Hello, leech.

This is a matter of clear definitions. I could just as easily say that black means, to me, a shade of mustard yellow, and that anyone who disagrees is close-minded. This obviously not being the case, we are forced to rule in favor of language being a shared tool where words mean the same things to all those using them. Night is not day. Black is not mustard yellow. Tidings are not greetings.

I am self-aggrandizing, of course; I am egotistical; I value myself! I'm not passive-aggressive, though; I'm just aggressive, and any appearance of passivity in these public debates is one that I wholeheartedly apologize for.

You're not a separate race, either. You're a Shadow-corruption of natural processes. That does not make you a separate race - is this the scholarship of Bloodloch, now?

You're contradicting yourself, too. On the one hand, you disingenuously criticize me for not caring about freedom, but on the other, you assert your desire to eat people. Your freedom is the freedom of oppressors - as long as the powerful are not restrained from abusing the powerless, you care little.

Look how happy you and your ilk to use the idea of freedom a bludgeon whenever the Light does things you don't like - but freedom means that no person is tyrant over any other. It means no more Ankyreans. It means no more leeches. We do care about freedom - you just object because we rightly recognize your existence as /being/ one of the restrictions in question.

Your criticism of the Light is empty. If it is wanting, demonstrate it; if it is the Dark Mother's cause, demonstrate this, as well; because last I checked, Enorian is home to Orcs, Ogres, and Arqeshi, all of whom have been liberated from Her in the last few hundred years. Unless there's some rising tide of corruption elsewhere, it seems to me that the tendency has been more of an ebb.

Your protest that you do not need us is ridiculous. Of course you do; your society would collapse without a surplus of exploitable living creatures. Even if that were not the case, the clear reality, established over centuries, is that you eat innocent people, and you will not stop until you are made to. Your protests that you do not need to fall on deaf ears beside these grim facts.

Or, to put it more shortly-

Leeches suck. That's what you do. You'll keep doing it until we force you to stop.

-Shachalai

Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 5th of Lanosian, in the year 468 MA.