I Saw My Youth In Those Fimbulwinter Stars

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. — William Shakespeare

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. — Samuel Johnson

What is real? Perhaps you asked two different people, and they each gave their own answer. Suppose one said that this is a world governed by God; suppose the other said that there is no God in this world. Do they experience the same reality? They breath the same air, walk upon the same ground, and they might agree on that much. Yet that fundamental difference will still exist: one lives in a world governed by God, and one does not. This is just a simple example, but it demonstrates an idea: that perhaps what is real is what we believe.

Where do these things we believe come from? There's another question with its own set of answers. Let me give you mine: our parents. Their parents. Our teachers. Our friends and their parents. Other people. As you grow up, each new person you meet teaches you something new about the world, whether it is the difference between light and darkness, that if you have five apples and you eat two there are three left over, or which flavour of ice cream is best. Or who is righteous and who is evil. That money makes the world go round. Whatever. Your parents tell you this one thing: this is how the world works. These are the rules. Of course, I'm simplifying again.

But what if one day you woke up and found yourself unable to believe anything which your parents said?

What if you found yourself unable to believe everyone around you?

What if you rejected the rules of the world?

Orphans in this Universe

Sometimes a child wakes up to the world and sees it as it really is. There are no real statistics on this sort of thing, but it's less than one in one thousand and more than one in one million. Usually between twelve and fourteen, sometimes a little younger, sometimes a little older. Exactly why differs. Sometimes it's someone running from the reality of adults, sometimes the world simply up and rejects them. And despite their youth, they come to understand that there is only one objective truth in the world: the only thing which determines what is real is belief. What constitutes reality is the consensus of the people. Those stories and legends and things they've heard and come to believe? It all piles up and writes itself into the world, sets the rules for a given volume of reality. An orphan can feel these rules, feel their currents and edies and the places where they crash together and conflict. They can feel the chaos which arises out of clashing ideologies and wracks the world.

An orphan isn't a part of this. They cannot be a part of consensus. They have been rejected and rejected in turn. They are the ultimate solipsists, individualists able to make their own rules bound only by their imaginations and the pressure of the world. It is can be lonely, and it can be frightening, but there's something to be said about being able to tell up that is down and down that it is up, even if it's only for a little while. They might just be children, and might just be children until they fade away, but that doesn't make them powerless. The only thing which can stop an orphan is the world itself: the ever present force of the real. it's always, always pressing down, and if you give it an excuse and it'll step it up a notch and erase you before your time.

Though if you take risks, it can pay off. An orphan can't be a part of the real any more, but that doesn't mean they can't marshal those forces and try to fool the world into doing their work for them. You can go from a kid with a neat trick to the spark which turned Krakatoa into a raging inferno. Couldn't tell you much about that, though.

I know what you're thinking: why would you even take the risk? Wouldn't it be better if you just lived quietly? Probably. But the sad thing about being an orphan is that no matter how much you might like to hide from the world, the world has this uncanny way of finding you and sometimes it's hard to ignore.

It's not the End of World

It's dangerous outside of the circle of the world. Sure, it's dangerous inside too, but your average salary man doesn't have to face the personified nightmares of an entire nation. while at first being adrift of the rules of the world might seem pretty cool, it becomes less cool when you realise that the system is moving against you. Every orphan is haunted by mindless, bland faced suits that are sure that the best thing for you is to put you into a home which doesn't really exist. If you talk to a police officer it won't take them long to decide that you're not just some lost child, you're dangerous too. Doctors, bus drivers, diner waitresses, whoever. Adults just won't trust you unless you try for it. Other kids are better, but friendships made with them probably won't last forever. That's what it means to be an outsider, but that's just where it begins.

The time is the near past. There are six billion people in the world and at least that many beliefs. Where enough of those beliefs converge, they write themselves into the world as rules. But what happens when those rules conflict? Even when there's a difference in scale - the original example of the faithful and the faithless - there can be turmoil as the greater consensus is challenged. When two systems of similar scale are opposed, well ... it gets pretty bad. There might be violence in the streets, the economy might crash, a war might start, the climate might change. Humans are of course aware of the clashing of ideologies, but they aren't aware of the literal friction. Orphans are. They can feel it, no matter where they are. It's hard to put into words, but an orphan always knows when something really bad is about to happen ... and they're in a unique position to fix it. Humans normally can't, being trapped within the circle of the world, within the rules which have caused the problem in the first place. An orphan can step up to the plate and fix things, but in the process they've got to step up to the plate, and that's where the danger lies.

These problems aren't just temporal, either. For lack of a better word they're fundamentally metaphysical. This friction can create spectres, the fears of the populace made semi-real and for an outsider totally lethal. These sorts of things are always lurking in the shadows, but when you've got a holy war brewing or ten thousand angry college students on the edge or a world leader with his finger hovering over the button, you're not talking about a little fear of the dark. Fear that paralyses a nation, anger which contemplates burning down a whole country, paranoia which makes every neighbor into a traitor, the monsters those things create are vast. They're dragons. And they're still things of the world, and you're still not.

Crack the World's Shell

Those are the problems the world creates, but that's not to say that they're the only problems. All orphans have one thing that connects them: they're all outsiders. But that's the only thing. Orphans are individuals incapable of building consensus. Their rules always conflict in some way. Being aware of the fundamentals they can at least try to work around it, but sometimes it doesn't work. An orphan with a rule of justice will not find it easy to coexist with an orphan who has a rule of injustice. If there's nothing bigger to keep them on track, it's likely they'll fight. Someone might die. Someone usually does.

That sort of conflict between individuals is normal. The Prefects are not. Most orphans don't take too long to discover their existence. White haired children with golden eyes and that strange uniform. They are cold, with childlike cruelty and seemingly adult determination. They are an aberration. They are orphans who are able to form consensus. They share a single system of rules between them, and so are better able to resist the world. There's no understanding how, or understanding how they are able to twist other orphans into this state. An alien state of being which is neither inside nor outside. their intent is known, however: they intend to change the world. with enough orphans at their disposal, they could supplant the consensus of entire nations. They could rebuild the world in their preferred image.

And if you get in their way, you either submit or you die.