I'm one of a strange race that has coexisted with humans throughout history: the Comyn. We can work small miracles--fly, for example. We're raised to use our gifts quietly, to help others, both human and comyn. We enjoy working miracles, but there is a catch. According to everyday custom, folk wisdom, and scientific experiment, we must not do more than one miracle or so every season, or addiction begins. Some hormonal, druglike effect.

Our history says one group did rebel against the stricture, but they got more and more miraculous until they were frenzied, like an engine gunned in neutral, like the magic shoes that make you dance. They miracled themselves into illness and exhaustion, and on toward madness. The main body of our people had to unite and kill them in the end.

But I wonder--would they have found internal regulation if they'd not been killed? Was their extermination really the mercy killing of insane addicts, or was there, perhaps, an element of fear and jealousy? We repressed folks always want the uninhibited to pay for their indulgences, as proof that our own sacrifices mean something. If those unregulated Comyn HAD achieved a new, more active balance... wouldn't we have looked stupid?

How is our story, in the end, different from the Inquisition?

Witches burned again.

NOTE

The Comyn are from Marion Zimmer Bradley's DARKOVER books. Many of my dreams have this theme of "Ration your clairvoyance, or it'll exhaust you." This dream make me wonder a bit. Is it like any muscle? Can one build up to more? Maybe my caution is keeping me weak!

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