After Agatha agreed to become Stultusâs apprentice, he led her to the basement of his house to begin her training. Climbing down the ladder, they arrived at a cave illuminated by thousands of blue gems embedded in the ceiling and walls, which emitted a dazzling spectral blue light.
"Well then, how about we begin your lessons?" said Stultus, standing in front of her.
"I'm ready!" exclaimed Agatha with a big smile on her face.
"Excellent! We'll start with the basics. Letâs go over the principles of knighthood. You canât aspire to be a good knight without knowing them, so I imagine you must know what they are."
"Yes, I know. We must protect our kingdom and the people with our lives."
"Thatâs true, that is one of the principles. But why is that the case?"
"Because we are the ones who receive training, so weâre the most capable of fulfilling that duty, and therefore we must do it."
"We must defend the weak, those who are defenseless."
"Exactly."
"But thatâs only part of a knightâs duty. The other part is to provide a benefit not only to those in need, but to the entire kingdom. Helping the people means helping the kingdom grow, to perpetuate itself over time. Thatâs why knights must act according to nature, because nature, in its self-sustaining essence, is capable of fostering and developing life on the planet. Nature is truth, therefore it is good. Our duty is to follow the natural order using our rationality to help others, and in doing so, weed out the bad elements like criminals, slavers, and the dreaded shadows that feed on all that misfortune, creating a miasma of death and decay."
"I understand. A knight must follow the order of nature, applying their virtues, like magnanimity, honesty, rationality, and charity, to eliminate injustice."
"You're getting it!" Stultus congratulated her. "And we must be that way in order to combat the darkness, which embodies everything opposed to those natural virtues. Thatâs why a knight must be humble, know their limits, and not try to go beyond what they can achieve, this applies both in combat and in all aspects of life."
"Thereâs something I donât understand. What exactly are these Shadows? Where do they come from?"
"I was just about to explain that, my impatient apprentice," Stultus joked.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
"Sorry, master," replied Agatha.
"As I was saying, our fight is also with ourselves. It is the curse that arises from our greatest blessing: life itself. Life gives us a wound that we try to heal every day, but one that never fully closes."
"A wound?"
"Yes. That wound is caused by the existence of change, the passage from life to death, movement and stillness, joy and sadness. That makes us corruptible. The closer you are to sadness, the closer you are to death, be it of your body or your ego. When your ego dies, a new entity is formedâwhat we call a Shadow. Thatâs why things like injustice, which cause so much suffering, bring people closer to death, creating countless Shadows. Unlike plants, for example, we do not follow a single path, toward the sky to be closer to the sun, but rather we have two: sky and earth, rationality and emotionality. That is, we can follow our rational nature or go against it, becoming slaves to our emotions and thereby degenerating into mere animals, like the Shadows."
"I donât understand why not following our nature would turn us into Shadows."
"Well, when we lie, become self-centered, greedy, or feel any emotion of that kind that causes external or internal injustice, it changes us. It transforms us in the same way it transforms those affected by our actions. In our view, the other human is transformed into a non-human, a being inferior to us. We dehumanize them in order to justify our injustice. In that act, treating a person as a means instead of as an end, our reality changes, and so do we. We become bestial, primitive, seeking only to satisfy an endless appetite."
"So I understand now that we must be humble, for example, in order to keep humanizing others rather than seeing them as inferior to us and thus unworthy of our justice."
"Exactly! Because if we werenât, it would be hard to maintain feelings of compassion when having to 'care' for beings more 'insignificant' than ourselves, or worse, we might believe we are arbiters of who deserves help and who does not. That is a sure path to becoming a Shadow. For example, the fact that Iâm a better swordsman than you doesnât make me a better person or knight. That skill is tangential to my being, it might worsen over time or I might never have developed it. Thatâs why it says nothing about who I am, nor about the other things I might become. Because being 'something' is more than just being good at one thing."
"That means vices enslave us, they kill us, while reason and virtue make us free."
"Yes. And itâs also important to distinguish between what you can change and what you canât. To know your limits, what is essential to your being and what is tangential to it. Wanting to be a knight depends entirely on you, itâs not something essential to who you are. If you persist in that 'ought to be,' you will have to follow that path with all the sacrifices and rewards it brings. That creates a world, a being to strive toward a future, a sense of purpose, which keeps the darkness at bay. But that will depend on how strongly you follow the dogma you have set for yourself. A weak conviction gets lost in the trees and forgets the forest; a strong conviction may lose the tree for the forest. The golden mean is the goal to always pursue. With a broader perspective, we will better understand the world we are trying to protect."
"That is, to follow this path with critical and alert eyes, with a balance between dogma and freedom."
"Precisely! But enough talk, I see that you understand the principles of knighthood now. Letâs move on to the next lesson."
"Yes, sir!"