Index L. Prohibitorum
Legacy Name: Index L. Prohibitorum

"Faith is the most important value of all." Index had been told this since her birth, over and over. "You must protect the morals of the faithful.That is your sole purpose for existence." Yes, her purpose. Her purpose was to read anything written by a human, memorize it, and compare the work to the Holy Book for consistency. If the work contained a theological error, its contents were destined to perish. She alone would remember the words contained within.

"It is for the sake of the faithful that your purity is being sacrificed," she was told. Endlessly repeated phrases preached her higher purpose. In the eyes of others, she was defiled: she contained endless amounts of sacrilegious knowledge. The people feared her.

But, Index did not much mind her so-called "destiny." She learned new and intriguing things every day, things that made her question the world around her and the people around her. When the Holy Book was shoved into her hands in the beginning, she had ben told: "This is the one truth." But she wondered. A complicated man named Sarte had sad that human beings merely exist: "They turn up, appear on the scene." They are terribly alone, he reasoned, for there is no God to help them define themselves. Despair knocked on their doors; it beat their doors down. Index found this dark view of life infinitely more interesting than the views she knew as truth. After all, God would never accept her now, as full of forbidden knowledge as she was. She had been force-fed all sorts of forbidden fruits; how could she ever be accepted into paradise?

No, Index just existed. There was no God to help her in her endless days of learning. Life, according to some men, was meaningless. Her one "purpose" in life, to read book after book to see if it was consistent with the "truth" or not, was meaningless. What, in the end, was the truth? Vague musings of a single book? Or was it a collection of thoughts and opinions based upon what your personal reality had witnessed and processed? Is the "truth" not different from person to person? Index realized in one moment, after years of computing endless theories of science and philosophy, that she was not "protecting the morals of the faithful." She was keeping them from finding their personal truth. She was suffocating them.

Life was meaningless. Her one sole purpose for existence was meaningless. But she still existed. She existed, and so she needed to act. She needed to provide meaning for her life through action.

One course of action rang out clearly and truly in her mind. She had the power to give back to the people. She had the power to give them back their freedom: the freedom to decide what the "truth" really was.

So that she did, and Index Librorum Prohibitorum was abolished. She gave forbidden knowledge back to the people, and they were given the chance to choose.

Filled with limitless knowledge, Index continued her search for her personal truth. This time, though, she chose what to read and what "truth" to compare it to. Perhaps, she thought, one will never fully be able to define the truth. However, the act of trying in itself gives life limitless meaning.