The Eyes She Gave Away

There are no records of Perfida anywhere in our Archive yet. Now that I've started writing about the Samarians, I decided it was worth studying and understanding the life story of their first prophet before going any further.

One of Ours, Once

It is easy to forget, reading what the Samarians have built since, that their first prophet did not arrive from nowhere. Perfida was an Assassin. Our own records place her inside the old Brotherhood before the Order had even reached these shores, before the Creed she left had become the Creed we practice now. Whatever she found wrong with us, she found it from the inside, which is a harder thing to dismiss than an outsider's complaint.

What she found, by her own account, was a massacre dressed up as discipline — a village put to the sword for the crime of keeping its own grain, and a child among the dead whose killing she did not order but did not stop either. I will not pretend our Creed has never produced that kind of morning. Our own Ironies say as much out loud: we seek to promote peace, but commit murder. Perfida did not accept that as a price of doing business. She left.

The Sword on the Altar

What she found afterward is where her story stops being ours to fully verify and starts being theirs to tell. A ruined temple, a blade waiting on a stone that should not have still been clean after however many years, and a vision of justice built around mercy for the repentant rather than punishment as a reflex. She swore herself to it. I won't pretend to repeat her oath word for word — that belongs to their own library, not this one — but the shape of it survives in everything the Samarians do afterward: a justice that has to earn the name every time, not one that gets to assume it.

What I find harder to look past is that she kept the sword. Of everything the Samarians built afterward — the daggers worn awkwardly on purpose, the doctrine that a blade should never be comfortable to draw — the one weapon they explicitly forbid themselves is the one their own founder never put down. A Samarian today carries a knife because a sword is called a pure instrument of bloodshed, nothing else. Perfida is one of only two people in their entire history ever to hold one. I don't think that is hypocrisy, exactly. I think it is closer to a scar that never got covered by a sash.

Blind on Purpose

The Blindfold, as the Samarians explain it, is mostly a discipline of the mind. Their own doctrine is honest about this: most of them keep their eyes. The cloth is a posture of trust, not a wound. Only two people in the whole of their history actually cut their eyes out for it — and Perfida was one of them.

I keep returning to what that must have meant for a woman who founded her entire order on having seen something clearly enough to walk away from everything she knew. She saw a slaughtered village and could not unsee it. She saw a sword on an altar and could not put it down. And at some point after all of that seeing, she chose to give her sight away entirely, trusting whatever she'd built enough to no longer need her own eyes to navigate it. That is either the most complete faith I have ever read about, or the most complete exhaustion with what eyes are for. Possibly both are true of the same act.

The Brother She Ended

The hardest part of her story, and the part I think their own library is most honest about, is Ptah. He founded the Path alongside her. He vanished, returned declaring his faith exhausted and hope gone, and killed brothers, followers and reprobates without sparing the defenceless. Perfida ended it.

I have spent time in this Archive arguing that failing one of the Samarian tenets is not the same as refusing their god — that their own Codex, tenet II especially, seems to assume falling short is the ordinary condition of a follower, not the exception. I still believe that. But Ptah is the case that tests it, and Perfida is the one who had to make the call in the moment rather than argue about it afterward from a safe distance, the way I get to. Whatever the line is between failing on the road and stepping off it, she is the one person in their history who has actually had to find it with a blade in her hand, against a man she had walked that same road beside from the very beginning.

I don't know what that cost her. Their library doesn't say, and I suspect it isn't meant to be known by someone like me. But I notice that the doctrine she left behind afterward — take responsibility for your actions, you are their shepherd — reads less like abstract law and more like something written by someone who had already done the hardest version of it herself, and needed her people to understand what that responsibility actually asks of a person before they ever had to carry it.

What I Take From Her

We do not have a Perfida. Our own history has plenty of founders and fewer prophets, and none of ours, as far as our records show, ever had to personally end a person they built the whole enterprise beside. Perhaps that says something about how differently we're built — a Brotherhood of doubt does not really produce prophets, since a prophet is someone who stopped doubting long enough to found something. Perfida stopped. Once. And then spent the rest of her life apparently making sure nobody who followed her mistook that single moment of certainty for permission to stop doubting themselves.

I don't think I would have made the choice she made, at the altar or at the end with Ptah. I am fairly sure that is exactly the kind of thing she'd have wanted a Scholar reading her story centuries later to admit honestly, rather than pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidy scroll.

Written by Votary, stormjas.