“Why?”
My grip tightened. I searched his face, hoping his question was rhetorical. I moved my weight from one foot to the other, but I did not break his gaze. Staring into his eyes, I understood the importance of my answer. I couldn’t lead a war without a clear directive.
“Because masquerades are cruel and unfair, and we don’t deserve to live in a world where they’re the norm.”
This answer caught him off guard. He tilted his head ever so slightly, gold-brown hair tufting in the heat gusting off the sands below.
“You can’t run on a platform of free will if it’s a lie. It wasproblematic when the free will was ‘you have free will to run into a vat of acid or into a cloud full of gold and mansions and joy.’ It’s more problematic when you realize that not only is there no vat of acid, even for their angels, but that the cloud is just more servitude. Heaven isn’t paradise. It’s a labor camp.”
He had no response, and I wasn’t done talking.
“I always used to think that Milton had a quotable fallacy,” I said.
Silas pressed his lips into a line.
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.You’ve heard it, right? But my take was built on a very specific understanding of what Heaven and Hell were. And if all of the rebellious angels are still rocking and rolling even in Biblical texts—Apocrypha or no—I’m struggling to see where we’ve based our understanding of the afterlife. So, when it comes to why I’m leading the war?”
He waited expectantly.
“Because even if we end up chained to a rock with a bird eating out our liver, I want it to be something we chose. I want free will. Not the illusion of it. Not the pretend version where one choice is absurd and unfathomable. The real thing. Free will isn’t real if it requires one path that you can’t deviate from. And a world stuck to that standard isn’t a fair world. Not for us, and not for the other people whose gods rule with an iron fist. And maybe we need anarchy to achieve that.”
“Order from chaos?” he prompted.
“Chaos from chaos.”
