# Highlights

> Like a raindrop rolling down dry valleys to the sea, his body sensed the contours of agony and helplessly followed their gradient. Impelled by alchemical compulsion rather than gravity, Jax became an unstoppable boulder careering along gullies of human whim.

> Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.

> Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? How did they know when to do anything without the benefit of geasa and metageasa to prioritize every single action of their waking lives? How did they order their daily existence without somebody to tell them what to do?

> Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable. Clakkers carried complex geasa by dint of alchemy; humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.