“Resonance comes from shared stories, not imposed solutions.”

~ Lucy Pendragon · read more

When Desperation Chooses

On power that confers, fractures that speak, and the cost of mistaking control for certainty

By Lee Hiatt · Dec 24, 2025 · 4 min read

This chapter carries weight without release. It moves slowly, deliberately, through a space that has already decided what it is, and through people who believe they still have a choice. The discomfort comes not from threat, but from recognition, the sense that something has already shifted, and no argument can return things to where they were.

What lingers is not fear of an enemy, but unease about the self. The chapter asks what happens when conviction outpaces understanding, when endurance becomes habit rather than intention, and when people mistake escalation for resolve. It offers no relief because the characters themselves refuse it.

Book 1 - Chapter 21 - The Circle Confers

I wrote this chapter to sit with a difficult ethical tension rather than resolve it.

The Circle does not gather here to plan a battle. They gather to explain themselves to one another. What unsettles them is not Lucy’s existence alone, but the quiet fact that something they believed immutable no longer behaves as expected. Their systems worked. Their rituals held. Their structures endured. And then something simply… did not.

That is an uncomfortable place to be.

There is a temptation, when power is threatened, to respond by tightening one’s grip. To escalate. To add weight where stability has already begun to fail. This chapter holds that moment, the instant where people who believe they are acting out of necessity begin to choose desperation instead, even as they name it something else.

Restraint mattered here because the danger was not spectacle. It was internal. If this scene had rushed, or if the world had answered them loudly, it would have offered the Circle a justification they desperately wanted. Noise can be interpreted as validation. Silence cannot.

So the sanctum does not shout. It thins.

The land does not accuse. It withdraws.

The pressure they feel is not punishment. It is consequence. And that distinction matters.

I wanted the discomfort to come from watching intelligent, experienced people misread what is happening around them. Not because they are foolish, but because they are invested. They have spent decades defining themselves by control, by authorship, by the belief that suffering can be shaped into something useful. Letting go of that belief would mean confronting the possibility that they have become conduits rather than actors.

That is a hard thing to face.

Non-resolution was necessary because this chapter is not about clarity. It is about fracture. About the first visible cracks in a structure that has been hollowing itself out for a very long time. Any neat answer here would have dulled the truth of that moment. People rarely arrive at ethical clarity while still benefiting from their own harm.

There is also discomfort in how close the Circle comes to naming the real problem, and how quickly they turn away from it. They sense that something responds to despair itself, that their practices feed a void they do not command. But acknowledging that fully would require change. And change, for them, would mean surrendering identity, not just strategy.

Confusion here is not a failure of reading. It is part of the experience. The chapter does not tell you what the pressure is, or what it wants, because the characters themselves do not know. What matters is not the nature of the force, but the fact that they respond to it by offering more of the very thing that draws it closer.

That pattern is intentional.

Meaning is not mandatory in this chapter. You do not need to decide who is right, or whether the Circle is doomed, or even whether their fear is justified. It is enough to notice the moment where endurance turns into insistence, where survival becomes an excuse rather than a goal.

Lucy is absent for most of this chapter on purpose. Her presence would have shifted the moral gravity too quickly. This scene needed to belong to those who feel the world slipping and choose, again and again, to press harder instead of listening.

If the chapter leaves you uneasy, that unease is doing its work. It is not asking you to judge. It is asking you to sit with the knowledge that harm often persists not because people desire destruction, but because they are unwilling to imagine themselves without the systems that taught them how to endure.

There is no closure here. Only a decision set in motion.

And a silence that does not argue back.