A Vision of Portent

[Caranthir_ 2088]

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A VISION OF PORTENT

1917

Cairtaigh, The Heartlands

 

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Spoiler

 

 

Heinrik Sarkozic,

You claim to speak for the Kingdom. Indeed, at every turn you have attempted to. Through elbowing your way to the centrepiece, your megalomaniac ambitions have ultimately led you to this moment. This one moment where you may call yourself, as your kinsman and fellow-anathema once did, ‘the Great’. Oathbreaker, cast your eyes aside, pull back from the crowd, for you are not welcome here. You call yourself a Duke, dream of being king, but your chains of office are stripped to bare. All right is gone, you are the Lord of Misrule, at your right hand the Renatian wolf, baying for blood. All you have is a twisting, puncturing, slicing, and destructive coil of flesh that pulls you and your luddites to the depths of hell.

 

Heinrik,

You claim the Right of the country. You may truly believe you speak for the nation. You claim tyranny, blood, provocation. Yet your pivotal reference was to claim to know the hearts of men who are dead by half a century. Men who were, and still are despite their passing, greater than you can ever know. You claim to know their imperial ambitions, but at least they fought for a cause. You fight only for yourself. Purge your own sins; wash your own filth. Point not your finger at us, and those martyrs who now rest eternally with their Lord God. 

 

Heinrik,

Your ideology is flawed. You claim to speak for the downtrodden, the victims of an Alstion tyranny, and yet you circumvent all legal means by which these disputes should be settled. Do not claim ignorance, Sarkozic. For the constitution of this realm bears the signature of your own hand. And yet, you insist, the menace is your liege lord, the King; it could not possibly be you. But you are false. That not one of your peers would stand with you shows the expanding boundaries of your arrogance. They cannot all be wrong, and you alone right. You may truly believe that your doctrine is freedom, liberty, independence. These concepts you claim to defend. Yet they are not for any one man to carry; they are the collective inheritance of us all. Your doctrine is destructive arrogance, and your means are tearing the Realm apart that you might stand upon its ashes as Rex.

 

Heinrik,

You may think that the world is your divine promise, that destiny calls your name. But then let me correct the record, for you are an aberration. You think that you are the future, yet you are nothing but a mouthpiece for violence. Traitors have come before you and will come again after. Look at what you have become, conceiting only power. A vestige of your former self. You who promised the realm liberty, but deliver it only bloodshed.

 

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Realms of Men,

The martyr William Alstion once branded the anathema Philip Novellen as Vargengotz the Destroyer. He did so that humanity may put the swords of the Exalted to them, and strike them down to hell. But he was mistaken, for scripture speaks of Vargengotz as not one corporeal form, but the multitude of humanity’s tyranny.

 

The first wyrm is Vargengotz, and he goes forth to conquer and to rule. His six heads bear six crowns, which are the great kingdoms of the world, and he lets no evil be spoken of him.

(Auspice 1:5-6)

 

Where Vargengotz once came to us as Philip Novellen, so too does he return as Heinrik Sarkozic. But his many faces are to be found elsewhere: in Vilacz, van Aert, von Draco - the opportunists who feel no love for Adria, but use it to propel a kingdom of their own design through the blood of us all. They are the leaders of men whose hearts crave glory and wanton destruction.

 

And Vargengotz calls forth three deceivers in the guise of messengers, with wings of cold fire. They are called Justice, Glory, and Reward. 

(Auspice 1:9-10)

 

Our charge is as soldiers of God to defeat the wicked anathema and his wolves. They mistake humility for doubt, meekness for fragility. They are mistaken, for Alstion has suffered the fires of indignation and it has left them inflammable. They do not know our strength, for they do not care to count it. So let me give you a number: Alstion has lived for a thousand years, and will survive for a thousand more.

 

And Godfrey’s host meets them in battle upon the mountain. Thus Godfrey raises the sceptre of rebuke. And lo! the command of GOD is justice, and the unjust are punished: Vargengotz and his servants are destroyed.

(Auspice 5:35-8)

 

Let the oathbreakers come to test our resolve; and may God have mercy on their souls, for the law shall not.

 

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Iain Gromach, Warden and Protector of the Daelish Crown & Nauzican

 

[rep2k 2477]

Letting the bow string from between his three fingers launch the sharpened arrow into a target at an admirable distance somewhere within the rainy lands of the March of Haute-Epine, Louis II August nods confidently as the arrow hits the white center of the target, "There it is.", he replies with a click of his tongue, just a moment before the arrival of his courier, a young lad bringing him the missive, "Well, it seems your arrow hit the center as well, seigneur Iain.", the young noble remarks to himself, nodding in approval of the missive within his hands. 

[Frank_Dog 299]

Guarding the pass with her lady archers, a rider would meet up from the Hohengarten and deliver the message to the countess Cosima von Augusten. She read it over slowly, not missing a single word even. Before turning to her granddaughter Anne, "Our loyalty shall always lie with whom has the Aunnic people's best interest in mind. The way I see it, that can only be an Alstion. These barbarians just want blood, so we shall give it to them..." The group would quickly move to quickly travelled pass and wait for the traitors.