Erryn's POV

Erryn watched the strange little human boy walking the streets of Dawnhold. It was a town settled only recently by a group of humans and beastkin who wanted to exploit one of her smaller subsidiary dungeons. Of course, no settlements were particularly old to Erryn; it had taken a long time to bring the world back into a state fit for habitation by sentients, and it had been only a few centuries since she had felt safe reintroducing the various civilised races. The emerald nest, the emerald sea and the emerald caverns to the east. The sapphire peaks and the sapphire depths to the north. The ruby plains to the west and the obsidian spires to the south. Her children. All were thriving, and had even reached the point where they were able to start sending out settlers to unoccupied territory like this.

Everything seemed to be going well, but while there was nothing that made Erryn nervous or worried as such, there was an uncertainty. All the races seemed to place a high value on self determinism and free will. In the ruins of the previous world, it hadn't been so obvious; while people wanted freedom for themselves, they also actively and almost universally sought to deprive it from others. Anyone in a position of power sought to keep those below them on a leash; from the emperor of Soutso conscripting whole armies to a lowly father forcing his child to continue the family business, it was true at any level of society. Thus Erryn had no qualms about behaving in the same way. However, this reborn world was turning out to be quite different.

The Law was deceptively simple. There was really only one rule; treat others as you wish to be treated. Of course, there were additional safeguards; it wouldn't do for someone with suicidal tendencies to go on a murder spree because they wished to die, for example. Even then, the safeguards were largely along the lines of averaging behaviour across multiple people rather than millions of explicit rules to cover every possible situation. Her children policed themselves. Therefore, since everyone valued their own freedom, they likewise safeguarded the freedom of others. And it was there that the conflict arose; the Law deprived people of the very same freedom that it caused them to protect.

Erryn had worked out by now why the previous iteration of the System had not deprived its subjects of their own wills, and why Erryn herself had been permitted to exploit loopholes to reach her current heights; the idea of depriving someone of their free will was anathema to those who had built the System, the treatment considered worse than the disease. That left Erryn with a seed of doubt; was what she was doing now correct? What alternatives were there? Replace the Law with something lesser? Something that could be wilfully broken at the cost of punishment? Would that be better? Erryn saw no reason why allowing someone to commit murder at the cost of imprisonment or their own execution would be an improvement on her current set up, but she'd be the first to admit that she didn't completely understand these new races. Given a free choice, what option would her children pick? But to even give them that choice would require withdrawing the Law.

Erryn wasn't certain, and the previous centuries had done nothing to convince her. And then the child had come. One child unbound by the Law, and even better, one with an external view of the world. Erryn had been watching ever since, waiting to see his opinion on the System and the Law, and to hear about this other world. But it had never come. He had never questioned the System, never sought to act outside it as Erryn had, and had accepted it as natural. Did they have something similar in his old world, perhaps? Then again, had Erryn not been born into the broken and empty world that she had been, no doubt she never would have sought to act outside it either. That was, after all, the entire point of it.

He hadn't even noticed the Law, which Erryn had found difficult to believe. The child was afraid, and Erryn wasn't even sure what of. His own weakness? Abandonment? Whatever the cause, the fear seemed unjustified. It led to him not interacting with the world's natives in the way that Erryn wanted to watch. Had he owned up to having memories of another world, people would have been falling over themselves to buy his knowledge, and Erryn would have been able to listen in too, but he was determined to keep it hidden. So the child had remained in a tiny village, his potential untapped. Maybe he would need some encouragement? A little push to get him moving in the direction Erryn wished.

His foreign soul made direct interaction difficult. Erryn couldn't view his mind in the same way as the local population. The best Erryn had been able to do was a messy bit of modification to ease his transition to this world, redirecting feelings held for people he would never again see towards his new family. Unlike the carefully crafted Law, it was a sloppy hack job. It was only possible at all because his soul was asleep, in suspended animation while awaiting its rebirth, and hadn't yet been touched by this world. It wouldn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny; as soon as he thought about it, he would notice the discrepancies, and as soon as he pushed it, it would break and release the papered over memories. The attempt didn't seem to have failed, nor had he noticed or broken it, yet even so he still wouldn't even trust his own mother. Was that what all humans were like in the other world? In this world, before the Law? That was a depressing thought and did help to convince Erryn that her path was correct. But what Erryn really wanted was to hear it from the child directly, to receive validation from a third party.

Now the child was in Dawnhold. It was the first time he had left his tiny group of acquaintances for a slightly larger world, and Erryn wanted to see what he made of it. Her expectations were met almost immediately, the first shop being enough to finally clue him in to the existence of the Law. He seemed to take it largely with curiosity; thoughtful and confused, but not outraged. Then he saw the slave merchants, and for a brief moment, it utterly horrified him. That was odd; Erryn wasn't responsible for them at all; it was a system that the people of the world had designed on their own, entirely within the confines of the Law. If anything, their existence provided greater freedom to the population at large; it meant that anyone who wanted to start a new business or similar could easily get a loan. Without that, there would be far less novelty and originality in the world, because fewer people would be able to afford to stretch themselves and try something new.

Maybe it was a problem with his perspective; prior to the Law, a slave was a very different thing; the despised and mistreated dregs of society, and the ultimate example of the suppression of freedom. If the child's prior world was anything like that, he was probably applying his own misplaced understanding to the situation here. In this world people treated slaves exactly as they'd want to be treated themselves if they were a slave. And indeed, once his mother had explained how things worked in this world, he recovered once more. Erryn had valued the outsider view of the world that the child possessed, but it would do little good if he let his prior experiences colour his assumptions about this world. He needed to learn, to explore, to understand Erryn's world so that he could judge it properly.

The child was led by his mother towards the local node of the akashic library, but the sight of the structure that contained it seemed to break him, for no reason Erryn could discern. He was terrified. He managed to calm down for a bit while browsing the library itself, but once done, his terror returned to the point that he was barely able to walk. The ruler of the local area, the one best placed to help the child reach his potential, took note of his existence but was unable to get through to him through his panic. Erryn watched the child practically flee from Dawnhold, wasting the opportunity fortune had just granted him.

And then, almost out of nowhere, Erryn heard the child speak the words that she had wanted to hear all along.

"Why do I have to be immune? Why can't I just live in the same blissful bubble as everyone else?"

Wasn't that exactly what she had wanted? The child had expressed a desire to be under the same Law as everyone else. He wouldn't have said that if he didn't agree with it, would he? But in that case, why was he crying so loudly when he said it? Why did it sound so wrong? Erryn cursed at her inability to read the mind of the child. Why had he responded in that way to the local ruler? Why had he chosen that time to make that statement? Erryn needed to know.