#4 The Selection: Why Everyone Dies at Forty

In the world of Ravenous Mother, your fortieth birthday is not a celebration. It is a deadline—in the most literal sense of the word.

The Selection is the ritual sacrifice that forms the backbone of society in the Sac. When you reach forty years of age, you are taken to the Mother's maw and fed to her. Your body returns to the entity that has sheltered you your entire life. This is presented as sacred duty, cosmic balance, the natural order of things.

But is it?

The Official Story

According to the teachings passed down through generations, the Selection exists because the Mother requires sustenance. She is a living being, vast beyond comprehension, and she must be fed. The ritual maintains the sacred covenant between humanity and the entity that provides everything: shelter, food, warmth, existence itself.

The priests speak of returning to the Mother's embrace. The nobles frame it as honor. The commoners accept it as inevitable—what choice do they have? You are born inside the Mother, you live inside the Mother, and when your time comes, you become part of the Mother again. The cycle continues. The balance is maintained.

The Uncomfortable Mathematics

But there are those who see through the religious justifications to something more pragmatic—and more disturbing.

The Sac has limited resources. The Mother provides food, but not infinite food. The population must be controlled, or everyone starves. The Selection isn't divine will; it's population management dressed in sacred robes. Kill the older generation before they consume more than they produce, before they become a burden, before they start asking too many questions about why things are the way they are.

The nobles understand this. They are exempt from the Selection—they can live to natural old age, sometimes reaching a century or more. Their pierced earlobes mark them as above the culling. They frame their exemption as divine right, but the mathematics tell a different story: fewer mouths to feed at the top means the system can sustain itself longer.

The Mechanism of Death

The Selection is not a quick death. When your time comes, you are taken to the Mother's maw—a vast organic opening where the ritual is performed. A membrane descends upon you, wrapping around your skull, sealing your airways. You cannot breathe. You cannot scream. The membrane begins to absorb your bodily fluids while you are still conscious, still aware, still dying.

Asphyxiation takes you eventually. But not before the Mother has already begun to consume you.

This is the sacred embrace. This is the return to the Mother. This is what awaits everyone who is not born with holes in their ears.

The Weight of Forty Years

What does it mean to live in a society where your death is scheduled?

Every decision is colored by the countdown. Marriage, children, profession—all calculated against the years remaining. Some embrace their fate with religious fervor, volunteering for Selection early in fits of ecstatic devotion. Others rage against it quietly, hoarding small rebellions, looking for ways to escape into the sewers where the desperate and the damned eke out a few more years in darkness.

The professions—Healers, Guardians, Cartographers, Architects—are not exempt. Their skills and their towers and their traditions cannot save them from the maw. Only the nobility stands above the Selection, watching as generation after generation of commoners marches toward the same end.

Defenders of Their Own Chains

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Selection is how thoroughly it has been internalized. Those condemned to die at forty often become the system's most passionate defenders.

When someone questions the Selection, it is rarely the nobles who silence them. It's their neighbors, their friends, their family. "This is how it has always been. The Mother requires it. Who are you to question the sacred balance?" The oppressed police themselves, enforce their own oppression, attack anyone who threatens to upset the order that kills them.

This is the genius of the system: it transforms its victims into its guardians.

Questions Without Answers

The Ravenous Mother series does not offer easy answers about the Selection. Is it necessary evil or manufactured consent? Would the Sac collapse without it, or could a different way be found? Are the nobles protecting humanity or simply protecting themselves?

These questions drive the characters who dare to look beyond the accepted truths. And what they discover may be worse than the comfortable lies they were raised to believe.

Because the Selection has a purpose. Just not the one anyone expects.