Microstory 709: Death of the Firstborn

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For the few years, ever since the revelation that we will now be working through a new taikon path, parents have been worried over this one. The Death of the Firstborn seemed like a pretty clear warning. Though, the passage on it in the Book of Anseluka speaks about family as a more general concept, rather than literal genetic links. We should have, therefore predicted what would happen. As far as we know, no parents have recently lost their firstborn children, at least not beyond casualties of our war with Thuriama. Those deaths have been happening since the Light Wars began, and no recent losses could be characterized as being different, or more exceptional, than the others. No, this was not what the taikon was referring to. Ileana Ulaire, the replacement for Eido Andrea was the only notable death since what we consider to be the accomplishment of the taikon before. She was the first eido replacement since the taikon began, and was actually appointed before Sotiren Zahir was even resurrected, as was Seamus. After millennia of progress, we have developed safeguards, and technology capable of curing nearly all diseases, and of treating just about ever injury imaginable. Still, there are some freak accidents that even we cannot fix. Even if we could, those who discovered Ileana’s body quickly realized this to be the fulfillment of a taikon, and would have been forbidden from saving her. As explained, a group of Irritants, which mysteriously disappeared from the galaxy years ago, came upon Fostea before the taikon started, looking to cause trouble. They ended up gifting the Belt of Andrea to Ileana, however, evidently seeing their constant meddling to be inappropriate. Ironically, we have now adopted some of those people’s principles, as some of them originated on Earth. We do not believe their gift to be a tool for deadly subterfuge, but that does not make Ileana Ulaire any less dead. She was one day using it to pass through walls, as her predecessor would do casually, when it experienced a literal catastrophic failure. Something in the device became corrupted, and disengaged while Ileana was in the middle of a cement wall. Only the front part of her body managed to exit the other side before this error, or loss of power. We know there to have been preventative redundancies in the design, so we don’t know how this could have happened,  but experts do not suspect foul play. Many have attributed this event to the New Light itself, but the resurrected Sacred Savior sees it differently. It has caused him to fly into a rage.