No Peace Beneath the Silence

We call Samaria neutral. It is a comfortable word, and we use it the way a soldier uses a password — to stop asking further questions once it has been given.

Our own histories tell us where that neutrality was born. The Samarian Rogue Brotherhood did not arrive from outside us; it rose from our own brokenness, in the years when a tyrannical Arch ruled in place of the Creed. They founded themselves on the belief that Levantines were innately evil, servants of a cruel master by nature rather than by failure of leadership — a belief our own Archive has since called a fallacy, and rightly so, since the Arch who wronged them is no longer the Arch who leads us. And yet a neutrality that begins as a verdict does not become peace simply because it stops raising its voice. It only stops announcing itself.

That is worth remembering when we set the word "neutral" beside what was found beneath the old watchtower. A hidden chamber, reached through a stone no one else had thought to move. Maps of our routes. The names of our couriers and safehouses, some marked dead, some marked missing — and beside those still breathing, drawn with care, the Samarian sign. Not beside the fallen. Beside the living. A faction that does not war against us unless war is declared does not need to know, with that precision, who among us is still walking. That is not the record-keeping of the indifferent. It is the record-keeping of someone who intends to make a decision later, and wants every piece already in hand when they do.

I do not say this to call them our enemy again by another name. I say it because we have been too satisfied with a word. Neutrality that is never re-examined is not different in kind from the Teutonic habit we so easily condemn — the habit of handing a question to someone else once and considering it answered forever. We mock the Order for building a Father who never has to earn his certainty twice. We should ask whether we have done the same thing to the Samarians: accepted "neutral" as a verdict rendered once, and stopped watching whether it still holds.

Nothing is true; everything is permitted was never written only for the people we have already decided to distrust. It is written, if it is written honestly, for everyone we have stopped questioning — allies included, and especially the ones who once had good reason to hate us and have never told us whether that reason expired. A courier's ledger, kept in the dark, updated as we live and die, is not the work of a people at peace with us. It may not be war either. But it is not nothing, and it has not been examined since the tower fell silent.

Perhaps that is the truer meaning of our own Maxim here: not that the Samarians are still our enemy, and not that they are safely neutral, but that we do not yet know — and that not knowing, while someone quietly keeps a ledger on us, is not a comfortable place to stop asking.

Written by Votary, stormjas.