#THE PARABLE OF THESEUS IS IF A BOAT HAS ALL OF ITS PARTS REPLACED IS IT STILL THE SAME SHIP???

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OF COURSE HES BRINGING UP THESEUS. OH MY GOD.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Theseus

(Artist: Sachin Teng)

There’s an Allagan parable that Kuzhuk reminded me of some time ago about the ship called Theseus. As it needed repair, it was replaced piece by piece until every single part of it had been changed for something new. At the end of it all, a ship bearing none of its original components floated in the harbor, but was it still the same ship?

For the first time in months, I fired up the recording that Annelise left for me, the one that I contemplated jettisoning off the side of my boat for weeks on end until I grew too cowardly and attached to sever the tie and give it to the ocean that had similarly swallowed the guns that were meant to take my life. It’s gathered dust in a trunk since, next to the files and files of research and development wasted on a shot at redemption that was never about her survival. I can admit that now that those pieces of me have been patched over.

Katarina, her voice said, and where I once felt a depth of longing in the sharp daggers of her annunciation, the only thing that surfaces now is a dull pang and the persistent weight of expectation that I now shoulder with weary acceptance at a soldier’s pace rather than the frantic, desperate sprint that inevitably led to complete collapse. I’ve reached the end of the road to enlightenment, and the shepherd’s life promised to me as a follower of technological progress is far more ascetic than any of my teachers even knew. Who am I fooling? I’ve been living like a pauper-prophet for years. It’s not greatness, but destiny can’t always deliver. Even priests have to make something of silence. Chins up.

If you can hear this, it means the worst has come to pass, she drawls, and what am I even doing? We’ve been here before. Lives suspended by spider’s silk threads await the intrepid Katarina Dorne’s hand in their delicate fate. I’m sorry to them; I wish it were anyone else, but it can’t be—won’t be. Do you hear that, fate? I submit. I skip through the recording. I don’t need what she isn’t offering now. I don’t need a reminder. Of course the ship isn’t the same in the most pedantic sense, but identity is intangible. Her voice warps, distorts, words sputtering out with no rhyme or reason, and before I know it I’m out on the deck and the tomestone is following a beautiful arc across the sky until it hits ocean water and unfathomable depths and unlimited gravity. I have better things to do.