have an arguably more reasonable and certainly-'ok' attitude towards death, that it is a release from something that becomes intensely tiresome if prolonged too much. Thank you for broadening the horizons of my thoughts.

Also, reading the last page or two of this thread, I keep saying to myself "Don't gush about Erinys' writing, don't gush about Erinys' writing, don't gush about Erinys' writing..."

[Mecron]

Feel free...gush! She has earned it!