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Zadriel and Aalva come upon an unbound clan who has oral traditions that help correct the understanding of the teethling background, the hellbound background, not as being evil, although the hellbound teethlings are focused on self-interest to the point that they are evil, but that it’s more about balance and nuance and the gray areas of things. You mentioned that destruction is a part of life. And I added that, yes, death, disease, rot, rust, all of these kinds of things that people associate with darkness and negativity. You know, can be things that the teethlings wield or leave in their wake. But that when it’s done in a moral or ethical way, it’s just a part of a balanced system, whereas the hellbound teethlings have been destructive and consumptive throughout their entire history because they like to have fires lit around them all the time, so they burn a lot of wood. They don’t care about the environment because they don’t really believe that this is their home. They despise the fact that they are outcasts, and they decide to live it up by being as terrible as they possibly can be.

Speaker 1 (01:51)
But that the demon that they venerate is not actually the originator of their race. Did I miss anything? No. Okay. I forget. Oh, I was about to say, I wonder what it would be like if we learn more about why Zadriel failed the test with the Paladins. And I had this thought that perhaps the reason why he failed was not because the God or whatever just saw him as evil, but perhaps he was asked a question that required a nuanced answer. Perhaps Paladin justice would have required him to just cut somebody down without offering them due process or without understanding that they might have committed their crime due to desperation and necessity. I’m wondering if maybe Zadriel answered the question in the way that he thought was right, but that to the Paladin deity, This ability to live in the gray areas was simply not the answer that he was looking for and was enough to say that Zadriel belongs to the dark.

Speaker 2 (03:31)
I like that thought, and I want to use pieces of it. The way I have imagined why Zadriel fails the light God’s Paladin test is not because of a lack of study or a lack of following the rules to the letter. I want Zadriel to be a Like a star Paladin. I do want him to be a champion of the light in his mind. I want him to follow the tenets. I like the whole Les Misérables stealing something because of poverty. And how should the Paladin be moral when laying out justice for that? But I don’t think that that should be the moral quandary of this school. I think I really like that as the moral quandary being the way that he failed. But in the way that I want to see it is that all of these Paladins have followed the light God, and the light God is really happy that he has people like the Paladins on his side to give him tribute and act in their name, and he shares powers or whatever. I want something like there’s something about the teethlings and the dark God, because I would imagine that this dark God is the progenitor of the teethlings, where the light God is the progenitor of elves, swarms, halflings, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (05:23)
The dark God probably did the Drow, which is a subspecies of elves that were Before elves, the dark God takes care of responsible for all the dark magic. But people twist dark magic in a way. For instance, perhaps the lightning bolt that struck you may have come from the light God, but then the dark God intervened and reincarnated you or reincarnated Serith. Because it’s Master of Death or whatever. I want something to be like the dark God has always watched over Zadriel and knew the character of what he would become and knew that there’s no Paladin school for the dark God because no one comes from the dark God and wanting to be a paladin to look for justice and what’s correct. Because the dark God is very chaotic. But the dark God, knowing that nothing is 100% chaotic, requires a little bit of order. How the light God requires a little bit of chaos Yeah. Zadriel is the chaos to the light God, but the order to the dark God.

Speaker 1 (06:53)
So I almost wonder if part of the reason why teethlings became so despised was that a sect of them decided that they would venerate one of these truly dark, evil demons that aligned- Or it could just be a very popular teethling who became a prophet to them. Right. His philosophy was that in order to correct the balance in the world where teethlings had been subjugated or shamed for centuries was to destroy it. Right. I also had another thought that, sure, we could say that the light God created all of these, the nice blonde races, right?

Speaker 2 (07:42)
The dark God did the orcs, the tolls.

Speaker 1 (07:46)
Right. But why does the… Does the dark God only do ugly things? The other thing is, what then accounts for the mix of light and dark that we have in us? What if we only think that the elves come from the light God, but that everything has to come from a mix of both?

Speaker 2 (08:12)
Yeah. Perhaps that the core of the world is that anything that’s ugly was created by the dark God. Anything that is beautiful was created by the light God.

Speaker 1 (08:23)
Right. Anything that exists in the day created by the… Anything nocturnal created by the dark God. Um, but like… Yeah, I just… I think that the idea that there are… You know, that there’s a sect of the teethlings that gives the teethlings their bad name should also be met and matched by the fact that there are a great number of paladins who, despite living by the word of the law, do not, do not follow the spirit of the law and exert power over people for their own prestige and gain. Yes. Because The law is written in a certain way, and so they can take advantage of people based on technicalities. Also, I’m wondering, are the Paladins the people who set the law of the land, or are the Paladins just people who enforce the existing law of the land? Is there a king who makes the laws, and then the Paladins are like, The law is just because the laws aren’t always just, right?

Speaker 2 (09:45)
I would say there are multiple different races of the world, and humans have the most Paladins, and they’re the most.