Two hundred years ago, I stood poised as many of you reading this post now do. Aimless and uncertain of a way forward through the mire of political recourse that followed both my own actions and the actions of those cities seeking to tug and pull at Cyrene's moral fabric. There is a saying that one whom does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it, and it is unfortunate but predictable in these circumstances that such an old phrase yet still gleans true.

As Devotion was stripped from my soul and ripped asunder not once, but twice, I wandered in a mindless haze from place to place, considering the best method to quietly end my journey as the failure I felt I had become. In my greatest moments of pure, absolute agony, when Thoth's embrace would have been a welcome kindness, instead I felt the hot air of a guttural whisper that filled my mind. For two years its voice and accompanying visions of sacrifice, death, lightning-struck mountains and boiling, red oceans plagued my mind, the ever-beating drums calling to me before the silence enveloped me once again.

It would take thirty years still and a brief stint within the Village to truly come to my senses and life's direction, yet even then, I was not truly ready to walk the road toward the Western mountains. Only through the bloodshed of a beloved husband, a vicious toss into a pit of skin-ripping demons, and then the beginning steps of tireless slavery gave me the opportunity all internally seek, yet few still consciously call to the foreground: clarity.

In the centuries that followed, I could not have guessed the escalating challenges that laid before me, nor of my further successes and failures. To watch the Sefyric boil and turn red as I had seen what seemed a lifetime ago, to the drums of war echoing in my head and in my heart, and ever so much more than these boards will ever boast. The agony has yet not departed me, but rather filled and became of me, as inseparable as the emotions that toil upon the mortals of both strength and weakness, for all are models of both, and never singular in their demonstrations.

The key, however, is to know what to rip from your frame to allow your true self to emerge. Remove the restraints of your morality, your scepticism, your fear, your nightmares, your pain and your heartbreak. Set aside your biases, your conjectures, your feelings, your offence and your greed. One must open their mind to close the distance between ignorance and knowledge.

There is a bridge across a chasm that leads to His city, where I and His servants reside upon an isle of red fog and sanguine seas. As a lantern standing stark in the darkness of your ambiguity, I will be among the first to guide you forward. But if not I, know the dogs of war are never far behind.

Seek me for the Western road.

Plainly,
Lady Melodie Cholla'Yi
Ambassador of the Baelgrim

Penned by my hand on the 15th of Daedalan, in the year 854 AF.