Hey there! Recent events have left me wanting to know more about Holly, so I reached out to some Vasudan contacts. I ended up getting an interview with Professor Anhefta, a Vasudan scholar of comparative religion with a particular interest in Holly's mythology. I'm not sure how relevant this will end up being, but it was interesting, so here you go.

At its core, Holly's ideology comes from a prophecy present in several religions originating in Vasuda's Great Silt Sea region. It concerns the coming of a "Destroyer without number" - unusual pluralization per the original; apparently, it carries a sense of grandeur. While most religious-minded Vasudans took it as a warning, some esoteric clerics took it as a promise. They called themselves the Hammer of Light, and generations later, their disciples took to the stars.

That history shows us the seeds of a schism with Holly's forces, which Professor Anhefta believes has already started. They have members drawn from diverse mystical traditions with generations of divergence history, heterodoxy, and even infighting, and more recent converts only complicate matters further. Part of the theological debate concerns the nature of the Shivans - whether they're a mindless cosmic force like Earth's locust swarms, true gods, or something else entirely. Another concerns what will happen after a Shivan victory. The mainstream belief is that those who helped the Shivans will be rewarded in some sort of afterlife, but a minority believe they will be spared and granted dominion over the material world. (I wonder how the crew of the HLC Ramses would feel about this, if the Shivans had left any alive.)

The most interesting point of contention, however, concerns the relation between the Shivans and Holly itself. The disagreement goes back to a single word, which can be read as "assist", "commemorate", or "embody", and is also used for theatrical understudies. (I'm told this sort of thing is completely intuitive if you grew up with it; I'll trust the experts on that.) Whether Holly is called to assist or embody the Shivans has deep theological implications, and one very practical one. The traditional view calls for waiting for a second Shivan Incursion, while the "modern" view holds that Holly should embody the Shivans and carry on their work in their absence. Chilling stuff, really. Apparently, Imperial theorists believe that Holly's attack on Antares was carried out by the second group, and their defeat weakened their position, explaining why there hasn't been another one since then. I guess that's good.

If you'll forgive some wild speculation, I wonder if one of Holly's factions was after the Shivan tech I reported on last time to consolidate power. That's as good a lead as any, and I intend to see where following it takes me.

