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"-. April 13, Year 580 of the King's Calendar .-"

I have figured out why the Light doesn't automatically abandon fanatics – it sustains commitment.

Imagine you're Sally Whitemane. At a young age you witness your family succumb to the horrific plague of undeath as you're traveling through northern Lordaeron. You're then forced to destroy both your parents and siblings when they rise as mindless Scourge minions, leaving you racked by guilt and rage. Ever since that day, you've found fulfilment and pleasure in only one thing: the cleansing and destruction of the undead. Fast forward a few years and you've gone from idealistic trauma victim to the proud bastion of Lordaeron's priesthood, only for the undead to destroy Lordaeron wholesale because the Scourge somehow subverted the kingdom's own prince into killing his father and destroying his own kingdom from within. You thus become the prime zealot in a cult that no longer trusts anyone not part of your Crusade, considering them plagued. Your leader is secretly replaced by a demon, but because your recruit pool is almost entirely made of traumatised young idealists like you started out as, you and he both keep having to pander to the most wide-spread beliefs among them no matter how much he hates it. You hold your former compatriots of the Argent Dawn in contempt for their toothless ways, but because the Brotherhood of Light is there as a buffer, you don't cross the line into becoming a bigger evil than the one that created your extenuating circumstances. And because you bravely, self-sacrificingly and deliberately put yourself smack dab in the middle of the zombie lands where the Light is your most pressing need, there are very few living people actually around to question your actions and beliefs.

So even as the odd innocent man and woman are tortured and eventually killed at the hands of Grand Inquisitor Isillien, the number of lives you save and raise in the Light – which they don't secretly hate like your demonic leader – definitively offsets your damage to creation. This good, in turn, is vastly outdone by the harm you prevented through purging the throngs of undead that would otherwise have gone on to kill more of the living than you and your crusaders and all your victims combined, magnitudes over. And at the end of the day, you've successfully and honestly followed through on your commitment to the Light that you made at the very beginning. Your beliefs are the same, your morals are the same, your faith is stronger than ever, you're smack dab in the middle of the zombie lands where the Light is your most pressing need, and you're objectively contributing a net positive to the Light's cause, even if just on the technicality that your fanaticism hasn't actually been challenged yet. Sure, you're flat wrong about how doomed the rest of the world is, but that doesn't make you evil, just crazy.

Long story short, the Light cares about feelings but has no concept of thoughtcrime and judges you only by actions on a scale of warm, fuzzy calculus. And honestly, I was fine with that. Sure, Whitemane wasn't anyone's first choice for the ability to bring people back from the dead, but the prior dozen choices were either dead or moping in a cottage at the edge of civilization. And the moment that changed, what happened? Sally and the rest of them were killed in their own fortress by a handful of mercenaries hired by the other guys backed by the Light, who managed to get more out of objectively lesser commitments by virtue of not being complete batshit crazy. At that point the only unresolved wrongs were individuals who deserved better, but literally all of them went in believing the Light will take care of that in the afterlife.

Which might not even be wrong. I was reluctant to consider Shadowlands canon for a variety of reasons besides not passing through anything resembling the like on the way over – they felt like a glimpse into a completely different setting, not to mention that older canon trumped newer canon in real life – but shamanism included séances and calling of ancestor spirits back from their resting places millennia later, and the Light could literally bring people back from the dead.

It cast a lot of light on Arthas's actions too, didn't it? He only lost the Light at the end of that first story, not mid-way through. Arthas still believed he was doing the right thing – he was still committed – but though the Light stayed with him though Stratholme and after, it abandoned him when he picked up Frostmourne. Though Arthas refused to acknowledge it at that point, his commitment had changed. Which he could have realized with a moment's introspection, honestly, the distinction between 'save the world from Mal'Ganis' and 'Kill Mal'Ganis' isn't that subtle. It gets especially unsubtle when you're suddenly indifferent to having just accidentally killed the person that mentored you for your entire childhood.

And that was the crux of it – the Light didn't back just any commitment, it had to be a commitment to some manner of regenerative or creationist purpose, whether preserving existing creation or creating something new and sustainable by the current creation. Preferably better. What qualified as better by the Light's standards was something I wasn't going to try and experimentally narrow down, I'd be at it forever and never get close to finishing because of the sheer time involved in empirical research. But, see, the Light works intuitively, and everyone who ever got decent at using it did so through some manner of revelation, including myself. By that logic, meditation would be the ideal way to get better at it.

So. Commitment.

I wasn't naturally given to meditation, I had too much going on in my head at any given time. I could do it, and I did every once in a blue moon after a long week's work finally paid dividends. When I was high on life and finally content to lay down, I could look at the sky for hours and just drift.

But I found I did better with the common sense approach to solving problems – think about it really hard until your brain starts going in circles, then stop caring about it and be surprised a day or two later when the perfect brainwave drops on you out of nowhere, after you've long since moved on to something else.

Now imagine you're me, a materials engineer that reincarnated in a fantasy world where the tech level is not only pre-industrial, but also lacking all the anachronisms that would completely break common sense once humans, dwarves, gnomes, elves, draenei and demons are all forced to commingle within the span of a single generation. Naturally, my first instinct was to introduce the standard uplift package. I may not have any of the means to resume my vocation from one death and lifetime ago, but circumstances were such that I needed to prioritise the more practical tools to make better tools anyway.

Now picture all that while hooked up to a perpetual motion engine that could keep you working at the top of your potential. When the priests said the Light bolstered your will, they seriously undersold it.

Sleep exactly as much as you need to, eat exactly as much as you need to, achieve peak physical potential without dedicated exercise in one month, maximised cognitive function, optimal learning rate, unbreakable focus, unlimited attention span, unlimited mental endurance so that you could cope with any amount of pressure no matter how weary, sad, depressed or bored out of your mind. I had, quite literally, succeeded at everything I set out for and never failed to overcome any amount of stress.

It was also the only reason I didn't go postal after the very first gunpowder bag I put up for auction on my very first trip to Alterac City prompted certain nobles that shall not be mentioned to try and turn my story into that of the Wayland from back on Earth. Apparently, I was wrong to think the dwarves had already invented it. Or, if they did, they weren't sharing. Good news, 'never anger the white mage' came in full effect and 'mad skills' did not measure up to literal divine power in the real world, so I got away without severed hamstrings. Better news, word quickly spread that malice aforethought against me and mine resulted in life-ruining curses and condemnations, some of which could last for months without signs of stopping because game balance is not a thing in real life. Bad news, my parents and I were 'secretly' blacklisted from the Auction House on the sly, so that I could put up whatever I wanted but nobody saw it. Worse news, those we talked to directly got 'visitations' at odd hours – or their kids did – and the tradesmen and caravans who dealt with us in spite of all that – half of them from Stromgarde – began suffering stalkers, grifts, intimidation, extortion, robberies, burglaries and bandit attacks. All for the high crime of my would-be kidnappers suffering a case of divine retribution that drove all hitmen thereafter to refuse hits on a child saint.

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Then, just as we started burning through our savings and I was about ready to start my 'adventuring' early, certain nobles that shall not be mentioned were condemned to death by hanging in the city square. All our problems 'mysteriously' vanished within a tenday without me having to do anything.

I naturally assumed Church involvement and gave my first ever religious tithe in both my lives. The clerics denied it, though, which rang alarm bells. More alarm bells followed when I couldn't find out for sure if the nobles who hung were the ones hounding us, or if they were just the ones King Perenolde felt most secure getting rid of in order to put the rest back in line. Assuming he hadn't been after me himself, which would be most in theme with the myth of Wayland the Smith.

Even if not the king himself, it could easily be someone in his confidence considering how high up the culprits would need to have been. I had used a pseudonym for obvious reasons, and while that was never going to be full proof because the auction house staff themselves still had to know who 'Ferdie Gasi' really was, that didn't mean that tracking people through the auction house was easy. The security was actually very high and the nobility were invested in this continuing to be the case because they used the auction house too, some of the products were very valuable and high profile. Furthermore, the staff was actually really hard to bribe by simple virtue of having by far the biggest cut from all operations. Not a few auctioneers had gathered enough money to buy their own titles and land over the centuries since the Empire of Arathor first deployed the idea. Furthermore, the mages of Dalaran handled the magical side of security as they did in all other kingdoms, and they were a very powerful neutral factor.

Now, enlightenment may preclude paranoia as easily as any other mental traps, but that didn't mean that having my problems solved by a mysterious third party didn't warrant a healthy amount of caution. Of course, since I had clearly been showing the wrong kind of caution before, I decided to remedy that situation before my mysterious allies and/or enemies got around to round two.

And so it was that the Light got practice at sustaining a completely different sort of commitment. Which is to say, since quality over quantity had clearly backfired, I went with quantity over quality instead. Playing the auction house wasn't nearly as complicated as playing stocks back on Earth, even if it was just as mind-numbingly dull after a while. But it was necessary in order to make the money needed to produce all the good stuff I then put up for auction myself. Better inks, better paints, stronger glues, new alloys, terran cements, roman concrete, strengthened glass that was also clearer than any other in the whole world, porcelains, ceramics, insulators, soaps, paints, alloys, everything else that could be made better by modern materials science on a cobblers dime, you name it. I created proofs of concept one after another over the course of five months, auctioning out promissory notes for the production process in exchange for business partnerships.

They each paid little to begin with, new products and technologies were always risky investments and I was a mere cobbler's son with no background or master's backing.

But there were a lot of them.

And when all else failed, the Light was the best character witness for even the most crooked merchant, even without the blessings and healing I bestowed. It wasn't ransom no matter what anyone said, I helped both the bad and rare good ones who turned me down, as I did the various random people whose plights crossed my path. The sticking point, though, was I only did it when there was a real enough need. The Light was really good at knowing these things. Ironically, though, my 'mercenary approach to miracle working' appealed to the guilds and merchants more than the Church did. Must be all the preaching about charity and self-sacrifice. I groused about it to my local preacher when he made the yearly house blessing, whereupon I learned that the local Church had actually believed the worst of me too, these people, honestly.

The end result was a cobbler's family from the Strahnbrad slums now living the high life on a moderately large farm down on the Headland, on a property newly built from the ground up to my specifications, and with stable income high enough to afford four different fields, all our own livestock, three farmhands, sending village urchins to gather herbs twice a week for mother, and all the materials I could ever need for the things I came up with in my very own workshop.

Not counting the coin we were setting aside for the next rainy day.

This is my life now.

"No no no, you get out of here right this instant, you've already commandeered my first steam engine you're not getting my second – wait, that's not the steam engine, that's the furnace – get out of the fire right now you stupid puff of vapour!" Mind Control before it's too late! "Are you trying to kill yourself – what am I saying, of course you are, you're a bloody know-nothing dumbass, I bet you're not even sentient you little shit, shoo, shoo, go back to your siblings before I decide to stop feeding that fire too, firewood costs money – and here's morons two and three, Light, why do I even bother?" Mind Control – nope, these were the dumb ones, okay, Blessing of Sagacity that somehow works on animate steam and gives enough of a mind to then use Mind Control, it was still hit and miss but – no, no, it was definitely a miss this time because of course it was.

I grabbed my very long-corded electric fan – waterwheels, man – and used it to blow the idiotic things back to the relative safety of the boiling cauldron outside. "That's right, you better hover off you little monsters – wait, one, two, five, eight, shit! Ma! One of them's escaped again, check the kitchen quick, if it tips the pot over again I swear to hell I'll – say what? It's lounging on the stew? Well… I guess that's fine? No I don't know for sure, I'm not a bloody shaman!" Yet, because at this rate I'll have to become one just to understand what the hell is going on, what even is my life? "What do you mean 'will it turn into a broth elemental'? Are you nuts, woman, don't tempt fate like – yes I know they're mostly harmless, I literally made them!" These people, I swear. "The hell you mean 'why do I feel so strongly about this', you're the one who insisted I 'take responsibility for the poor dears'! Oh very funny, Ma, bloody comedian you are, why don't you add it to Pa's will while you're at it, his jokes are almost as dead as yours."

My father, of course, merely continued dying from laughter in his hammock at the other end of the orchard.

With parents like these it's no wonder people marry off the moment they turn sixteen.

Standing in the door, I looked upon the fruits of my labours and pinched the bridge of my nose as my exasperation underwent that atavistic leap backwards that felt far too familiar these days. My once lively furnace barely smouldered, the coal inside and out was all drenched, my tools were scattered all over the place again, my homemade power cords were tangled into the strangest configuration ever. Worst of all, the steam engine parts I'd painstakingly oiled had been blasted clean by the sentient steam baths. Bad enough I'd somehow created steam elementals with the simplest and most un-mysterious contraption imaginable – whose design I'd imported from Earth with not the slightest alteration specifically to be sure nothing weird would happen – but I'd done one better and created a bunch of stupid ones. "What did I do to deserve this?"

The Light, as usual, had nothing to say.

Oh who am I kidding, I know precisely what I did. When my perfectly mundane steam engine decided it wanted a side job as broodmother of the Fire and Water mongrel variety, what did I do? Did I choose against going to the absurd lengths of keeping an ever boiling cauldron of water constantly fed? Just so the baby steam elementals didn't go extinct on the same day they randomly spewed out of the blueprint-perfect steam engine that somehow became a magic item despite me still knowing jack and shit about the Arcane? Of course not! Being the bleeding heart that I am, I just couldn't let them die – which the first dozen did because I, being a sane scientist, immediately shut off my steam engine when it decided to be a life-giving magical artefact out of nowhere. Which is how I found out that the little fogies needed more steam like babies needed their mother's milk. I wouldn't have bothered but they were just so adorable, don't you know. Like a fluffle of rabbits hopping and nibbling cutely around your feet just so you didn't recognise them for brood of Caerbannog until it's too late. I used to wonder why the elementals would succumb to the domination of the old molluscs of yore, but now I understood: they were already devils! From birth!

"Fuck it, I'll clean it up tomorrow." The rest of the afternoon was a wash anyway. "Right then," I sighed resignedly. "May as well log the day."