How tiring this has become.

Whatever dignity Saltaern forced upon Hashan, it has long since squandered, just like so many orphans do with every dull sovereign they fish from the gutter. This was amusing for a time, but I wonder if that time hasn't passed: one thing I think everyone can agree upon is that every play demands a denouement, every scene its deliberate conclusion, lest it limp to a piteous, disappointing close, abandoned by all who once gazed upon it with some measure of interest.

Speaking now both of children and of disappointment, incidentally, let us take up the matter of Asmodron (do note: as a man of class and fine breeding, I will pointedly forego the connections between Asmodron and 'dull,' as this is an insult to every doomed fish trapped in every small barrel across Sapience).

Watching Asmodron play at profundity is akin to watching a child play at fingerpainting -- and wisdom suggests applying any sort of critical analysis to his brand of revisionism would yield a product of about the same quality. His novel work of fiction concerning the tsol'teth are about his serious as his claims to be either a wanderer (wherever his ramblings have taken him, I'm assured they're not far from Hashan's Crossroads) or a herald of progress (unless 'progress' involves standing, petrified, in the middle of some filthy village, left behind while the world changes around you -- actually, that does describle his patterns of behaviour in Hashan, now that I think about it).

But let us turn, for a moment, to the idea of progress, and how Nicator's Empire completed its arc. Let us glean what truths we may about the world from the flowers so many strew upon its mouldering grave.

Seleucar arrived, a novel idea made tangibly manifest, led by a visionary who ultimately carried, in a very literal sense, a bigger stick than his peers. Like all forgers crafting their petty forgeries, the tsol'teth cannot see beyond what they do not understand, and at the end of the day, they do not understand what it was that drove so many to set aside so much to win so striking a victory. They have sought to secure a bigger stick and failed, and now they seek to build a better champion -- and if Asmodron is their spokesperson, I feel a measure of hope that they will fail.

Indeed, it's eminently fitting that the tsol'teth have chosen Hashan as an ally: at the end of the day they've adopted the same battle strategy. Hashan has seen the identities and characteristics Ashtan, Cyrene, Mhaldor -- and even Targossas and Shallam before it -- have crafted. It has lived in the shadow of giants, suffocating among the forests Eleusis guards so zealously. Worse, under the directon of those such as Asmodron, it has secured the ideological scraps of its betters, Seleucar included, and, under cover of its perennial Night, it has attempted to craft its own uniform, its own fashionable statement unto a world. Yet the uniform is garish, devoid of single-minded purpose and purposeful direction, held together by the stitching of amateurs and likely to fall apart, as all things do, given enough time.

Seleucar's time has come and gone, as all things must. It has reached the inevitable end of its run, taken its bows, and it is now consigned to crumbling ruins and failing memory. In the present, it is inspiring only insofar as the scraps of its name motivate petty arguments to which all, unfortunately, are privy. The tsol'teth will not save you from this, the fate of all things: they cannot, and I suspect even if they could, they would not. Instead, I would direct everyone to look at the broken faith of Targossas and the surrender of Hashan. Look at what the tsol'teth have driven these ideologues to become. Look at the exacting price they demand to guarantee a few more lamentable years upon this broken and dying land and ask yourselves: is living bereft of everything you care about still living? Is this hollowness of mind, body, and soul truly living?

Hashani, your leaders would have you wait in the wings, a second-rate understudy clinging to whatever glory it might claim when the actors upon the world stage have fallen to seed. They would have you believe, in some form or another, that your limitations are insurmountable and as such, life as a thrall is better than no life at all. If you, like so many who have lived there before, truly seek to break new ground, to forge a lasting identity, I tell you now: the first blow of the hammer must be to drive these tsol'teth back to whatever stinking hole whence they've come.

If you demand glory, break free of your apathy and join with those who would seize it.

Penned by my hand on the 1st of Chronos, in the year 799 AF.