Sacred Guilt

The Sacred Band has ruled the city of Meridia for hundreds of years. Myth and tradition have been their tools of influence. Although preaching a philosophy of civic responsibility, they've also perpetuated a great many lies in order to preserve their prestige and authority. Many members of the Sacred Band feel guilt over these deceptions. Other members do not share in such feelings, and they take actions which bring about the fall of the Sacred Band. This is a world of...
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The Sacred Band has ruled the city of Meridia for hundreds of years. Myth and tradition have been their tools of influence. Although preaching a philosophy of civic responsibility, they've also perpetuated a great many lies in order to preserve their prestige and authority. Many members of the Sacred Band feel guilt over these deceptions. Other members do not share in such feelings, and they take actions which bring about the fall of the Sacred Band.

This is a world of city-states and empires, sages and barbarians. This is the story of a culture war, long simmering, that bursts into a conflagration as witnessed by those who wage it and by those innocents caught between conflicting philosophies. Peaceful debates turn into arguments, arguments into murder, murder into mobs, and mobs into the destruction of an entire civilization's ancient way of life.

In the end, the good and the evil are distinguished only by the degree of their remorse.

Those who wage this culture war include two members of the Sacred Band, Cara and Corwell, who hold positions of influence. Their jobs isolate them from others of the Sacred Band. Unable to enjoy camaraderie with their peers, they fill their lives with the purpose of the Sacred Band: to make the world a better place for all people. Unknown to them, a conspiracy against their rule has been growing. It will assault them in ways that wealth, armies and rhetoric cannot protect them. They face two ironies: to be lonely while surrounded by people, and to be helpless while they are the most powerful of people. They seek a way to keep power without sacrificing their ethics; they discover they cannot have both.

Those innocents caught in the middle of the conflict include teenage twins, Ota and Tamin, who have been recently orphaned. Homeless and penniless, all they have to defend themselves against despair are each other and their vivid imaginations. After living for weeks as beggars and thieves, they are taken in by what at first appears to be a gentle family. Soon, their adoptive parents reveal a religious dogma that equates fantasy with madness. This forces the twin's imaginations, and their true selves, into hiding. They face two extreme experiences: being abandoned to anarchy, and being sheltered by oppression. They seek for a way to fit into their larger community without losing who they are; they discover they cannot have both.