Innocent man (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, December 21, 2018, 09:32 (2233 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Ragashingo, Friday, December 21, 2018, 09:37

Uldren was surely influenced and driven to partial madness, but he also made his own choices and decisions:

What future? After he finds and saves Mara? He realizes that he doesn't care. He's spent so many centuries stalking the perimeter of Awoken society, fighting off challengers, spying, sneaking, doing Mara's dirty work… Nothing has value except in its relation to Mara's plots.

Not even himself.

"They can die for all I care," he says, with a viciousness he never expected of himself. Didn't he want to save his people? No, no. Mara was willing to destroy them for her purposes—the Awoken have no value at all except in service of her design. "If some part of them survives… it will be the worthy part."

Mara sacrificed Awoken lives for a legitimate greater good. She and her Awoken put an end to Oryx, a being who had exterminated trillions and trillions of lives.

Uldren, in contrast, refused to come home. Refused to lead. The Awoken would have helped him in his efforts to find Mara, but instead he helped the House of Kings attack Awoken cities and settlements. He even personally betrayed the throne room guard by leading Fallen and Scorn onto Ceres and letting them slaughter Awoken who's first instinct was to trust him and protect him. He himself gunned down those who would have protected him:

Prince Uldren Sov saunters in like the belle of the ball, his cocked revolver aimed at the ceiling. "At ease," he says, with a little swish of his cloak, and everyone, Dinna included, responds. Just a moment's weakness. Just the subtlest flicker of deference, because he is the Prince and it feels so right to have royalty in this throne room again. Fingers off triggers, weapons skewed a few degrees off target—

The impulse is so strong because it jives with Dinna's discipline, which has already stepped in to crush the immediate instinct to blow Uldren away. Something's wrong. Something's off.

Baseline Humans can react to a visual stimulus in less than two hundred milliseconds. Awoken, less than a hundred. But there is a phenomenon Dinna and every other Royal Guard knows well, a trick of the mind called attentional blink. You are waiting for something to appear: a hostile, a gunshot, a loud noise. When it does appear, your attention blinks. You cannot detect a second event if it comes just after the first.

So it is with the blue flash of Arc-rifle fire behind Uldren's cloak.

It could go differently, still. But there is no one in this room who can easily sight in and fire on their Prince—and he has no such reciprocal inhibition.

Maybe in a court of law circumstances and madness might make for an interesting legal defense. But, realistically speaking, Uldren was nowhere near an innocent man when Petra and (perhaps) our Guardian killed him.

And that's fine, because now we know that Uldren's story is not over. And his not being innocent when he was killed will now (hopefully) be played against his innocent, memoryless new life as a Guardian. The dramatic tension of whether the Vanguard, or City, or our Guardians will accept him could be all kinds of delicious.