The Sword and the Voice

There’s something comforting about the idea of being chosen.

Someone sees you. Out of all the people they could have called upon, they choose you. Maybe they recognize courage you haven’t discovered yet, or strength you’ve spent your life doubting. Whatever comes next, however difficult the road becomes, you have that knowledge to hold on to. Someone believes you matter.

The familiar Chosen One story gives us that reassurance. The person at its center may be frightened, reluctant, or spectacularly unprepared, but the choosing carries a promise. There is a reason it had to be them.

I’m interested in what happens when that promise starts to feel uncertain.

In my forthcoming novel, The Fighting 57th, the first book of The Veiled Core Chronicles, two very different women are chosen by the same god. Sora is a soldier who can’t fully account for where she came from. Marro is the new Emperor’s cousin, a young woman the court has never had much reason to notice. Neither seems an obvious choice for divine attention, but Arath-Bar has a purpose for each. Sora is to be his sword. Marro is to be his voice.

Both would like to believe there is something meaningful in that choice, something about who they are that makes them worthy of it.

But being needed can feel remarkably like being valued, at least until you start asking questions.

Someone Sees You

I don’t think wanting to feel special is necessarily vanity.

Sometimes it means wanting to know that the things you’ve endured have been seen. That your effort counts. That beneath the rank, the title, and the responsibilities, someone recognizes the person carrying them.

For Sora, that desire is bound up with being a soldier. She understands duty. She understands being asked to do difficult things, and she knows responsibility rarely arrives at a convenient time. Being entrusted with something important can mean a great deal to someone used to measuring herself by what she can do for others.

So there is an appeal in the thought that a god has recognized that commitment. He might see more than a capable soldier. He might understand why she keeps going, and what it costs her.

Marro meets the same temptation from another direction. To become a god’s voice is to believe that what you say might matter on a scale few people ever experience. Your words could carry authority beyond your own knowledge, beyond your own lifetime.

That could be an extraordinary affirmation. Someone has trusted you to be heard.

Each role offers significance. Each also leaves a great deal unsaid.

A Sword Has a Purpose

The trouble begins with the words themselves.

A sword is valuable because of what it can do in someone else’s hand. Its edge matters. Its strength matters. The direction it would prefer to be pointed rarely enters the conversation.

“You will be my sword,” Arath-Bar tells Sora, and to a soldier that can sound like praise. It acknowledges ability, resolve, the capacity to act when action is needed.

But a person has to live with what follows the strike.

Sora has her own judgment, her own loyalties, and people whose lives matter to her. Those things don’t become less important because a god has found a use for her. They become harder to protect when his purpose reaches beyond what she can see.

A voice carries its own difficulty. “Through your lips, I will echo,” he tells Marro. When people listen to her, whose words are they waiting for? How much room is left for her uncertainty, her understanding, her conscience?

Being heard is a very different experience when the audience is listening for someone else.

There is a loneliness in both roles. You can become terribly important while feeling that less and less of your importance belongs to you.

The Questions Behind the Gratitude

Neither woman begins by rejecting what she has been given.

That would make the problem easier.

They want their roles to mean something. They hope the power behind them has a purpose worth serving. They can feel gratitude and still be troubled by what they don’t understand.

In fact, gratitude can make the questions harder to ask.

Once you’ve been given something extraordinary, doubt can feel ungracious. You wonder whether you’re failing to appreciate the honor, whether you’re being small, whether the discomfort is yours to overcome.

So you try harder. You look for meaning in the next demand. You tell yourself that trust requires patience, and that understanding may come later.

Eventually, though, you want to know whether the one asking so much of you has any interest in answering.

You want to know whether your fears matter to him. Whether he understands what you might lose. Whether there is anything you could say that would make him reconsider what he expects of you.

Those are personal questions, and a grand purpose has a way of leaving them unanswered.

The Person Who Was Chosen

This is where Sora and Marro interest me most.

Each has a life and convictions that exist beyond the role assigned to her, and each has reasons to want the choosing to be an affirmation. It would mean something to believe a god saw them clearly and found them worthy.

Yet the demands of being his sword and his voice leave room for a less comforting possibility. Maybe the qualities they hoped he admired are simply the qualities he needs.

Courage is useful when you need someone to face danger. Loyalty is useful when you need them to stay. A strong sense of responsibility can keep a person working long after they would have walked away for their own sake.

None of those qualities becomes less admirable because someone else knows how to use them. But discovering that possibility changes how the praise feels.

You can believe in the good you hope to accomplish while having misgivings about the power helping you accomplish it. You can want to be worthy of a calling and still wonder whether the caller deserves your trust.

Sora and Marro would both like to believe they were chosen because someone saw who they were.

They’re less certain he would listen if they told him.

— J.A. Raithe