On the 13th of May of the year 1026, Sir Edwyn Rainecourt addressed the following letter to the Realms:
To the Peoples of the Realms,
You call me monster. You are not wrong. I was once what many of you still pretend to be: a good
man in polished steel. I knew banners and vows. Shared laughter in cold keeps, and the warmth of a
hand that waited for me at dusk. I put duty and honor before everything else. And because I did, and
others did not, my wife died alone.
My commander gave the order. Hold the line. I held it. Because duty demanded it. On the day my
wife died, I stood where I had been ordered to stand. My Knight Commander gave the command,
and I obeyed. I did not run to her. I did not break formation. I did not choose personal well-being
over the greater good.
You worship choice as though it were sacred. You raise your children to prize it. You tell yourselves
that freedom is what makes life beautiful. Tell me, how beautiful was her death? How beautiful is
the freedom to abandon a friend? To betray a vow? To watch a stranger suffer and decide it is not
your concern?
A hundred small freedoms colliding like blades until all that remains is blood. You worship this
chaos and call it virtue, but it is not. It is the first and oldest cruelty. It is why the powerful betray
their people, why parents bury children, and why neighbors burn one another’s homes, and why
every promise made beneath the sun eventually withers into dust. Given freedom, mortals choose
selfishness. Given power, they choose tyranny. Given fear, they choose violence. And, given grief,
they choose vengeance.
Choice is not a gift. It is a weapon handed to every coward, every tyrant, and every selfish little soul
who wishes to excuse what they have done. And I have seen what lies beyond it.
My brothers and sisters march without doubt. They do not falter. They do not betray. They do not
leave one another to die because fear whispered louder than loyalty. They have no need for freedom,
because they have something better. They have peace.
Two of our beloved order have fallen to your hands. You think this delays me. It does not. It reminds
me why I must continue. I will tear the burden of choice from this world so that no lover will again
wait for a door that will never open, and no soldier will again be ordered to choose between duty
and love. There will be no more choices. There will only be peace.
Once, no one offered me a mercy. No one asked whether I wished to stay at my post. No one told me
I could put love before obedience. No one gave me the chance to choose differently, and I will
remember that. But I am not so cruel.
So hear me now, peoples of the Realms: I will give you what I was denied. A choice to stand aside.
Lay down your banners, your crowns, your petty little freedoms. Step willingly into the stillness I
offer, and the pain ends. No more fear. No more betrayal. No more impossible decisions made in
impossible moments. You will call this tyranny at first, but every chain feels cruel to the hand that
has only ever known flailing.
Or you can resist.
Cling to your freedom. Defend it with your trembling hands and righteous speeches. And when I
break you, when your bodies rise in my ranks and your minds obey, you will finally understand
what peace costs. But at least it will have been your decision. That is more mercy than was ever
shown to me.
Either way, you will serve the same end. I do not ask for your surrender, I offer you absolution.
Soon enough, each of you will face the same question I once did. Hold the line…or break it. Only
then will you learn who you truly are. When the hour comes, and it always comes, we shall see
whether you hold the line…or whether you join it.
Sir Edwyn Rainecourt Knight of the Aberrant Gate
Two days later, on the 15th of May, he received the following response:
Unto Sir Edwyn Rainecourt of the Corrupted Court of the Knights of the Aberrant Gate,
You have suffered a terrible loss to which no one should be subjected, and I would like to offer you
my most sincere condolences. But I will not justify my moral position to you whose conscience has
been suffocated under the crushing weight of that loss, and the lust for power it has brought forth in
you.
That tragedy, and the horrors it has fueled, have carried you to a most curious destination. For
should you succeed in your conquest, one individual alone would retain the power of choice:
You.
It is thus my assertion that the act of choice, which you have framed as a burden upon us all, is in
fact a power you covet for yourself, and yourself alone. You claim that all mortals inevitably choose
selfishness and tyranny; violence and vengeance. And yet from where I sit as I pen this letter, the
one I see who has chosen these is you, Sir Edwyn. And as you have chosen these things, your ego
demands you claim that all others would make the same choice, if only given the chance. I
wholeheartedly reject this assertion on the grounds that your personal pride is insufficient evidence
upon which to indict all mortals of your own failings.
Despite the tarnish your legacy has suffered at the hands of your present actions, I concur that you
were once a good man. Perhaps I may even have once described you as a great hero. The order
whose name I carry was in part built on that legacy, and even now its weight is not lost on us.
Although the time of your service may be long past, I believe it has earned you an honorable and
dignified death befitting a true knight. And it is that death to which we shall deliver you, out of
respect for the man you once were.
Until we meet again,
Anthony Warder of Stonewood
High Priest of Arius
Squire to the Knights of the Sable Dragon
Squire to the Knights of the Aberrant Gate
Penned on behalf of the collective forces of the Realms
