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I set these words down with the faint perfume of spiced wine still clinging to my sleeves.
Virelia is a jewel set adrift in velvet dark, its seas of sapphire and emerald gardens cultivated for delight alone. Star-liners arrive hourly, each bearing nobles and off-world merchants hungry for entertainments both sanctioned and quietly proscribed. Music drifts from every balcony, and the very air hums with scented pleasure.
I came uninvited, as I usually do. My passage was paid by a miner from a neighboring moon who begged me to “speak sense to the silks,” for beyond Virelia’s perfumed core lay out-settlements where laborers harvested rare pollens and subsisted on crusts of nutrient paste. While the spires drowned in wine, the workers starved.
The high houses welcomed me with curious amusement. An aged preacher in road-worn robes was a novelty amid their glitter. They offered me chalices of amasec older than my bones, platters of fruit bred only for perfect sweetness, and diversions I will not name. I accepted water. Only water.
One lord—whose robes were worth a shuttle’s engine—laughed and pressed a cup of crimson liquor into my hand. “Even the Emperor,” he said, “rejoices in the bounty of His creation. Drink, old friar.”
“The Emperor,” I replied, “rejoices when His creation is preserved, not squandered. To sip while others thirst is not celebration but theft.” I set the cup aside.
There was mockery, a few bored shrugs. Yet one listener, a young noblewoman named Lysera, lingered after the others drifted back to their masquerades. “You do not condemn pleasure,” she said carefully, “only its excess?”
“Pleasure is a gift,” I told her. “But a gift becomes a chain when it rules the giver. Temperance is not denial; it is freedom—the choice to give what we might hoard.”
The next evening she appeared at the workers’ docks dressed in plain garb, a single servant bearing crates of food and medicae packs purchased with her own coin. Word spread, and within days other houses—eager not to appear stingy beside her—sent their own convoys of grain and filters. Pride, too, can serve the Emperor’s design.
I remained a fortnight. I neither feasted nor starved, taking only what my body required. Some called it asceticism; I called it equilibrium. By the time I left, new levies had been decreed: a tithe of every pleasure-garden’s profit redirected to the outer settlements. A small thing, perhaps, but enough to steady lives that had hung by a thread.
As my shuttle rose through Virelia’s perfumed clouds, I tasted again the simple sweetness of water on my tongue and thought: victory lies not in refusing delight, but in mastering the desire that would make delight a god.