{Aetolia,

The Lord turns His eye once more upon us, and wills that His word be known. Know now His dread path and bring forth your hatred and your spite. We are waiting.

The truth of Strife has ever been obscured, an illusion we wove with our own hands into a shining pinnacle of lofty ideals. Purpose. Hope. Salvation. These are the words in which we invested our brutality, these are the words for which we bared our blades and scribed bloody testament across the pages of history.

It has been a cage of our own making, to believe that those things have a place in this world. In our crusade, we mistook the end, an impossible end, for the means. There is but one way to know Strife, and that is the singular truth of our existence.

Strife is the fight, the struggle. The blood in your mouth and the tears in your eyes, the bile in your throat and the rend in your heart. It is misery and it is loss, it is fighting without the hope for anything more. Strife is the knowledge that you will cut and cut and cut, you will be cut and turn, and in the end you will find yourself no loftier than when you began. You will know instead that you have walked through this world with your eyes open, for that is all we have ever been, and will ever be.

This is what the Lord was born into. A mantle of unending conflict. Only now do we know the fullness of His lot and ours, to struggle ceaselessly for the rest of our days with no purpose, no satisfaction. This is Strife. Only in the midst of such sorrow, such bitter battle and carnage are we made whole. Such is the curse of His, of our, existence.

This is His decree. If we are to know such misery, never-ending and never-ceasing, if we are to know the bleakness of eternal war without the taste of victory, so too shall the world.

Hope is dead. Desolation comes. We are its heralds.


Ever His,

Whirran Arcan-Tetzauh

High Priest}

Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 11th of Dharos, in the year 2 AC.