Material abundance goes hand in hand with spiritual famine.  Go forth as slaves and return as free men.  Loose yourselves before the halls of the Iluthe-set-Arc, bind yourselves to that hollowed tower, and when it brings you in, tie it down my child.  Sing that beast to sleep in your eyes, that stares out lecherously like one of the mesura to devour the heavens and the earth.  Give in to ambiguity, my child.  Lay to rest what subtle ironies plague your fledgling spirit.  Ask not for answers and I will not trouble you with lies.  Beg not the source for I will not plague you with alms.

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.

How disappointed I am, with our kind, with ourselves, with all that has come before and all that we seek evermore.  With leglike hands and sleeping feet, there will be no where to go in the ages past and fleet.  We will return everplowing into this plane and we will damn ourselves consistently into the ground.  Drive ourselves sick and tired into the clayy that didn't even make us.  Where will we go then?  When our time is come and we have wasted our lives,  what will we make of us?  What can be made of us when we have made so little from ourselves?  Who will make what of us when we have made so much of ourselves, but so little from us?

There are answers here, and we can see them, but we choose not to act on them.  We are ignorant, stubborn, and stupid despite our scholarship.  We have sought the past in the future and the future in the past but we have made nothing that will last, much less something that will do us good.  We have taught ourselves to recognize the truth but never taken ourself to the strength that will wean us of lies.  We who are called the fools, those who ignore wisdom, those who die in ignorance come at least in the time that we can recognize.  We at least know we are lost.

But the Iaerae... know not.  They are truly lost.  And in some ways that is more forgivable - to not know the truth, as they do; or to know the truth and choose lies, as we do.  There are only rivers and sunsets and drying leaves and the bitter cold to give us succor, but we were better had we cut off our own hands to offend not that higher power.  We were better had we not allowed us to astray.

Can sI speak truth to this page ? Am I truly able to lay down my thoughts here?  We are pathetic and full of sickness.  Tried and true we are truly false, genuinely fake, powerfully weak, all creatures pathetic with opposites and flu-filled with oxymorons.

No glory here, my lord, no majesty, but the weakness of omission, the grace to acceed to higher grace, the willpower to let go our own will.

You are afire in my mind, a bow in my arc, a theorem amidst my ramblings, a proof in this world of fear. Go try and I'll forget your name, if I cannot forget my own.  Take your fingers from my heart or let me die.  Let me be with you, my lord.  Nothing else knows me in my core.  In my center, the heart of my gravity.  If I'm a crown without a king, then you are a god without a need, a lord without a servant, a messiah without a herald.  At least in my person.

Have mercy,  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.