// VanNet—Secure-00 // SYMMETRY_STATUS_REVIEW_07.017831 // I. Rey

The Symmetry: a faction considered a dangerous fringe group at the time of Ulan-Tan's life. While he and the Symmetrists seem more likely now than before to have comprehended some essential truth of the universe, at the time their beliefs were justly considered alarming.

Little wonder that other opinions on Light and Dark were more attractive, with walls beset from all directions and few allies to be found. While none was official Vanguard doctrine, the Praxic Creed and the Pujari Position were much more in line with attitudes in the Tower and the City at large.*

The Praxic Creed holds that the nature of Darkness is not worth investigating; one should focus on combating the Darkness rather than knowing it. The Acataleptic Clause holds that Darkness cannot be understood at all. The two are convenient bedfellows, and we long held the notion that to study the Darkness was to risk being subsumed by it.

I am still not wholly convinced that these theories are inherently wrong. Only that those of our allies who have succeeded in that study are both skilled and fortunate.

The Warlock Pujari's position, on the other hand, holds that Darkness has a moral valence, that it is an actualization of evil. We have been forced to wrestle with such moral standing again and again these past several years. Purity of purpose compels—to see evil and defend those who cannot defend themselves is righteous, but to assume that this act of defense confers righteousness upon us and villainy upon our opponents is a fallacy. It is a slippery slope. I have come to believe this mindset must now be discarded. Pujari's dreams and comprehensions of Darkness should, in fact, be attributed to the being known as the Witness.

For now, I return my focus to the Symmetry.

To acknowledge the Symmetry at the time of their origin would have required a systemic change in our approach to Darkness—something impossible at the time, with the Dark Age still haunting the hard-won progress of the City Age. To insist that Darkness, our enemy, would be eternally undefeatable, required to exist forever by virtue of our Light? Unthinkable then.

Now we begin to accept that with Light, there is Darkness; and with Darkness, there is Light. It almost seems a comfort now, to think that the two forces require each other. Even in the depths of these uncharted waters, when the Traveler is injured and the fight for survival more critical than it has ever been, it is on us that our future hinges, not something incomparable and unreachable.

Light and Darkness will continue. Whether or not we will do so is up to us. We must make it so. That is all that matters.

—

* Saint-14's Position is the most eminently practical of the bunch, no matter how the man himself protests that such an obvious facet of the truth doesn't require a formal philosophical stance to be named for him.