A people steeped in history.  Generations blessed and cursed, rampant both in liberty and tyranny.  Wire hands grip at empty stomachs, sustained only by the fascination, some would say obsession, with a force greater than themselves, which without remorse will lay them low despite their dutiful observance.  It is more than the pages themselves that take in these contrite spirits.  It is less than fiction, stricter than truth, a taller tale than many historians would care to tell, but nevertheless, it is them.  Stricken from the hearts of those lonely, humble speakers of the cheyr'emeth.

With an intolerable ache for knowing, let them lay down their lives, their passions (as cogent as these may be), where from they will throw themselves ever forward.  Having taken from them all that has been, there is only left what will be.  In contrast, though, they will never give up the past, for these are creatures of history, spectres of libraries, wraiths of ancient cities, guardians and students of what has gone before.

They are smaller than those they came from.  After years of knowing too well the sas'arael, the Iaerae, their brethren and former kindred, tower above them.  In contrast to these, they are weak and frail.  But where the bliss of awe has been banked by centuries of cynicism and neglect, the Es'mensis will not give up the hunt for aetoras. 

They are a people of shades, of practicality, one might almost say, garbed as they are in their layers on wasted layers, and their minimal adornment.  What regalness possesses them comes only from their demeanor.  Shoulders square, neither hunched nor thrown back, but given to an air of defiance nonetheless. 

Eyes, yellow and amber, pass judgment from hollow sockets.  Their faces not skeletal, but burned away by the seeking and staring for too long into the face of glory.  It is a surprise their visage does not run and flow like candlewax, such things have they seen.  Having bound otherworld's inhabitants, as slaves and soldiers, having endured hatred and spite from their fellows and guardians and captors, suffering betrayal from their would have been liberator, how is it that this people has survived?

Only through countless strength, unbelied by their diminished bodies.  Only through courage of the rarest sort, yet epidemic to this curious race.  The eternal hunt for truth, whether in the day that comes or the day that does not.  What are dirty nails, pale skin, burning eyes, dry and ashen lips, maddened hair, and a demeanor fey and wild in recompense for the things they have learned?  Should they all be struck blind they would wander the streets with their canes and their hopes, finding some manner, even in their disability, to sense the change in texture of writing and written, to the end that all should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

Finding her low with pride, full with courage, a leader not of men but those who preceded them and have fallen since.  Some would call her a servant, but others a warrior.  All at once both slave and seeker of aetoras, which she cannot hope but to find, cannot believe but that she will fail. 

Tall, tall almost as the Iaerae were tall, with eyes cast eternally high towards the horizon, with hands thin like twigs, arms gaunt like branches, eyes like fool's gold, a face sharp and harsh and never shapely, but hollow with courage and fear.  Bright skin like the light of dawn, hair white like the ragged clouds of morning.  Sickness and health war for her, the taint that occupies a thousand generations and lineages, the purging of the sas'arael. 

Over her unforgiving form layers have draped themselves, trying as they might to hide her, without success.  Of shades that vary slightly, tossed on like they matter less than the path behind her.  Without remorse they are tattered, ragged, shorn of hope but full with life.  Feet bare, she walks solemn.  There are things on her hands, made of wood but crafted with glass and filled with worries and seawater.  On the one, a ship, on the other, a road; all telling where she has been. 

Through countless miles she walks, ever in search of aetoras, in hungry wilds and hollow hills, past day and night, beyond the rising of the sun and the setting of the same, she ranges both east and west, ever in praying that one particular name, that light that blesses most generously the gates of the first-city, which we call aetoras.

When her time has come she seeks no more, yet was the first of the seekers.  Abroad she dies, far from the Edgelands, the Orvelai-mai-Ith, beyond where pass the aurel, beyond where sun meets sky and water, land. Beyond home, beyond hope.  Where the sky is low with pride and full with courage, where it meets her lonely form to make her way back home.

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 now, that this peculiarity of pigments so enthralls us?  That this near accident of arrangement, this coincidental question of ink and page should tyrannize our existences so thoroughly?  Oh, that the subtle irony of those who so oppressed us for ages have in fact ensured our slavery for much longer.  Despite our escape, they gave us the written word with which to shackle ourselves for eons that will come.

How dies these words?  How tire these eyes?  How weak these hands!  Arguments fall on failing hearts.

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.