Hello reader. Your goal is to help a young 12 year old girl, Lilly, survive to the age of 18. The world she lives in is vast and mysterious, almost entirely unknown to her outside her small village. We find Lilly at a critical juncture in her life where she must make a choice that will send shockwaves through all possible futures that lie ahead of her. Still, sometime between now and her 16th birthday, the world itself will go through a tremendous change. Depending on how the dice fall, that could be far off or very soon indeed. Your secondary goal is to resolve the issue that will make surviving to 18 difficult in the first place, I fully expect you to fail this. If you can somehow do the impossible and give Lilly a fulfilling life along the way, props to you.
1.1: Beginnings
The forest is your favourite place.
In the day it is warm in the clearings and cool under the canopies. If you could you would wander for days just watching and feeling everything and nothing in particular. There is life here everywhere around you that you've always felt somewhat connected to. Trees do not have tasks they must perform. Bushes do not have roles they are expected to fulfill. They simply grow up toward the sun that gives them warmth and down toward the water that feeds their roots. A Tree ((tree)?) "( I don't know if you're capitalizing for stylistic effect but I don't think you normally do that.)" spends its whole life moving freely toward its desires.
It is certainly more free than you.
The moon is full tonight(,) making it possible to navigate even through the thicker parts of the forest now that your eyes have adjusted. The darkness gives your surroundings a somewhat baleful atmosphere, but you like the sense of mild danger that causes your heart to pump harder. It is perhaps the closest to an adventure you will ever come, so you savour it tonight.
Tonight you will choose your Ethos; the destiny that you will cleave your future too (the destiny to which your future will cleave). Your family wished to conduct the ceremony in father's workshop, around his tools and symbols of his trade. A pity that you hate working on dead timber. The fact that you have the beginnings (of) prodigious skill at the art of woodwork makes it worse, for making something beautiful out of what was already beautiful before it was cut down seems an ironic mockery to you. You would not dishonour your father or family by sharing such thoughts. You do not want to be seen as a childish silly girl who is overly sentimental about trees. What's worse is that your father might convince you he is right if you actually told him, you don't want to entertain the possibility that you are wrong about something so close to your heart.
You have been a good daughter for so long and you take no small pride in the fact that you have been able to swallow your own ambitions of a bolder life and play the part of the dutiful firstborn all these years. But tonight, you could not stomach the idea of the most important decision of your life being made in the presence of symbols that represent bondage and a chained future to you. You wanted to spend it here, feeling the dew of leaves and the cool biting night wind that makes you shiver through you like (your light) clothes. Here you are constricted by nothing, free to move on all sides.
Everyone chooses an Ethos. The conduit through which the magic of the world and life shall have its say upon you. You choose once, only once, and that is that. Sure, an Ethos can grow, can change. But only by small degrees and in subtle directions.
Still, if being here offers you an Ethos that would go against your families (family's) wishes, will you accept it? You feel guilty thinking of your brothers who even now must be being rallied to begin the search. They'll think you a runaway by this hour, it was not a short walk here from the village. Perhaps it is best you take one of the Lesser Ethos that almost always come as an option, something that will bind your future to village. A simple and contented life, boring, but secure.
You are sitting now in a clearing, it looks very different to ((compared to), (from)) your memories from the daytime. You've never come anywhere near this deep during the night. Everything in (is) quiet and still, wrapped slightly in pale dim light. It is honestly quite foolish of you to come here alone in the night, but you've had bigger things on your mind than any hypothetical danger.
You honestly don't know what you'll do. You hope there is only one choice, so you need not carry any guilt or regret for opportunities lost.
The sensation has begun building, you know on a instinctual level the time has come. As an act of final betrayal to your families (family's) wishes but loyalty to your own desires, you cast your thoughts to the life you dream of. A mighty warrior Queen from the stories, powerful and beautiful in equal measure. Loved and respected by men. Free to set her own course through life while still bringing honour to those who raised you. You hope these thoughts bend the Ethos that come to you in that direction.
You are not a fool. You do understand only those with powerful legacies and substantial power have any real chance at unlocking some legendary Ethos, but a girl can dream. Even if it is a false hope, it is a pleasant one.
It will be any momen-[crunch]
Blood pours from your mouth, ears and eyes. Pain worse than any you have ever felt or even thought to consider wracks your body as bones break and reform to then simply break again. Fingers bend backwards in the wrong direction. You float in the air before slamming back into the ground. Your eyes pop and regrow a number of times. You do not scream, for your lungs are already empty of air and perforated with holes. Something reaches into you from a place that is nowhere, gorges (gouges) out a part of you that you didn't know was there and replaces it with something similar but different in a way you have no words to describe.
The pain is gone as quick as it came, you lay surrounded by your own gore, unharmed. Breathing hard ( unharmed, surrounded by your own gore, breathing hard), unable to form anything more than ragged hacking coughs to clear the last of the blood leftover in your lungs. Whatever just happened was not supposed to occur. What was supposed to happen is actually finishing as you speak, the buildup almost entirely unnoticed in comparison.
But you know something innate about yourself already. Something Impossible. Unlike anything you have ever heard in any story. This will not be the only Ethos you ever choose. You shall be able to hold more than one.
It is not possible. But it is the truth. Before you have any more time to process this complete upending of what you considered an immutable law of reality, it is time to choose not your only but your first Ethos.
- - - - - - - -
Namesake (Lesser):
On the day you were born, your mother declared your name to be Lilly for reasons neither of your parents have chosen to share with you in the years since. It was a bit of scandal, a woman insisting on the right to name her child, but your father was a gracious man and allowed it. Besides, your mother never pushed her luck with the naming of the brothers that followed you. To pursue one's own name as an Ethos grants incredible freedom, but often little actual direction or aid. There is perhaps some promise to choosing this given the mysterious origins of your own name, but it is more likely something quite boring you think.
Service to Man (Lesser):
A choice available to any young woman who has not betrayed the expectations of her culture. As an unmarried virgin of good standing within your community, the path of the maiden is available to you as it is to all other such female youths. You honestly can't think of anything worse than to live and die a housewife, living vicariously through the achievements of your children. Still, such a choice would be the perfect option to deliberately cause others to ignore you and look no deeper. IService to Man is the choice women with no better option take, allowing others to assume it was the best you could attain could do wonders for the goal of being left alone. Unless of course your father decides to marry you off immediately, that could cause all kinds of problems.I "( You've got quite a bit of sentence weirdness similar to the stuff I just mentioned in here, too. Suggest replacing the periods with commas and the commas with periods. (Except the end of the paragraph period, which is obviously supposed to remain a period.) )"
Nihilist Roots (Lesser):
On your more melancholy days, simply giving up on worrying about the challenges of life has seemed quite appealing. To simply become as air, uncaring and aloof to the concerns of life. It is an answer to your life in a manner of speaking, though you wonder if you could ever actually be happy simply accepting contentment in apathy and meaninglessness.
Dream within the Forest (Common):
You have spent many an hour daydreaming within the idealic clearings and shadowy underbrush surrounding your family home. The thought of this place fills you with warmth and calm, an inner strength and peace rising, flowing inward from your surroundings. You have always felt a special connection to this place, perhaps that can become more than an abstract truth.
Brave Blood (Common):
You have always dreamed of being a noble fighter, wading into lines of horrible unspeakable terrors and being utterly unmoved. A knight of legend. It is only a wish of the heart though, you lack any experience or ancestry in such a thing, leaving you with a tenuous connection at best to such an Ethos. In fact, as a girl of no repute it is a mystery why this is even a common level choice; Perhaps your deep yearning for adventure was enough to raise it from a Lesser Ethos.
Deviant Wanderer (Common):
You have played the part of the good daughter whilst guarding the true feelings of your heart and desires for the future carefully. Though it was never your deliberate intention, you are in fact a well practiced and expert liar. Capable (, capable) of convincing even yourself that every lie is a necessity and burying any guilt that might expose you. To embrace a life of deception in many forms big and small would be a tremendous departure both from what direction you expected your life to take and from what you consider an honourable path. It would however give you immediate and potent tools to become a free roaming woman beholden to no-one. This is an extreme option, ( ; ) could you even really return home with such an Ethos? Could you break your parents heart (parents' hearts) by having them behold a daughter holding such an ignoble future?
Duty of Wood (Rare):
Your father is a carpenter. His parents also plied the trade. The line stretches back an unknown number of generations. This is the path you would be expected to take. Your relationship with your ancestral family trade is a cold and distant one, you possess little natural affinity on an emotional level. You are actually quite surprised the choice is even an option, perhaps your deep sense of familial duty and raw technical skill has allowed you to just barely pass the necessary muster. To counter-balance your hesitance, the legacy of family is a powerful source of Ethos itself. You are perhaps one of a handful of children within the village capable of gaining a Rare Ethos through their families' trade. While it would give you little personal satisfaction, it would likely be a comparatively potent and prosperous path to follow. You also would feel far less shame for running off alone on your return home in the morn.
Foṟ̴͍̇m Fr̵̠̂̓ạ̷̾cture (̶̩̲͒͂A̷̡͆pō̵͕t̵̨̃heoti̶̦͛c):
Whatever has granted you your unique nature to choose additional Ethos in time has also linked you to something otherworldly. It calls and stirs at the edges of your mind. It is magnitude personified, limitless in scope, inhuman in nature. To do anything other than resist any further incursion would likely turn you into something perhaps not even recognizable to friends, family or even yourself. Even considering the option seems to minutely erode part of your self-identity. Still, such power, if only you give it just a little more…
Time to Choose an Ethos:
This will have a huge impact on what Lilly does immediately afterward. You haven't had the time to shape her personality yet, but the Ethos you choose will immediately provide or sever opportunities and courses of action she will consider and take. She won't take any irreversible decision before your next vote, but she will definitely be pushed in certain directions.
. "Nevil's Corrections" is sitting on a to-do list along with "Finish 2.5", "Finish 'Walk among the Daisies'" and "Clarify Jeremy/Mother Death continuity in early chapters"
