Lo-da'i, fellow mortals - on behalf of the Wildwood Queens village, I bid you warm greetings.

The time has come for the Great Rewilding of Her village.

As we begin to take the first steps in our collective metamorphosis under Her wisened rule, Her servants look to the past and future as one. Her rule would see us view our impact and interactions with Her world not just in the mortal-centric lens of the immediate present and past, but the long view that allows us to gaze and understand both the day long since passed as well as the days that none of us alive today will likely see ourselves. In short, She would have us begin to plant and tend to the seedlings whose shade and fruit we may never ourselves know.

Many of these proverbial plantings will entail new and previously unseen actions and displays of faith that are unprecedented in the modern era. Many of these actions will be unprecedented in any era, period. In some ways, they are departures from everything we as mortals have ever known - but in each instance, they will bring us closer to Her, Her Realm, and Her Vision for Her Village.

If we are to follow Her command in this, then we must ourselves remain eternally-ready to critically examine each and every aspect of that which we retain from the old village, for the old village is dead, and Her village now finds itself within the embrace of its first Summer. As the Queen spoke to Her assembled servants on that beautiful day in Daedalan, She bid us to understand that we must acknowledge the past and understand the work that will be required to change the ways in which the village is viewed. This work will take many forms, over many cycles of the seasons, and will require a great many large shifts in our understanding of what it means to serve Her. To understand some of the changes She would have us embark upon, we must briefly turn our gaze to our collective past.

Going back as far as the earliest days of the village (and even further back, if we examine closely the Sentinels and Druids), the mortals who would serve Her and Her realm have always treated both with covetous greed. In some ways, this can be somewhat understood through the lens of hindsight and sympathy for the inherent failings of mortal minds; She is beautiful, wondrous, a power without equal among Her brethren and a realm without equal anywhere in existence, and so the earliest naturalists - then called forestals - set about in their centuries-long quest to keep Her from mortals who might not serve Her and view Her realm in the exact way they they themselves chose to. They sought to restrict that which was not theirs to restrict. They sought to control that which was not theirs to control. And they sought to cage that which cannot and should not be caged.

In this, the naturalists of old showed their inability or unwillingness to truly embrace Her. They would live in the village, yes, but they would treat it just the same as any city. Despite the fact that Eleusis has no physical walls, the mortals who dwelled within showed the same mindsets - and made many of the same mistakes - as the city-dwellers. When the villagers of the now-dead Eleusis could not build a physical wall of stone and iron to keep the rest of the world out, they did the next best thing; enacting walls of mortal will, pettiness, and bureaucracy to ensure that only those whose personalities were deemed the most pleasant would be allowed to serve Her realm. We, as naturalists, have historically shown that we tend to make very poor judgments around what makes an individual fit or unfit to serve Her.

Those of us in the present must now reckon with the gravity of this monumental arrogance; we mortals saw ourselves to be wiser than She and more knowledgeable of Her realm than anyone else, and as a result, we failed Her. We thought that we were the arbiters of what it means to serve Nature. We thought that we were so important and sagely that we demanded mortals to act in the most strangely civilized ways in order to try to be accepted by those who would serve Her, and in so doing, turned away many a savage rogue whose failings were in the difficulties of their personality, not the quality of their actions. We thought that we had the right to determine what makes a mortal useful to Her by choosing what makes a villager likable or pleasant to Eleusians.

And in each of these things, we were shackled by the restraints of bureaucratic thought. We weighed our decisions in shackles of iron and stone. In Her wisdom, She removes these and shows us that we were wrong. With this understanding, the time has come for us to take the first steps in rectifying our mistakes and submitting ourselves to the vision She holds for Her village. We, as mortals, built walls around a village that was only ever meant to be open. Today, we take the first steps in earnest towards tearing them down. We break our shackles upon the stone of Her wisdom and find ourselves freed in a way that no naturalists have ever yet known. As we take these first few steps, no longer beholden to the falsehoods and iniquity of civilization, another revolution of Her cycles Is upon us; it is time for the Great Rewilding of Eleusis.

Those who would serve Me shall do so.

Gone are the walls imagined and sustained by mortals. Gone are the days where mortal pettiness and recalcitrance would stymie the growth of Her forces as She continues to retake Her world. In its place, those who would seek to serve Her will instead find a village without walls, a village in harmony with Her realm, one that may be entered based on service to Nature and to Her will - not the subjective approval of mortal emotions and feelings.

Acknowledge the past, but do not linger upon it overlong, for change is constant.

Going forward, those who wish to pledge their minds, their blades, and their lives in service to Her will find the path to achieve this to be far simpler than it has ever been. Mortals who would seek to live the savage life as part of Her village will apply for the opportunity by mailing a letter to the Ambassador detailing what they seek to do in service to Her, what they would bring to the ranks of Her village, and what they understand Her realm to encompass.

Once this letter is received by the Ambassador and sent along to the Council of Hierophants, the Council has three months to vote on the application. At the end of three months, the application will pass unless one of two things happen; the Queen voices Her disapproval of the mortal in question, or if the Council votes unanimously to reject the individual. Any other outcome will result in the individual becoming one of Her villagers.

During these three months, the Council remains welcome and encouraged to seek out the concerns and input of the current villagers. In determining their vote, however, the Hierophants will vote to approve the application to proceed unless the Hierophant finds good reason to believe that the individual has done one of two things in their past; participated in the act of massive organizational theft, or have been accused of repeatedly making unwanted sexual advances towards others after being asked to stop. If a Hierophant has good reason to believe that the applicant has been involved in either, they will vote to reject the application and make note of their concerns with the Council, the Ambassador, and our Queen.

In a similar vein, the process to become an ally to the village also does away with the city-inspired formalities and appeals to democratic assent. Instead, those who will be allied to Her village will be those who are known to Her servants by the formers actions. Any rogue individual seeking Eleusian allyship will send a letter to the Ambassador expressing their intent as well as the name of those Eleusians who might have been able to take proper note of the applicants actions and their worth in determining whether they would make a worthwhile ally. Once received and logged by the Ambassador, the Ambassador has three months to seek out the Eleusians listed to confirm that they have seen the applicant helping Her village or Her cause in some meaningful way. If they confirm, or if they do not respond, then in three months time the application will be automatically accepted and the individual then made an ally. If the Eleusians mentioned by the applicant respond with a story that greatly conflicts with the applicants, then the Ambassador will work with the applicant and the Council to address appropriate next steps.

Those prospective allies will need to achieve the endorsement of any one of the following: the Wildwood Queen, the Speaker, the Ministers of War or Trade, or the Ambassador. In lieu of these, the hopeful comrade would also be able to seek the endorsement of two Hierophants or two soldiers whose rank within Her armies is a Farstrider of the Weald (AR3) or above.

None of this, it should be noted, changes the list of professions whose foul magicks themselves run in direct contradiction with the Earthmothers will and as a result would preclude the individual from becoming aligned or embraced by Her village. Be sure to note as well that this applies to those who have chosen to live the life of a Pariah, in addition to the more commonly-known list of classes and professions.

These changes are effective immediately. Today, we undo half a millennias worth of stagnation and mortal hubris. The old village is dead; long live the Queen.


Laiq tsuura,

Aodfionn Wintermourne
Ambassador


Penned by my hand on the 2nd of Valnuary, in the year 882 AF.