Book One – Chapter 15

Some allowed the humans to live with a degree of autonomy, while others interfered heavily. Some directors, like Tria, granted their humans a productive purpose. Her fishing communities, for instance, sustained her domain with a grim efficiency. Others used them in less self-fulfilling ways. Wizards, Tria said, were particularly notorious for experimenting with their humans. They sought ways to suppress or recondition humanity’s destructive nature, bending it to their will. Some, for example, employed Lightshifters to weave illusions; entire pantheons of false gods and horrifying phantoms, conjured to distort reality and thus fracture, restructure and control the human mind.

“You have the most control when no one recognises your wing in it,” Tria had said.

So when the humans’ quarrels began to disrupt their productivity, she did not intervene directly. She neither divided them nor implemented regulations to resolve their disputes fairly. Instead, she hired four bormen and that wizard paigen-hunter from up north to venture into the mountains and capture two funners. They came back with three. Tria released all of them into the habitat. The creatures wreaked havoc, their brutal attacks indiscriminate. They slaughtered adults and children alike. The devastation forced the human fractions to unite, their anger and fear redirected toward the creatures instead of each other. The losses were catastrophic, yet by the year’s end, the survivors had become more productive and docile than in any of the preceding months.

“They need a release,” Tria had explained to Yu, her voice clinical and distant. “A common enemy to bind them, to channel their brutish impulses. The greater the losses they suffer, the more grateful they become for what remains. Pain has a way of making the intolerable seem preferable. It will make their previous living conditions and struggles, harsh as they may have been, seem safe and even desirable by comparison.”