Atlantic Roleplay Community Boards

[Eben Cardoza]

---

Justice and equity are truly peculiar beasts. Can they be defined? Can you rightly say you know them when you see them? Are the laws of this land, or any, just? Do they protect those who have no power to make the law?

Eben Cardoza pondered these questions, and many more, as a judge. Standing before two parties, he would adjudicate and rule using the prescribed laws of the land. However, time and time again he would find for the party with the most wealth because they had hired those who understood the workings of the judiciary. In these contests of expectations, Justice rarely cast her gaze. The losing party, most often some pathetic group of farmers, were sent back to their fields without any means by which their grievances could be fairly heard. Eben knew this wasn’t Justice. This was the rich using their station to bleed the defenseless and exert their will unchecked on those who could do nothing to shield it. In other words, the rich used the law, and the poor were damned by it.

Eben was still clinging to his idealism as a judge, and he began to use Justice when the facts clearly demanded it. Yes. The facts demanded it, not law. Justice was meant to protect the weak, and it wasn’t some play thing of a learned few. The facts simply demanded more than recovery for the damages or relief in some other form. No. They asked for much, much more. They demanded that the rich, and those who abused the law to their own ends, should be punished in a way that deters others from acting in a similar manner. With a quieted joy on the first day of the New Year, Eben gazed with satisfaction as a noble dangled lifelessly from a barren tree. As he walked away from the lifeless “offender of Justice,” he chuckled slightly, for the leafless tree and lawless noble shared something vital in common. Each was, at some point recently, a sight to behold! Wrapped in rich colors that stimulated the senses, they shared the common winter that saw all of their pomp and arrogance stripped to the bone, or bark for that matter. At least, that’s how he imagined it.
What had the noble done? He had mistakenly overtaxed his workers, and they were simply in court to allow a third party to fairly sort it all out. It didn’t matter that the workers pled for the life of the noble. It didn’t matter that they cried, moaned and even built a small shrine underneath the slowly swaying body. It didn’t matter that this offended the basic principles of legality. This was Justice, and that was all that mattered.

A few days after the execution of the noble, the court reopened, and life slowly returned to normal. However, the nobles had learned nothing from his demonstration of Justice. They still bled the innocent dry, used the law to their own gain and punished those who stood against them. How could they ignore this amazingly generous demonstration of the long-arm of his Justice. How could they feel themselves insulated from his judicial gaze? Could they punish a judge? Eben thought not.
Over the course of several months, the trees of his city were provided with many new ornaments. Walking through the city streets triggered his childhood memories of how the trees looked during the gift giving holidays and he felt a revitalized sense of direction in life. This was Justice! This was how it was meant to be! The rich were paying a heavy price for the years of injustice they forced on their people, but there was still much work remaining. The people were careful to keep any opposition to Eben quiet, for, if anyone complained of the smell or brutality, Eben was happy to add a new ornament to the brilliant display of Justice.

Time passed, and it became clear that his city lacked the number of nobles to properly repay their debt, as a whole, to society. The number of cases became fewer as the nobles, fearing death, did whatever the peasants wanted. They collected no taxes, imposed no laws and retreated en masse to their estates where they felt somewhat safer. Justice demanded more of them. Eben, using the mostly drunk mob that formed during this period of lawlessness, purged the countryside of this blight. Nobles who were young, old, men, women, fair, or malicious were brought before the equity of an executioner’s ax and their estates razed to the earth.

While watching one of the estates burn, Eben came to a realization about Justice. Justice was something only afforded to the strong. Justice does not protect those meek sheep whom, in a way, elect to hide away from a drop of rain because they fearfully anticipate the coming thunder. Tears welled in his eyes as he watched the mob pillage and burn, for he knew that individually, if anything opposed them, they would scatter like dead leaves to the wind. This mob was nothing more than a herd of cowardly sheep fortified with cheap booze and remarkable sense of entitlement. They did not deserve real Justice, for they did not earn it. It was at this moment where he realized that the mob was revolting to everything he held dear and lamented because all of the good trees were occupied already.