None of us is as cruel as all of us.  What we would never justify on our own, is completely acceptable as a race, as a people, as a hint of thought in a thousand hearts, as a product of some unknowable wyle of time and death and sleep.  What unfeeling criticism do we level at our peers, those fellow seekers of aetoras, when we are found ourselves caught in a corner of fear, trapped at Eschalon? how will we justify our acts of perdition?  'It is not a failing of ourselves.  It is not a failing of any child of Iad, no single student of history, no rebel, no one single one who will die for the chance to redeem ourselves.'  We must all atone for our own actions, or so we are taught, and so we find ourselves cold and alone, hard-hearted and driven to murder.  Our ideals are no higher than the heavens, to kill those whose hearts are no higher than the horizon, and we have no choice.  There is some peculiar gravity, some nature curious to our own people that we must never rest for answers, never question the truth, but never cease questioning 'til truth is where we come to.

I am different from you, not because I have no power, neither for my hope for a better life for the us, but because I am more willing to shed power than virtue.  The scraps of flesh that litter the ground on the mount of Censeasen bury not only my bloodmark but my arrogance.  They are the laying down of my pride, the sacrifice to prove to you assembled alal'rhan that the time has come.  Our hopelessness is past.  Look at this corruption!  This tireless oppression!  How now is it that you are not as wearied of your dominion as we are of your tyranny?  Let us chain this vapid empire to Eschalon and cast it all into the sea!  What has Ialar become under the auspices of your reign?  Sick and hearty all at once, with cancerous ghettos filled with the first kindred. A site of wonder and malice all at once, like time has split one apocalypse unto another.  Where this comes from, the fury, the terror, the wonder that fills us as we walk your streets, we know, every one. If we tell it not from the beginning, we will be taught it by the hardship of a daes'rhan's written countenance.

Yore

Imagine tomorrow you cannot read anything.  Your whole national history, all literature, all things, gone.  Rootless and legless, with no place to stand and no place to come from, and the pollution fills up your stumps, rotting them like old trees that have been cut down.  What if we were as the gnarled ones, and bound to the very  place from which we hailed.  What if we grew up out of the gentle waters of the Orvelai-mai-Ith and then were ripped out from our comfortable flower beds, what if we left behind all that we loved best about ourselves in order to escape those who trammelled us into the clay from which we came?  What if we uprooted ourselves, made ourselves homeless, soulless, to escape the oppression that lay thick on us there?  What if we had a desire for freedom greater than our love of history?  Is there any choice?  When we lay down in this new land, will the flesh of the plants themselves reach up to enwrap us?  What is true naturalization? the true transformation of our nature?

With words there goes hope.  Millions of us, and no history.  Not one document to our name, not one book to our ancient strands.  Not one age to define us in the hallowing rarity of our terrible halls.  Can we build it back?  Can we survive our innocence?  Innocence with dirty hands, thin with the wisdom of the roadside, choking with widows weeds; will we die here?  Are we able to die here?

From above, in riotous fashion, rain history from the sky.

It is almost not a choice.  For a kind as taught as us, as tried as we have been, what choice do we truly have?  We must seek what was taken form us.  Take back the history that was ours, but is no longer.  From our older but not elder brothers.  From the first kindred.  Into Cheyr'emeth.

An Age and an Age

Old and older, quiet and quieter, bleak and yet even grander, this tidal plain like the natural planes of death, written with gates and precincts. All the pools filled with the mercurial remains of the night's flood, like ages gone and past, whose subtle residue soaks our feet as we travel through the light, cold sunlight towards where the water that lies miles off the shoreline. Look down at this panorama behind you, and there is a sign of joy in this weakness, a world missing, at the cliffs that overlook where you will not even bury your ancestors. You will lay them down in the wet sand, surrounded by the edges of the water, but not yet by the sea. Their ashes are now fallen on the ground, and when the flood comes again they will wash and be thrown against the cliffs that buttressed the place they called home from the immeasurable tides. Convinced in some way of its appropriateness, there is a dirge that escapes almost silently from our lips, an honor, a laurel composed by another, but it vanishes in a wyle, barely heard in the first place, and shredded and dusted over the dead by the wind, less even now than when it first escaped our lips.

This is the same place where the criminals bury. Lay down in the mud at the bottom of the sea, miles from land and inches under water, silt, sea-life, shells and demons of the dead. Corpses of those that came before. This is what papers, carpets the land before us, provides a place to walk on, a plank and bridge into the past, where we came from, and the future, to which we are inexorably pulled. Is there more to this? Do my feet really tread the walls of death and the walks of the dead? The walls of the passed, the heights to be passed, ascended, and then stranded beyond, on the plateau of beyond-being. Looking out over the cliffs that preceded your journey, and now you are higher than them. Is this what heaven looks like? A view of a coast-line and the Orvelai-mai-Ith? I am surprised. I feared that there would be more, like some sort of quest, some answer to the questions that we have posed to the sea and the ceaseless tides since our coming to the Edge-lands. Then there was nothing to fear after all. Being saved from the constant inquiry that has housed my kind since before our leaving.

Damn the Iaerae, those bastards that care not for good or truth or peace. Everything is easy for them but nothing is right. Their gods are no deities at all but the simple beasts of burden that cart them from day-to-day. Tools. Things they have subjugated to themselves and nothing more. And oh the irony! That these draft-beings that they have created should enslave them all the more for their superiority! Service to a being greater than yourself is perfect freedom. The perfect opposite is true, and that is the truth that the Iaerae live. How sad, really, that these were the ones to whom was given the death of a deity. As always, the master is the servant; the servant, master. A world of inversions, and always without hope that things should change. And so the persecuted should become persecutors. But breaking this inversion in a most important way, the hunted will not become hunters, though the last become first. The tired will become hungry, but the empty, full. Strong and defiant and eternal of the end, Iad was redeemed by his dying. He at last proved that he was worthy of his Creation, that he had deserved the absolute dominion of the place he had made, this Machine that works so imperfectly. That Thing Which Obeys. And now where lie his remains? In his place of origin? Chaotic, yes, lawful in its unpredictability and we will be tired and done in but a short time. Wait for us. Yes, wait for us.

We must build a wall.

To Defend Enarsis, Part One

I have seen the end of Creation.

I have seen the tides of unreality that threaten to consume the world. I have witnessed the Beast that crushed the Naudieri and unmade the Glorious Empire of Sesvimil. But my blind eyes have not always borne witness to tragedy. I cannot forget the age before Its coming, when the old gods, the first Keepers of the Machine, reigned from beyond the reaches of Valdial. The Far Realm was a distant nightmare. The world, though imperfect, was still whole.

In that ancient time the Iaerae, descendants of the kindred appointed as stewards of this world, had abandoned their heritage of “creator magic” for a more secret power that they had wrested from a single madman. Using this “Sol'vyr,” the Glorious Empire of the Iaerae ascended to celestial heights of enlightenment and majesty. The golden age was not without its consequences, however. The empire’s rulers perpetuated their petty conflicts, and arrogance reigned supreme.

Samornys Elaex, the lord of the Iaerae, in all his ignorance and recklessness, made war on the Es'mensis, a people who were brothers to his race. His justification - their supposed centuries-long pollution of Iaeran thought. His plan turned on him when those he made war on stole the secret of his power and took a tremendous gamble. The Es'mensis coerced four of the Keepers to yield up their servants, the Sas'arael, as soldiers in the war against the Iaerae. The lord, faced with extinction at the hand of these otherworldly conscripts, attempted to summon and bind a beast of war from the Far Realm. Though successful in calling up the creature, he failed utterly to control it. In a terrible rampage, the horror drove all of the lesser summoners hopelessly insane, and in their madness they laid waste to the Empire. As horrendous as was their fate, it was nothing compared to the doom that faced the lord of the Iaerae.

The abomination possessed the ruler of the Glorious Empire directly, subjugating him as an avatar on this world.

The creation that the Iaerae had ruled, that their forebears had helped build with their own hands, was in terrible jeopardy. Most of the old gods, the first protectors of the Machine, died in combat with the Beast. The remainder were scattered across existence. To atone for previous failures, I came to the world's defense. Through the grace of the greatest Keeper, the Iaerae and I constructed a gargantuan barrier that confined the beast within the ruins of Mirc'del, the Empire's former capital city. Maintaining this barrier were two Great Towers, Karamyr and Sharalan, the anchors that ensured the safety of Creation.

All was not safe, however, and the echoes of the Beast's invasion still rang out. A number of intrepid mortals took advantage of the celestial Machine's vulnerability and sought for themselves the secrets of the Naudieri. Unfortunately for them, the strictures of Enarsis were not so easily broken. The would-be deities achieved only a part of the power granted to the first Keepers.

Among these Second Keepers, Arsithil was perhaps the most dangerous. Dissatisfied with his semi-divinity, he sought the rank of a true god. Locked within the decimated capital of the Glorious Empire was the means to his goal, the corpses of the slain Keepers. Should he gain one of their bodies, he could consume the soul that rotted within and achieve for himself true godhood.

Blind to the consequences, he sought to breach the barrier that I had created, but Nehandra, one of the last living Naudieri, forbade his entry. Infuriated, he lashed out at one of the Towers, unmaking Karamyr's wards and guards, destroying one anchor that held the Beast at bay. The Beast stirred, and because of the barrier's nature, we were powerless to reinforce it. The haste of its construction had left no means of repair. Thankfully, the barrier held and the Beast was still contained, though less strongly than before. Arsithil's punishment was imprisonment in his own mind, a confinement that he would not escape for more than three thousand years.

The world was in a precarious position. Only Sharalan remained to prevent ultimate destruction, and if it failed...

Fortunately, a guardian presented himself. A once-righteous servant of the Keepers, the being named Helazael, was cast out of Heaven into the sunless depths of our world. In return for sanctuary, he swore to defend the last Tower. But in the most bitter twist of irony, his presence inadvertently presented the greatest threat to its safety. A revolt within the ranks of his followers almost led to the complete destruction of the anchor. The dissidents traveled to a cavern beneath the Tower and pulled the very edifice down upon themselves, ending their own lives but wreaking vengeance on Helazael as well.

It was only through my intervention that Creation was saved. I traveled to the ruins moments after the Tower's fall and began to redirect the flow of time to undo the destruction. As I labored, the Beast itself assaulted me, seeking desperately to slay me or stop my magic. Nehandra came to my aid, and it was only through her direct inhabitance of my form that I was able to complete my work. Lamentably, even with such assistance I was unable to maintain perfect concentration, and my efforts went partially awry. Though the Tower was restored to its original place, a second, duplicate Tower, manifested in the rubble beneath the surface. Much to my chagrin, my failure not only duplicated the Tower but copied the surrounding city as well. Damn my eyes for making such a foolish mistake! For now there is a city living beneath the earth, the Eye of the World, as it is called, and it is a pit of sin and iniquity.

Since the rebinding of the Beast and the restoration of the Tower I have sat here in meditation. For you see, it is only my will that maintains the Tower whole and intact. Should I suffer even the smallest distraction, it is death for us all.

And who is it that bears this burden on his shoulders? Who am I to be the bulwark between Creation and Annihilation? I am the last line of defense, the world guardian, the living lock that chains the beast. Mine is power, and knowledge, and righteous suffering.

I am the Arbiter.