*The following is written in High Mordentish*
My mind wanders back to the streets of my dearest Levkarest tonight. The wide thoroughfares, flanked in purest white marble carrying though my city the treasures of the Core like veins carrying precious life-blood to the heart.
I remember as a boy being walked through the Grand Cathedral with my grandfather. The sheer scale of that magnificent marble structure still takes my very breath away. I remember thick clouds of incense wafting up to the baroque ceiling...
That celing! That ceiling engraven with hideous reliefs of Legions of Death. How more terrifying were those statues when the incense shrouded them? How more terrifying are they still while cloaked in the smoke of the incense, wrapped about them like the very Mists of Death? I remember, at not even seven years, how tightly I would close my eyes, how firmly I would clutch my grandfather's hand! Each and every time he would silently bid me to open them with a gentle nudge, and when I finally found the courage he would always direct my attention to the High Altar. There, radiently I gazed upon Our Lady towering over us shrouded in that very same incense cloud! How quickly that sight would dispel my fear, how quickly would as if by magic my impression of those carved horrors above me change! Where I once saw expressions of malice and ill-intent I would now, fortified by the graven image of Our Lady, see only fear in their deformed eyes.
This would not always be so.
The shift was gradual, so gradual I did not notice until I was too far gone As I became a young man, passions, desires and wants stirred in me. An avarice that nothing in my life, as it was, could satisfy.
Abomination!
How I grew to resent those sermons, how I grew to resent setting foot in that Cathedral. I felt no more solace in your gaze My Lady. That gaze, that stern gaze of protection, of hatred against the Legions of Night etched in the ceiling above I felt week after week turned more and more onto me!
I poured over the holy texts, I prayed, I begged, I pleaded! I went so far as to bargain…I promised if you would but sate the disordered desires within me I would dedicate my life to your Church. Never again would I feel tenderness in your gaze. Never again would I feel the embrace of your love when I entered your sacred spaces.
You had abandoned me My Lady, you detested me My Lady. I sought to hide myself from you, and I did. There was no place for me in the Grand Scheme, destiny had abandoned me.
There is now too much fortune, in this my darkest hour to be mere coincidence. Too perfectly do the pieces come together…That which caused me to first stray from your embrace has been cut from me, an act precipitated by the betrayal of your own clergy in Vallaki.
A walk in a dark place forces a chance meeting..in the entire vastness of the Core I was there at exactly the right moment.
You have found me My Lady.
You have led them to me, you have led me to them.
Exitus acta probat...
