for their selfishness and their pretensions of morality. There is no
morality where one sees another starving and suffering and does not
help, when one sees a whole race of people living on a land where
nothing but sorrows dwell, but will not let them share the wealth that
was given one by no doing of oneself. There is no morality in
selfishness, and when I saw those wretched people, I no longer felt like
redeeming those on Daem from the impending doom of humanity. Whatever
plans they had for me they never told, I sensed, for there was something
deeply wrong about the way they looked at me and talked about me,
something deeply wrong about the way they patronized me and treated me
like a silly child, while I was the one who was to decide their fate.
The Canitaurs and the Zards both looked at me with a subtle sense of
deceit and ill will, all that is, except Bernibus, which is why our
friendship flourished so swiftly. As I laid there with thoughts of Onan
and the decision that I was to make, and of all the responsibility that
was put upon me involuntarily, as I thought of the conflict of past and
future at the neglect of the present, as I thought about the self-
obsession and overindulgence that come with wealth, and the desire for
still more that accompanies it, I fell to sleep and into a place where
no troubles lay, for my long day and night had left in me no energy for
dreams.






Chapter 10: Devolution