From the subjective perspective of my mc he didn’t, since my mc is not an adherent of Aygul of Nyr but of the anti-Xthonic philosophers of old Erezza.
"“Your philosopher meant that law can change, nature can’t. But everything changes. Even what we call nature.”
“All things are in flux, and flux is the deepest nature of things. The more something resists change, the more likely people will give it the name of Nature…but nothing resists change forever. Ask any Theurge, or anyone who has faced the Plektoi.”
Everyone’s heard tales of the Twisted Ones: hounds, horses, or humans transformed by Theurgy into lethal armored giants. “A dram of blood makes only a brief change in nature, but a Harrower-full can change a Plektos’s bones to iron. Bleed a province, and you can turn air into an impenetrable Ward or make a mountain float in Aekos. Spend enough blood, milord, and you can change anything.”
“‘All things are flux’? Sounds like the anti-Xthonic philosophers of Old Erezza.” Horion sound flabbergasted at hearing the line from a helot—and uneasy. “They’ve been condemned even longer than Aygul of Nyr.”
“And they’re all the more likely to be true for it.”"
Despite his obvious enthusiasm, you decide not to sidetrack the conversation into theology. “Returning to the point: even should there be some difference in nature between helots and nobles, who’s to say that makes it immutable? The Order we call Nature is harder to change than the Order we call Law. But if there were need to change it, we would make a way.”
The ${delelle} looks slightly queasy but impressed.
From comparing your bit and mine I still see Horion falling very much within the niche I’ve described before, sure he might believe smart helots beat out dumb nobles, however prove to him that you’re both smart and do not agree with him as a helot and it is fear, not respect, you’ll get out of it.
Horion seems to only respect Helots who at least partially agree with him (thus putting them on the level of a dumb noble, as Havenstone described) and in Horion’s vision that, given his emphasis on the cities on the losing side of old Karagond, that he’d go no further then @P_Tigras and some of our other forum members in making helot manumission (not elevation to the top, manumitted helots still wouldn’t exactly be nobles) theoretically achievable.
You’re thinking too small, it is Shayard alone that already has 20 million helots. The population of the Hegemony as a whole is larger still
China without the one child policy and a relentless natalist drive (that tramples on gay helots even moreso then their straight peers) instead. The current Thaumatarch alone has likely overseen the butchering of tens of millions of helots already and the way the Hegemony is set up it practically requires every subsequent Thaumatarch to go for a higher body-count in butchered helots and the natalist drive to keep expanding the helot population to lead to the slaughter in order to keep the Hegemony’s system going. So, in the Hegemony Deng would have had to surpass Mao’s body count just to keep going.
Yep, that was the intention, since you really have to consider that Harrowing is intended to inflict the absolute maximum amount of suffering they can wring out of another person’s death. They then repeat this on an industrial scale as a matter of routine policy, instead of horribly misguided at best but ultimately still one-off projects like the “cultural revolution” and “great leap forward”.
Even discounting the Harrowing the life of helots can be as bad as that of people in forced labour death camps from China to the gulags of Russia to North Korea, only the Hegemony has a far larger percentage of its population in those circumstances then any of those.