To the subservient bureaucrats of the Cyrenian Senate,


For some time, your very existence has been defined by your opposition to the War Tsol. They brought Conflict to your home. They destroyed what you prized most: your peaceful, isolated, apathetic existence, and forced you to confront the very real possibility of your own eradication for the first time in centuries. Ironic, then, that you despise them for this, and yet acquiesce so readily to the embrace of the War god and his feckless puppet.


You have now elected a blathering warmonger, a dog of War lacking both the capacity to maintain even the semblance of dedication to stance or the spine to support it. Where once stood shrines to Lord Neraeos, your lake is now filled with blood-daubed monuments to your subjugation by her hand. Such monuments to War profane the mountains around your city that would otherwise pay homage to the Lord Smith, erected even at the very foot of His statue.


It is clear that you seek Conflict, that which you have strained so strenuously against, though not for the challenge it presents, not as a lesson. In your Imperiate's infantile grasping for recognition and footing upon the world stage, you have sought to build upon the bodies of those innocents who she finds unaware and easily slain. You butcher Hashani children. You invade the shelter where care is given to the homeless that they may have a better life, and you cut them down in their beds. You eschew attacking the Tsol'teth for the grudge you bear them, because your Imperiate is a craven creature of cowardice who has known only failure, fearful that any true challenge will reveal the depth of her ineptitude. Far safer to simply declare that the innocent children and downtrodden of Hashan, and Tasur'ke as well, deserve to die than risk such exposure.


In recent months, Cyrene's hostile rhetoric has only increased. At your Imperiate's bidding, you have threatened Hashani lives, and your Imperiate hurls insults and slander with impunity while swaddled in the dubious mercies of the Faith Recusant.


When her slander earned the ire of the Court of Shadows, your Imperiate revealed her true intent - to drag your city along with her to groveling servitude beneath the heel of War, acting swiftly to place Cyrenian territories under Aegean occupation. We did not seek battle with Ashtan, nor Eleusis at this time. We did not seek conflict with War. So War will be allowed its conquest of Cyrene. Truth is paramount, and so your hypocrisy is laid bare for all those with eyes to see. We will cast back the veil, we will assist you in removing the remaining shrines to the Lord Smith, the tarnished monuments shunted aside in favour of the new dominion within which you now reside. It is already evident that while your armies fervently battle on behalf of War, there is no spirit at all in support of your Patron.


You have been content to put down your brushes and your quills to pick up a sword and spill blood to sate your grudge upon those undeserving of it, clad in the certainty offered by the mewling assurances of a woman who wails that her cause is just, while condemning others with false sanctimony. You will not now hide behind Ashtan, and Eleusis, and rogues, when retribution comes to your door. If you wish to embrace War, then embrace the destruction that comes with it. Rest assured that it will not be innocent children or recovering homeless who march forth to bring ruin upon those places your Patron holds dear, but soldiers of our Legion, girded in the clarity of their purpose.


Should there be any earnest concern for your Patron left, know that our campaign against His shrines will cease under the following conditions: Cyrene must issue an apology for slandering Hashan, cease defending shrines to War, and provide compensation to the families of the poor and young of Hashan and Tasur'ke who were butchered by your armies. Should these demands be met, you will be allowed to return to frolicking, finger-painting, and wallowing in complacency as you so choose.


Ever,


Mezghar Al'Jafri


Seneschal

Penned by my hand on the 15th of Sarapin, in the year 845 AF.