Let us be clear.

You have taken particular aim in your tirades, and I am no longer the quiet forest flower who will let such things go unconfronted.

I brought my questions to you. I brought them first in private, to allow you the space to explain. When your explanations did not meet with enthusiastic condonement and encouragement, but rather more questions, you lauched into an unhinged explosion of personal insults before closing your mind in deep snubbing... only to revoke it the very next week and make a second such rant in shouts after a single, simple challenge of your words.

You hold convictions loud enough to proselytize, but cannot bear even basic scrutiny and challenge of those convictions without childlike tantrums.. and it is us who paints the Underking poorly? You wear Him like a shield to hide from any who would confront you with the dissonance in your path, and put your failings on Him. You wave His approval of your move like a banner, hoping people will distracted enough to see how much your rhetoric has shifted in your time there, straying further and further into a mongrel cross-breed of Duirani culture and Spirean propaganda as you try to please both.

You are the head of the Underking's Order, and explicitly claim that authority to back your words, and those words have been aimed at making Spines seem like a friend of the Cycle, an attractive option for those who wish to pursue Duirani goals and worships but are more comfortable with city living. You manufacture nonexistent persecution of other ordermates to make it seem like the Heartwood is turning their back on the Underking, and you (and thus your new home) are the where one should go to worship Him or His ideals.

Here are the facts, Arbiter. The city of Spinesreach is united in a singular internal goal: for each and every citizen to break free of the Cycle by becoming Divine. The city of Spinesreach may have individuals with different beliefs, but they will all march to war in support of the progress their various peers pursue, examples of which include: entrapping fae and processing them into synthetic drugs, the creation of labs and grotesque mutation of natural growth, the avoidance of the Underhalls through scientific means, the defense of other forms of undeath, the use of Shadow and ylem and other means to further their goals despite harm done to nature... even the literal feeding of Dia'ruis to the Goddess of Corruption.

So which is it, then? Are you a loyalist to the Cycle who is seeking to subvert the North into an arctic mimicry of the Heartwood, standing against their intended progress? Or are you a true Spirean, who uses Duirani platitudes as a smoke screen but will stand behind your citymates when they step further and further beyond the Rhythm of the world and its natural Cycle?


Aolin, the Twilight Ritualist


Penned by my hand on Closday, the 5th of Ivolnos, in the year 2 AC.