Sho’rai T’mithrall

They’ll pay for what they did, even though the triaum sish is very specific about how wrong revenge is. The ‘path of the people’ is also very peculiar about it, by teaching that it is wrong without ever calling it by name. There is no word in our language for vengeance. That's how taboo it is.

But we learned what it meant from the humans. Their burden, the burden of selfishness, became ours, so we learned about negative reciprocation. They stole my idea, so now I will take something of theirs.

Not that it was really my idea in the first place. Amongst my people, an idea belongs to the community, and that was exactly how it was meant to be used. Besides, it was the community that gave me the idea in the first place. The reciprocation of the conscious self and the collective consciousness of the community, you might say. The triaum have a word for that: m’lartsh. Humans have a really hard time pronouncing it, and an even harder time understanding what it means. I’ve seen very few of them ever practice it.

It was supposed to help them, as it has always helped us. In return, we were supposed to be paid. The money was supposed to come to our community, so that we could turn the ‘Fae Quarter’, as they call it, into something better than the piss-poor squalor most of us have been stuck with our whole lives. I only got out because I was smart, and I wanted to use those smarts to bring something back to the community. Only the human druch would be so cruel as to promise an ease of the burden we triaum carry, the burden they gave us, and then renege on it.

I based it on the idea of Sho’rai T’mithrall...the endless cycle. The triaum adopt the belief that all things are without end; that all things are in a constant state of flux and transition...but it is up to us to maintain a balance in that flux, or the universe will collapse upon itself eventually. Humans have no respect for Sho’rai T’mithrall. They take and do not give. That was why I sold them the patent for the waste recycling system - to improve the quality of life for everyone. Waste works better when it can be filtered properly and completely back into the ecosystem – the way the goddess M’Tiar intended. Not just dumped back into the water to create filth and disease like the societies of old, not ‘treated’, as the humans called it, but recycled for crops. What enters our bodies must eventually leave again, only to return once more. It is the same with food as it is with souls. The harmonization of the physical and spiritual universe.

Humans don’t understand that, of course. They only understand profit. The now. What can benefit the individual the most in the moment. Thus our idea of community was taken advantage of. Why pay for an idea that would benefit humanity, thus benefitting the triaum who are stuck using the human economic system, with its made-up values for things, when one can simply take it and pay nothing?

There will be a lawsuit, of course, but we have to play by their rules, in their courts. We’ll never reach a decent settlement, and a new generation of humanity will simply learn that it can take advantage of the triaum without any real consequences. It’s been our story for thousands of years.

And that is why I now understand revenge. If I want to change our situation, I cannot allow us to be taken advantage of. It is up to us to change our situation.

I only hope M’Tiar will forgive me for all the suffering I am about to cause with this sabotage. What matters most to the gods, the number of souls saved in the long run? And do the human gods wage war against the goddesses of the triaum just as the humans cause us misery?

What a fucked-up world we live in, full of shit.

The humans are going to learn just how full of shit it really is.