Mirror

Network

Someone's arm around my shoulder was comforting and warm. What I would have given to stay there for a few more hours, but school work and saving the world called. I looked up see Terr's chin. He was staring at the horizon, a far away look in his eyes.

"Thinking about home?" I asked.

Terr smiled slightly. "Yeah," he replied, keeping his gaze toward a distant world for a moment longer. Then he looked at me and smiled again. "You look better. Something good happen or just nothing bad."

I chuckled. "A little of everything, I guess. It was an... interesting day, I suppose." Terr nodded, looking a little relieved. I leaned into him a little harder to soak up more of his gentle warmth. "Speaking of interesting, I met a man who mentioned something called Avril's pax-something."

"Avril's Paxili," Terr finished.

"I thought you might know of it. What is it?"

"It might translate to something like Avril's poison. Avril was Cantery's beloved's doppelgänger and she threw her soul into the river Life which made it poison to the shadows who were filled with greed and malice."

"Oh, I remember," I said, excited. "He said it was something he was trying to learn."

" Yes. There are some who believe that we can train our minds to resist shadows. It's a practice that has three central tenets: extreme pacifism, acknowledgment of guilt, and unwavering hope for a better self. It makes the assumption that shadows use the evil already within people to cause harm, so the idea behind Avril's paxili is to make oneself useless to all shadows even in the most extreme circumstances."

"Extreme pacifism?" I asked.

Terr nodded. "A vow of nonviolence even in defense of the self and others."

I remember the man from Wheat. His family had been murdered unjustifiably and he was trying to resist the desire for revenge, but that wasn't the end of it. He was also trying to prepare himself to never use violence in the protection of those he loved. "To let people you love die because you have a vow of nonviolence?" I asked. "That doesn't seem right."

Terr shook his head. "No, not like that. It's not that you let people die. It's that you never let violence be an option, at least not the kind that will cause permanent damage."

"Does it work? Are people who practice Avril's paxili resistant to shadows?"

"No one really knows," Terr said. "We, my people, are taught Avril's paxili from the very beginning. Our lives are structured around it and we have little fear of shadows. Maybe Avril's paxili has done well to prevent shadows from taking hold of Avril's descendants or maybe shadows have not yet reached our corner of the world and we have not truly been tested. I do not know."

"But it seems overly idealistic to think that resisting violence, even if it means making yourself or others vulnerable, would actually prevent more violence. I would think it would just make it easier for you to be hurt."

"Maybe," Terr said with a shrug, "if you think about it from the perspective of each individual event, but it may be effective as a kind of herd immunity. Even when some people get infected, if most of the people around them are resistant to infection because they practice Avril's paxili, then no new shadowed-infected people can be created and the infection cannot spread. It may be the best defense against the shadows in the long run. Well that and Avril's orbs."