Domhnall Guivarch's Black Book

[Erudiche]

In the past is darkness. Death.

In the present? Madness. Pain. Anguish. A house of skulls is built here.

And what of the future? A frail, fleeting fiction.

I will fight, because I must fight. Because that is what Salvatore would ask of me. Even if he did not share my cause, I will not shame him further.

I will fight, because I must not dirty the blood which has been spilt. I will fight, because if I should surrender, even for a moment, then the battle is lost forever. The very last light of humanity shall be extinguished. From the moment I came here, I knew that no revolutionary movement should come into being in this land if I did not give birth to it.

Yet what is it that I have given birth to? What rough beast? It is clear now that I have failed, that this Populist project is an abject disaster. I have become a scavenger, a feaster on the bone-marrow of the oppressed, a coarse, venal politician, little better than the cads I so abhorred when I arrived here, little better than the bloodless scum in Palm Heights. The Pyramid is a toy, built for children, set out by the Sultan for the entertainment of the masses. The Legates are fools. Elections are a system by which the energy of the masses, earnest and powerful, is directed exclusively towards the struggle for table scraps. The Well is perverse, its institutions rotten, its leaders evil.

In a just world, they would all be hanged, or put to the sword by their thousands of victims.

I will set out one final chance for the Populist method. It will succeed or it will fail.

But I swear this, at least. Standing on the broken remains of my many promises, of my divine oath, of my words of love and care: If you cannot have justice, Ephia's Well, my people, you will have an avenger. Let them strip me of this false title. I care little for it. Let them mock and deride me. I welcome the hatred of the Voiced, and pray daily that they might suffer and die in anguish. I will not let that immortal beacon of light and hope, the vision of the Ideal Republic, disappear.