The Law of the Bond

The Priest and the Handii

A Priest does not stand alone. Neither does a Handii.

The Priest bears the Holy Words. He speaks where the Handii remains silent. His calling places him before darkness openly, bearing truths that evil has spent ages attempting to corrupt, silence, or destroy.

The Handii stands with him. She is not his servant. She is not his possession. She is not merely his protector.

The Handii is his shadow, his precision, his strength when strength must remain unseen. Where the Priest's calling is often made manifest in word, hers is revealed through obedience, restraint, vigilance, and sacrifice.

Yet even these descriptions do not explain the Bond. For the Bond is deeper than duty.

A Priest and Handii may disagree. They may anger one another. They may know fear. They may carry wounds the other cannot heal. They may even know things about one another that neither wished another soul to see.

Still, the Bond remains. It does not depend upon affection. It does not require agreement. It does not weaken because one is afraid. It does not dissolve because obedience becomes costly.

The Bond is not sustained by their feelings toward one another. It simply is.

There Are No Secrets in the Bond

The deepest terror of the Bond may not be death. It may be truth.

A thought fiercely guarded can sometimes be felt by another. A memory buried beneath centuries may rise where two minds meet. Fear passes through places words cannot reach. Pain may announce itself before it is confessed.

The Bond does not erase the distinction between Priest and Handii. They remain two persons, two wills, two histories. But there are places within each that the other may touch.

Thus the Bond demands something more terrible than courage. It demands that one be known.

There are enemies from whom a warrior may hide weakness. There are friends before whom a person may conceal sorrow. There are lies a man may tell the whole world until he nearly believes them himself.

But before the one bound to him, such walls are never certain.

This is why trust between Priest and Handii is not sentiment. It is survival.

If the Handii Dies, the Priest Dies

Those words are spoken simply because the Law itself is simple. If she dies, he dies. And if he dies, she dies.

There is no ritual by which the surviving member may petition for release. There is no priest sufficiently ancient to undo it. There is no distance great enough to escape it.

Mountains may stand between them. Seas may divide them. One may descend where the other cannot follow. Still, the Bond remains.

This knowledge changes everything. Every wound matters twice. Every battle places two lives upon the field even when only one stands before the blade.

Every sacrifice carries a terrible question: what does it mean to give your life when your life is no longer yours alone to give?

That question has followed Priests and Handii for generations. There has never been an easy answer.

The Bond Is Not a Curse

Those who first hear of the Law often mistake it for cruelty. Why should one life end because another has fallen? Why should the innocent bear the death of another? Why bind two people beneath a law neither can escape?

The Priests have asked such questions. The Handii have asked them as well. The Law has never answered.

For the Law of the Bond was not given so that men might possess an explanation for everything the Most High permits. It reveals instead something mankind has always resisted: a life does not become sacred because it belongs only to itself.

The Bond makes visible what the world continually attempts to deny — that no life exists entirely alone. The Priest cannot say, My death concerns only me. The Handii cannot say, My sacrifice is mine alone to make.

Each bears the other. Each must reckon with the terrible dignity of a life entrusted partly into another's keeping.

The Bond therefore creates neither master nor slave. It creates burden. And within that burden, something greater than power may sometimes be found. Mercy.

The Law and the Most High

Even the oldest Priests speak carefully here. The Law is absolute to those who live beneath it. But the Law is not the Most High. Creation does not bind its Creator.

There are mysteries within the history of the Bond that cannot be explained by rule, ritual, scholarship, or precedent. When such things occur, the wise do not declare the Law broken.

They remember instead that every law of creation remains beneath the One who called creation into being. The Law commands those beneath it. The Most High stands above it.

This distinction is rarely comforting. For it means that when the impossible occurs, the question is no longer: how was the Law broken? The question becomes: why did the Most High act?

And that question may be far more frightening.

The Cost of Being Bound

The young often imagine that courage means having no fear of death. The old know better.

For the Priest and Handii, courage means knowing exactly what their death will cost another — and standing where they have been called nevertheless.

That is why the Bond cannot finally be understood as a weapon. Nor as magic. Nor even as protection. It is a vocation carried by two lives.

A Priest bears his Handii. A Handii bears her Priest. Each becomes keeper of something that does not belong entirely to them.

And when darkness comes, as darkness always comes, neither asks merely: will I survive? The greater question is: can I remain faithful when another life has been entrusted to mine?

That is the weight of the Law. That is the terror of the Bond. And perhaps that is also its grace.

For in a world where evil teaches every creature to preserve itself at the expense of another, the Bond declares something altogether different: your life is not yours alone. Your death is not yours alone. Your burden is not yours alone.

Two stand. Two endure. Two bear the cost.

And until death — or the will of the Most High — parts what mortal hands cannot sever, they remain bound.