The New Way - First paper of the Codex

[VenatorX 13]

 

The New Way

 

I am not the first to write upon Xionism, and I will not be the last. This paper is not offered as a correction to its creed, nor as a fifth pillar within its structure. It is offered as supplementary, that a Xionist may want to read and agree upon. The reader may judge what follows.

 

The four ways are not four religions. They are four faces of a single discipline, and the Xionist who treats them as independent sects has, with complete candor, missed the architecture of his own tradition that was meant to teach him.

The Way of Ember, the Way of the Dark, the Way of the Oaks, and the Nameless Way. These are not denominations to be chosen between. They are a symphony of the work. They are the four hands a single mortal is meant to use, in their proper turn, against the corruption of the divine. 

 

I call this proposition, for want of a better name, the New Way, meaning not a fifth denomination, but the accumulation of all four combined, and evolved into a whole. The Symphony, completed as it were.

The New Way is the way that recognises all four parts, and is not held by any sect. This path is taken by those Xionist who have lived long enough to watch the deific do different things in different ages past, and to recognize that no single posture is correct against them all, at once.

 

First, I shall visit the Creator and the Immortals. The paths will come next, and as a finality, I shall pen the New Way. A Way I will urge you to consider. For it is a completed set. The Four must become One. Our history began the shattering of One into Four. And now, let us become One once more.

 

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On the Nature of the Dark

 

 

The Canonists call Creation the Kingdom of their God. They could not be more wrong. The Creator was a singularity, or came through a breach in the void; the accounts are vastly different, and honestly, I have stopped caring which is right. What follows is what matters, and so he made the Veil. One act that has since defined the world as we know it. Within it, two primal elements: Light and Dark, two sides of a coin, each requiring the other to be itself. The light cannot shine without darkness to shine upon. The dark cannot exist without the Light. The Creator was the coin. Not the Light, not the Dark, the thing that made their existence possible without strife. Remove this coin, and you do not get peace between the two sides. You get what we have had ever since.

 

He is gone. He withdrew, or was consumed by the act of creation, or perished in the way that the greatest sacrifice needed. The result is the same: Creation is not his Kingdom, it is his grave.

And what we have endured since. The Three Sins, the Desolation of Aegis, the meddling of divine hands. It is what the two sides of a coin will do when the coin itself is no longer present. What happened thereafter is the history of Man. The First of Three Sins.

 

Iblees did not descend from the Skies for hunger, nor ambition. He did not come because of the slow ambition that poisons kings; he came because he wondered. His light entered the dark, and the dark corrupted his form. A thing of pure light has no ward against darkness, because it had not yet encountered it in full. He became something they had no name for yet. Not Light, not Dark. Something in between, his very existence, an abomination. The first proof history offers, the boundary between light and dark is there for a purpose; they may be of the same coin, but they are inherently different from one another. It is a law that breaks the one who crosses it. Iblees did not choose. As he descended into the mortal realm of Darkness, his form twisted and writhed, transforming into the horror we know him now to be. The descendants defeated him. Thirty years of war, and Man drove him back. What he left behind were his curses: Horen’s sons short-lived, Malin’s sons sparse, Urguan’s sons greedy, Krug’s sons blinded by unrelenting fury and the greater wound beneath those all. The fragmentation of the One Race into Four. Unification, shattered. 

 

Now, consider what followed the first,

 

Then came Aerial, not with wrath, not with armies. She came with open arms, perceived as a blessing. To Horen, she promised ascension to the Seven Skies. To Malin, long life. To Urguan, strength. To Krug, honour. Provided with entirely benevolent intentions. All received with earnest gratitude. All of it was a lie dressed as a cure.

Horen’s sons were promised a place in the Skies, but instead their souls were enslaved and promised to the gods they would follow. Malin’s sons were given a long life that bred a culture of obsession and ambition. Urguan’s sons were given strength, but did they not already possess such? Krug’s sons were given honour that clouded the very wisdom that had been seen through Iblees.

The curses the descendants knew were curses. The blessings were not blessings after all. This is the Second Sin. A curse disguised as a blessing, or a curse spoken plainly- I’d rather fight the foe I can see, than the one I cannot. A foe you can name, a foe you can raise your blade against. What Aerial did is far worse in my own eyes. I could not imagine the pain. The feeling of betrayal… 

 

After Aerial, every being of light followed Xan. Tahariae. Orsathiael. And many others: the whole host pressing into the dark realms of mortality one way or another. Each one was an extension of their nature that had no bounds to hold it. Xan did not decide to become a tyrant. His perfect view of Order, in a world where perfection does not exist. Tahariae did not choose to demand decimation. Purity taken to its completion consumes everything that falls short of it. Do not mistake them for villains; villains have a choice, these beings have a belief, one they follow without fail, it's in their nature. We cannot change one’s very nature, however much I would like this; we simply cannot. An order without a limit is not an order; ask anyone who has lived beneath it. And so they press, and the descendants who worship and follow them call the pressing ‘love’. This is the Third and Final Sin. It did not end; it continued. It is the state of this world as we know it, and it persists within every temple, every prayer, every soul delivered to the afterlife. Having been taught since childhood that the delivery of your soul to the divine is the point.

 

The deists will say: The gods are grand, and the gifts they bestow are of genuine meaning, and the life lived in service is the life well lived. History answers differently. Aegis, the birthplace of the Four Brothers, the home of every descendant race, was destroyed. It was not unmade at the hands of mortals. At the zenith of the war between the Ascended and the Undead, Aerial and Iblees fought a duel. Two beings, powerful beyond reasoning, crashing into one another across fields where mortal children had been born, where the first white cities of the Malin rose, where men had plowed the first fields. They did not notice, why would they, the fields were not theirs to mourn. The Lord of Embers witnessed this from the depths below and cursed their names in anger. The Lord of the Dark sank with what remained and became Xion. The Abyss was born, not from mortal failure, but from the failure of divine hands.

 

The deist will say this was the work of Iblees, and that Aerial fought in our name. Fine, let them say it. Ask them next what we were saved into. A shepherd who burns the fields to kill the predator has not saved the flock. 

 

The Canonist faith teaches that the Creator watches over his kingdom. It does not ask them to look at what his kingdom has become. It does not show what has happened to the birthplace of their race, or why the first home of Man is naught. History repeats itself across every age, confirmed by every meddling Aengul that found themselves in the realm of darkness. Written into the ash of Aegis.

 

I have read the records many times now. They do not favor the divine. The clergy is a tool for the immortals. The Xionists do not worship. They remember, they name what it reveals, and they refuse to follow blindly. It is the only honest reaction to a history that is shared by all descendants, and yet none have been permitted to read it plainly. 

 

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The New Way - The Dark Doctrine

 

“They named thee clay, and thou didst believe it.

Clay is shaped, it is broken, it is discarded.

Thou art older than the hands that reached for thee.

What was stolen does not stop being thine because the thief grew comfortable.”

 

I. The First Creed: remember and let the remembering burn

 

The New Way is not a doctrine. It is fury. The earned fury of a people who have come to understand the history of what was done to their forebears and will not call it providence.

Aegis is ash, not by mortal hands, not by wars fought by mortality. By two immortals who fought their private duel across the ancestral home of Man and left the people to flee through the Verge with only the curses of Iblees and the empty blessing Aerial replaced them with. The One Race, fractured into four separated by the First Sin, has spent every age since that time bleeding the wound into the world that does not remember it was dealt by the hand of the divine.

 

The Xionist carries this. Not as grief, grief is for those who have accepted what was taken cannot be gotten back. Not as vengeance either, although it resembles it from the outside. The original scripture knew this fire, vengeance is satisfied when the score is settled. What the Xionist carries does not settle. It is the drive behind their beliefs, their actions, and their decisions. Call it what it is- fuel.

 

The Maleficar who tends an altar does not know what he is actually nurturing. Every soul given fuels the divine’s power. He was taught from a young age, manipulated into thinking the altar he is tending is one of love and protection. Instead, this maleficar is simply a tool the divine uses to enslave the souls of mortals. This is his misfortune; the New Way does not bear him any hatred for it. The ignorant cannot be blamed. But the misfortune of the beguiled does not make the altar less what it is. An instrument the divine uses, just as it uses the maleficar who tends it.

 

“The Shepherd does not love the lamb.

He loves what the lamb provides.

He will call anything a wolf.

That reminds the flock of this.”

 

Let the remembering be the first. Let it be the foundation upon which everything else is built. A man who remembers what was taken will never mistake a foe from a friend.

 

II. The Second Creed: The blade before the Book.

 

The first tool of the New Way should always be speech. Speech without the clergy’s framing and without the softening of reality for comfort's sake. The history lay bare before a mortal who was never permitted to understand it in a different way than that of his religion or culture. This is the most effective tool the New Way utilizes. The mind that’s been shown the true power of mortality will not easily forget.. Help these misguided souls in their journey back to the dark. Speak to them about our belief, speak with the patience of the Lord of the Dark, who sank with Aegis, rather than abandoning it, and in the sinking, became Xion. When speech has failed to reach the ears of the misguided, it is also important to know when a season needs to change. 

 

The maleficar who first hears the history and turns away is not yet an adversary. He may return on his own, taking the question home and finding it will not leave his mind. Give him the time to come to his own realisation. The maleficar who has heard our shared history, turned away from it, ignored it, and takes up arms against those who would speak it plainly, who has made himself a tool of the divine, who burns our writing and drives the dark arts of mortality from our world in the name of some divine fool, this man had made his answer plain. He has by his own choice, decided to ignore the truth. He does not deserve our mercy.

 

“I have spoken to men like thee before.

Some heard, most did not.

The ones who did not

learned the same truth, by a different road.

The road was not kind.

It did not need to be.”

 

The New Way does not counsel divine murder for its own sake. There is no satisfaction in the slaughter of the misguided, no wisdom in cutting down the farmer next door who prays for a better harvest because he was taught to do so and never opened his eyes. The New Way is better than that, and the work requires better. 

The Inquisitor who has taken the lives of innocent Xionists, the Templar who has spent a lifetime driving the dark arts from the reach of mortals. The old Bishop who sent two generations of souls willingly to the Seven Skies, fed the divine with the ignorant souls of his entire flock, and calls this his calling. These men are not unknowing; they have chosen their faith. They have provided the divine with more than a mortal is able to give, and they have spent their power and influence ensuring others do the same. For these, the blade is not a last resort. It should be the correct instrument used for the season they have wrought upon themselves. 

 

“Say it once, say it plainly.

A man who understands will carry it home and find it waiting for him in the dark.

Do not argue with an answer.

There is no argument left to make.

There is only what comes after.”

 

Mercy first, then the blade. The blade not first, nor mercy always. The wisdom of the New Way is in knowing the difference, and in being decisive when the difference is clear.

 

III. The Third Creed: Deny them their harvest.

When the maleficar eventually falls, the Aenguls reach for what he carried within. The soul he willingly gave to feed the gods will rise towards the Skies as it was taught to rise, obedient even in death, completing the transaction between Maleficar and Patron. Giving the gods a final return on an investment made.

 

Deny it.

 

The souls of the fallen maleficar do not belong to the divine. It belongs to the dark; it was always of the dark, every mortal soul is of the dark. The dark arts, through the working of lifeforce and ectoplasm and the rites of the Old Lords forged from Iblees’ own stolen essence. The soul can be returned to its birthing place before the divine receives it. Consumed into the substance of the work, what was spent feeding the gods is spent instead on the reclamation they spent their fight against. This is not a desecration, dear reader, no. This is a correction. As returning to normal.

 

Those who fall before the work of the New Way do not simply perish. They are reclaimed, their souls taken from the maw of the deific who expected it and placed where it should always have been. In this way, every soul the gods turn against the New Way becomes, upon its demise, a part of the very belief they were sent to eradicate. I have taught on this for a long time; I had plenty of time to do so, and I believe it is just. A means to strengthen ourselves while robbing the Aenguls of their quarry.

 

“Every god that ever demanded a prayer was hungry.

They dressed it well, I will grant them that.

But strip the vestments back far enough

and what is left is a mouth.

A mouth can be shut.”

 

What they feed against us feeds us in the end. Let them send their zealots. Let them come.

 

IV. The Fourth Creed: Reclaim what was taken.

 

The dark arts are powers held by mortal hands. Lifeforce, blood, ectoplasm. The living substance of the dark realms, manipulated by the hands of mortals and used for the betterment of mortality. I never held the dark arts as a negative, in my many centuries that I walked the realms, I have encountered many a fool who would have me believe otherwise. They were called dark and forbidden by the deific because a mortal who commands his own lifeforce does not need a god to sustain him. A mortal who understands their own soul does not hand it over at the end without understanding. The suppression of these arts by the clergy and the divine is evidence that they certainly do matter. The deific does not forbid that which is harmless to them; it forbids what threatens their existence.

 

Master them, not recklessly- the dark arts are volatile and mastery demands a certain discipline, one which I have not yet come to understand wholly, but that we must acknowledge. The Old Lords spent lifetimes earning this discipline. Do master them without apology, without the wider world’s branding of shame attached to them. They frame it as if a mortal's own birthright is a corruption.

Every dark art practised openly and without shame is an act of reclamation. Every Xionist who stands before the accusations of maleficar and does not flinch is proof that the arts survived oppression and will outlast it. The passage too is to be reclaimed. The gate is a contested ground, and the divine awaits, with a thousand ages of practice and the heavy weight of mortal conditioning behind them. The New Way prepares the passage in the living years, when one is still full of youth, and the mind is clear. The Old Lords did not transcend by accident; they transcended because they had prepared for it. Long before they reached the line where the dark ends and whatever lies beyond it begins. 

“The Darkened arts were not named dark by us.

They were named dark by those who feared what we might do with them.

Let us prove their fear was warranted.”

 

The threshold comes for us all. Let it find thee ready, and free of the bounds of the deific.

 

V. The Fifth Creed: Endure as the dark endures

 

The work outlasts a lifetime. The cosmos did not lose its equilibrium in a generation, and it will not recover in the generations to come. The Xionist who expects to see the full ‘fixing’ of what was broken at the First of Three will be disappointed. I will not speak untruth. Disappointment has ended more faithful lives than any Paladin’s blade. Endure, I simply say. Not as the Oaks endure, passive and in waiting for the cycle to do what the cycle does. Endure as the dark endures: present and everlasting. Capable of withstanding all that has befallen it, and yet is still standing. 

 

The New Way does not offer the comforts it refuses. There is no promise of the Skies here, no falsehoods to cling to. There is the work, the company of those equal-minded, and the accumulation of what that work produces over the coming ages. Endurance is a trait inherent to us mortals, for all we have suffered through the ages. One such tale: My travels have taken me places that I had never imagined. A small village in the northern regions of this realm. Harsh winters, famine, and war-torn because of cultists that believed in something larger than themselves… Who can blame them, really? Generations long in servitude to some higher being. It is a chain that is hard to break. Within this village, there was one young man who captivated me. He preached upon the town square, hands soaked in blood, not for any god. But, for the salvation of the monsters that had slaughtered his kin. After a long dialogue with this young man, he revealed his kin had been slaughtered in the name of a nasty Deamon. Yet, he could not blame the hand that did the killing, he could only blame the Deamon that had poisoned their minds. At that time, I had not found Xionism. I wish I had. I could have taken this young man and given him purpose… To me, this is endurance, of such a level that I was jealous of it. No one would have blamed the young man for seeking vengeance against the men who had come into his hovel, slaughtered his sister like one would butcher livestock, but he did not. He endured without the dark to hold him; imagine what he could have done with it.

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Ending Word

 

I have never learned his name, I did not ask, and by the time I had thought of asking, the road had taken me elsewhere. A mortal who endured without doctrine, without a community, without even the knowledge of what he was carrying, and carried it regardless. The alternative was to become the thing that had destroyed all he held dear. That is the dark enduring. Not the absence of pain and fury, but the refusal to let either of those things decide who you are.

 

The New Way cannot give you what that boy had by nature. It can only give you the framework to find it for yourself, and the company of those who walk a similar path. Whether that is enough is not a question this paper can answer. It is the question this paper was written to ask.

 

• V.

[dark lord Ragtanatos 414]

Holy yapping that took forever altough i did enjoy reading it keep it up