Marsha Rosenhart's PV "The Oath Unending" vs Version 3.0 "A Long Long Way" node 11-10 "Devil's Work"
@fishareglorious pointed out this sentimarsha parallel in a post of theirs; one look at it and the gears in my mind hit terminal velocity and voided the warranty.
(Disclaimer: I am presently panentheistic, and I was never formally raised Catholic. If I made any mistake in the following analysis, please do not hesitate to correct me.)
The windmill meadow imagery... it appears in both 11-10's "Devil's Work" and Marsha's trailer like a witness. Whether it is the same windmill across time and space matters not. War makes all windmills the same windmill, all fields the same field, all moments of confrontation the same moment repeating itself until someone breaks the pattern.
In the trailer, Marsha kneels beside a wounded soldier. The windmill looms behind them both. The soldier points a gun at her face and screams.
In 11-10 "Devil's Work", Marianne pursues Sterling to a windmill after shooting down his tank. He scrambles backward through the grass, fires desperately, watches bullets glance off her skin in sprays of stone. "Why won't you die? You devil!" Later, cornered: "What the hell do you want? Back off!"
Identical framing. Identical accusation. The same architecture of an animal terror of a life cowering on death's door over a force they are yet to comprehend.
But their response cleaves everything apart.
As Marianne chases after Sterling, she expresses: "For the wicked flee, and I pursueth." This is a stylized paraphrase of Proverbs 28:1. In the Bible, no one is pursuing the wicked, they flee from their own guilt. In this rephrased quote, the speaker sees themselves as an agent of justice.
When Sterling calls Marianne a devil, she does not flinch. She accepts the title and turns it back on him like a blade: "A devil, you call me? What are you, then?" She begins quoting Genesis, the voice of God confronting Cain over murdered Abel: "What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."
Genesis 4:10. God speaking directly to the first murderer. In the original text, Cain has just killed his brother out of jealousy, and God asks a question to which He already knows the answer. The blood cries out. The earth has opened its mouth to receive it. There is no hiding what has been done.
Marianne cannot help herself but always aligns the world's action against the words of God, divinity and curse baked into her blood in equal measures. She sees Manus Vindictae as fratricide on a massive scale—brother killing brother at the instigation of false prophets, nations tearing themselves apart for the profit of shadow orchestrators. She steps closer. She offers redemption even now: "For if you do the devil's work, are you not a devil like me? I pity you. Repent and you may yet find mercy in the judgment of the Lord."
Not a direct quote, but her statement follows the themes of doing the devil's work (John 8:44) as well as repentance and mercy (Acts 3:19).
STAGGERING theological weight??? She is quoting from John 8:44, where Christ tells the Pharisees: "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires." She is invoking Acts 3:19: "Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out." She acknowledges her own devil nature—demon-blooded gargoyle whose hands are stained with similar blood of demons who stoke iniquity—while insisting Sterling still has the chance to turn back. The difference between them is that Marianne knows she is doing evil even if it is called for. Sterling has convinced himself he is righteous, watched over by Arcana.
"Sterling, isn't it? You need not fear me. You still have time."
She gives him every chance. She tells him he has nothing to fear. She promises that repentance may yet yield salvation. But Sterling cannot hear mercy through the roar of his own terror.
"And now art thou cursed from the earth," Marianne continues, "which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand."
Genesis 4:11. God's judgment upon Cain. The ground that drank Abel's blood will yield Cain nothing.
"When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth."
Genesis 4:12. The curse complete. He will wander as fugitive and vagabond. He will find no rest, no home, no peace.
But Sterling does not repent. Sterling tumbles to the ground and scrambles backward and launches into a desperate prayer—but not to any power Marianne recognizes.
"Mother of Resurrection, the Guiding One... Please have mercy on your humble servant. I pray for a miracle—a ladder into your eternal kingdom. I hereby offer my life to you. Please save me from desperation and take me to the golden era."
The prayer follows a pattern Marianne knows by heart. Yet the name he speaks is strange.
He saves the last bullet for himself.
Marianne can only kneel there, coughing stone dust, watching another soul slip beyond her reach.
"A blasphemer to the end."
Injecting Marsha's hardest dose into my bloodstream to suppress my urge to explode into countless tangents about the underlying motif of Marianne as a fallen archangel. ANYHOW, to put it simply, here she is an avenging angel. As instrument of divine justice. As the stone sentinel who watches over churches and now wanders the battlefield as a shadow of herself, stamping out enemies of peace—not through gentleness but through terror, through the promise that sin will be answered, that blood will cry out, that there is no corner of the earth where the guilty can hide from reckoning.
She offered Sterling the chance to choose mercy. He refused. He died. And Marianne was left with another failure, another body at the base of a windmill that she could not save because salvation requires participation and Sterling would not participate.
Now look at Marsha in The Oath Unending.
"Hands off me! You're my enemy!"
The soldier's gun wavers. The accusation hangs in the air between them. And Marsha—Marsha who was once a knight, who was trained to see through the narrow slit in her helmet an equivalent straight and narrow bullseye, to strike with max lethality as to not drag out the brunt of trauma dealt to both her and her enemy's psyches—does not offer arguments about judgment. Does not pursue or pressure.
She says: "Hold still. We need to stop the bleeding."
Marianne answered accusation with counter-accusation. Met "devil" with "what are you, then." Offered mercy from a leverage because her upbringing preaches to her forgiveness is only a duty fit for a higher power. Marsha answers accusation with instruction. Meets "enemy" with "we need to." Offers mercy from a position of vulnerability—kneeling, unarmed, hands wrapping around the barrel of the gun just as quickly as she wraps a bandage.
Sterling asked: "What the hell do you want? Back off!"
The wounded soldier asks: "Why did you save me?"
Marianne wanted confession. Wanted answers. Wanted to understand why Manus Vindictae drove the world to war and ruin, wanted Sterling to repent before the judgment of the Lord so that his soul might yet be saved even as his body failed. She was trying to save him—in her way, according to her understanding of salvation, with the fierce urgency of someone who has spent centuries watching men damn themselves and cannot bear to watch more and more slip into darkness without at least offering the ladder out.
Marsha wants nothing. Asks nothing. Demands no confession, no explanation, no repentance.
Full stop. No condition. She will save this life because it is a life. Not judgment and mercy in careful balance, but mercy alone. Mercy without caveat. Mercy that does not require the recipient to earn it or deserve it or even begin to wrap their head around the full picture of her motivation.
Marsha will save every life she can from this war. Marianne will stop at nothing to end it. One woman pulls the drowning from the water while the other dams the flood at its source. Marianne kills ten thousand so that a hundred thousand might live; Marsha bandages whoever survives, regardless of which side they fell on. They are working out an equation from opposite sides, and the answer they're both solving for is the same: fewer bodies in the ground tomorrow than there were today.
Sterling died because he couldn't accept mercy from a monster. This soldier lives because Marsha refuses to let him die, regardless of whether he accepts her or not.
Sterling had a choice—repent or refuse—and he refused. The soldier has no choice. Marsha will save him whether he likes it or not. She will hold pressure on his wounds while he calls her enemy. She will bandage him while he curses her. She will keep him alive long enough for him to understand, or not understand—it doesn't matter. Her mission is not contingent on his comprehension.
Old Testament gargoyle and the New Testament medic.
Marianne speaks the words that could redeem. She presents the door that could lead to forgiveness. But she cannot force anyone through it. She cannot make Sterling choose life when he has already chosen death long before she even sees him eye to eye. The bullet he saves for himself is his final answer to her inquiry on grace.
Marsha doesn't offer choices. Doesn't wait for acceptance. Sees a body bleeding and moves toward it with gauze and steady hands and a determination that borders on violence—she will save you, she will keep you breathing, she will drag you back from the threshold whether you want to come or not.
Marsha learns mercy from the best, but she dissects it under a different lens. Marianne withdrew her bayonet because she could no longer bear to be the instrument of unnecessary evil—because Agnès's question echoed through her mind unanswered, "What immortal hand or eye could frame the cause behind these deadly ends?"—because something in her finally broke against the futility of killing someone who had already stopped fighting.
Marianne's mercy was conditional. Not on repentance exactly, but on recognition. Over the course of 3.0, she needed Marsha to see her. To understand what was being offered. To meet her eyes and acknowledge that something unprecedented was happening between them. And Marsha did. Marsha loosened her hands and accepted death rather than continue killing, and that surrender was its own form of confession. Its own form of prayer. The mercy was given because something in Marsha's exhaustion spoke to something in Marianne's exhaustion, neither of them wanted to be at war for "higher powers" having long disillusioned their code of justice, sense of glory.
But Marsha has taken that conditional mercy and universalized it. She has removed the requirement for recognition. For surrender. For any acknowledgment at all.
If you only save the lives that deserve saving, you will save no lives at all.
A gun pointed at your face when stripped bare of its thorny disguise is just fear. Fear can and should continue to be answered with assurance and competence.
YOU KNOW WHERE ELSE THE WINDMILL IMAGERY RESURFACES???
Later, when Marianne hallucinates hanging out with Marsha at their same old meadow while descending down the depths of Hill 299's hell:
Her first instinct is to apologize: "I was nigh on killing you. No, in a way, I did kill you, just as I have killed so many others."
But Marsha refuses to let her carry that weight alone: "It's not our fault. None of this is..."
And Marianne cannot accept absolution when she has been denied it from her own self and a long list of red underlined names prior: "You may have granted me your forgiveness, but those who have forever lost their lives due to my actions—I shall never have the chance, nor the right, to earn theirs."
The windmill creaks in the wind. The hallucination shatters into gunfire. And Marianne wakes back into violence, back into the demon's bargain, back into the choice that will damn her: ten thousand lives or one that is ten times harder to bear.
She chooses damnation. She takes the explosives. She says: "But if sacrificing one can save ten, if sacrificing ten thousand can save a hundred thousand, if someone must make that impossible choice... then I am willing to bear that sin."
This is Old Testament mercy. Eye for an eye. Blood for blood. The scales must balance. Someone MUST carry the weight.
But when she hands the explosives to the demon, when he laughs "that's the spirit, from now on we will walk together"—she stabs him. Drives the bayonet through his incorporeal body. Shoves him away.
"Look upon me, Demon. I am not like my ancestors, to be led astray by their thirst for blood and your honeyed words. Whatever choice I make, I make of my own free will. I will not let your taint spread within my soul, yet still, your power shall be mine to command."
She will bear the sin. But she will not pretend she had no choice anymore. She will not let determinism absolve her. She chooses this damnation with full knowledge and full autonomy, which paradoxically makes it both more damning and more redemptive.
She turns around to address Agnès yet again:
"When I was young, I never truly understood the words you spake. Why would one man willingly bear the sins of all the world for the sake of others? I lingered on the thought of it—if all guilt and suffering were placed upon me, how cruel and unjust that would be. But now I think, perhaps it is best that they are mine alone to bear."
Christ's pattern. The scapegoat who takes upon himself what others cannot carry. Who accepts cruelty and injustice because someone must break the cycle.
Marsha's pattern, in this fashion, is quieter in actions but no less loud in resolve.
When she says "Life is priceless," she is not invoking divine law. She is speaking from experience. She is saying: I was shown it on the battlefield of all hells.
The soldier in the trailer will live. His wound will heal. Someday—most likely—he may even remember the enemy medic who knelt beside him and kept him breathing for another day, and he will understand that he was not saved because he deserved it. He was saved because saving is the only word left legible in the old dictionary of a knight at war after war itself has burned through every other page, and she's met with an opportunity to pen a new chapter with whatever vocabulary survives the fire.
Because Marsha herself remembers her savior. After all, Marianne does not have a face one forgets—it's lovely, just like her name.
(p/s: @please-let-this-work-oh-my-god boarded this train of thought with me after they did a pass through my analysis:
"The Old Testament features god being cruel and relentless, often unleashing catastrophes onto humanity. The New Testament is more compassionate and understanding, almost more human-like in a way.
Marianne is the force of nature who wishes to end the war and stamp out the enemies while also trying to let them repent through her understanding of salvation vs Marsha who saves lives unconditionally. The medic who considers every life precious, regardless of which side of the conflict they're on.
A brief thought flashed through my head was Marianne carrying a bit of that New Testament "compassion" by offering the damned a choice while Marsha carries a tiny bit of the Old Testament's "imposement" by not offering others the choice to refuse salvation. Marianne offers conditional salvation while Marsha offers unconditional mercy."
"The inversion is more nuanced than a clean swap (again, when has sentimarsha NOT been all about a careful balance of antitheses?) Marianne carries the Old Testament's weight of judgment and curse. She quotes Genesis, pronounces Cain's fate, positions herself as the pursuing hand of divine justice, but she offers salvation through the New Testament's mechanism of choice, confession; the sinner's active participation in their own redemption. Marsha, conversely, has stripped away all the theological scaffolding to arrive at something almost primitive in its simplicity. You WILL live because I SAY you WILL live, the rest is dross. There's something almost wrathful in her compassion because she's seen too many innocents throwing themselves into the meat grinder of war, whether involuntarily or pretty much an echo of her faraway former self who too sought glory in sacrifice on the battlefield. Again, the Old Testament; God hardens Pharaoh's heart and parts the Red Sea regardless of anyone's consent—she will drag you back from death the way God dragged Jonah back from the sea. You can see her tough love, commitment to the best interest of the most people via Merel in 3.3 PV:
I doubt Marsha is angry because the girl deserted or ran away, after all, she's only 16 years old. War still haunts vets like herself for life, so it's completely normal for a budding teenager to be afraid of the battlefield where artillery explodes day and night. She's angry because Merel's living in a state of "cowardice" for a long time. Instead of learning to face things little by little, she keeps relying on and hoping for a place that will always protect her. Marsha probably wants her to start growing up, learn to protect herself, learn to face her fear — especially if she has something important to protect. Suppose she's with Charon now, in the same cavalry, does she intend to live like that forever? If one day Charon encounters an accident that separates them, and the cavalry falls to ruins, what will she do? The war may end, but The Storm will still be there. She also knows about the danger of The Storm. Rather than maturing day by day to face it, would she continue to run away?
You also find resonance of her resolve in how her banner is entitled 'The Oath Unyielding.'
Marianne opens the door and waits for you to walk through; Marsha kicks down the door and carries you out over her shoulder whether you're screaming or not.")
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