99. The Face of Evil

Entropy is the drift towards chaos.

Left alone, a room grows dusty, a friendship cools, a conscience grows dull.

Nothing good holds its shape without some kind of added care.

We know this about houses and gardens, but we are slower to notice it in our own soul.

It is easy to see the drift in other people.

A crowd that will not think, a man who washes his hands of a wrong that he could have stopped, a people who would rather be fed in bondage than walk free and hungry.

Those pictures are useful, but they are also a trap.

They let us feel clean.

It is harder work to ask whether the same drift is already at work in us.

The small fear that we have named prudence, or a hatred that we have named a principle.

The turning away that we have named peace.

In The Hand of Chaos, the fifth book of Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle, that question is given a physical body.

Haplo, a patron, has been taken by the dragon snakes, creatures of living chaos who wear elven faces when it suits them.

They mean to unmake him.

The keepers of the cathedral, elves who tend the souls of their dead, come to stop it.

One of them is called the keeper of the soul.

He has lived a very long time, and he has never, he thinks, met evil like this.

Then he looks at the dungeons around him, and then he looks at his own heart.

Fear leaves him, and shame takes its place.