How bold of the West to discover the brush - centuries late, but swinging it as if to cudgel the rest of us into reverence. One imagines the canvas groaning beneath each stroke, not from awe, but from the weight of pretence.

We are to be treated, it seems, to a gallery of prayers reimagined as pain, captured in the medium of pigment and martyrdom. A sermon for the eyes, painted in crimson and consequence. How novel - to conflate devotion with suffering, as though the latter were proof of the former, and not the poor theatre of those who cannot convince through doctrine alone.

And yet: what is offered? Not wisdom, but spectacle. Not theology, but a bloody tableaux curated for the foreign gaze. This is not faith - it is performance.

Attend sheep, if you must, and marvel at a people so desperate to be feared that they hang their entrails like garlands upon the wall and call it holiness.

We, too, know how to paint. But we do not beg others to find us profound, and you'll not find our work scribbled upon canvas and hidden away in temples.

In the days to come, you will witness it - not in frame or shrine, but writ upon the world itself.

Where once there were blank walls, there will be meaning. Where once there was silence, a vision.

Not offered. Imposed.

And when you finally understand what you've been made to see, it will be far too late to look away.


~II

[X] Overseer Grandue Xeh'ria, Keeper of the Iron Crown

[A small octagon encircles a raised "II" here, inscribed in thick, amethyst ink]

Penned by my hand on the 17th of Ero, in the year 972 AF.