Mm. If that is the takeaway, then I have misrepresented my warnings. Allow me to try again.

I am not championing apathy, but pragmatism. If you take this to mean that I plan to simply forget and forgive the path that led us here, then I have not been clear in my actual message.

Passion can, and will be used against you. The servants of the Shadow Mother are not all going to be raving, lunatic, bloodthirsty beasts that squeeze out of a pinprick in reality like fluid through a sieve.

They will come to you wearing the faces of people. They will offer ideas or make requests that seem to align so perfectly with the things you hold near and dear you wonder why no one else is suggesting them. They will appeal to your zealotry, your vindication. They will feed your paranoia and mistrust. They will offer balm and succour to guilt and despair.

They will approach you privately, one by one, and offer you a chance to feel like you are the only person on this continent who can be trusted with the right answer. They will feed you these warm feelings of belonging, until you truly do belong among them, and try to spread their word much the same: one by one, approached in private, making emotional appeals that simply feel correct.

So your best defence is to be rested, to be pragmatic, to fact check with a large number of peers. I have my grievances, and I have things that I will want reckoned when this war is won.

But until it is won, I do not care who has the idea that saves us all. I do not give a damn which hand makes the killing blow on the threat we all currently face. If it is Spirean, if it is Bloodlochian, if it is Duirani, if it is Enorianite.

We need to be safe collectively before we can begin to negotiate the circumstances of how this aftermath will play out, and in fighting makes us vulnerable.

I reiterate my last newspost: today, we need to survive.
Survival is enough.
And when we have survived, then we can talk about what lines were crossed.

I have no Order. I represent no God. I speak only as a man, one who lives on this continent, and one who has been entrusted to represent the wants and needs of my fellow Spireans on the world stage.

I am just Inkh.

Call me boring if you like, my approach is certainly a methodical one; but methodology will keep us alive, and I want to live.

And I will fight for that, if I am the only man who does. But if there are others who share this grim conviction, please take my words to heart. I want to live. I want you to live. It?s hard to demand reparations from the dead.

Solemnly,
Inkh, Chairman of Spinesreach.

I refuse to make any more public posts this week. Seek me out if you have questions. I will see you all around Howling.

Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 13th of Niuran, in the year 503 MA.