[Sale Bête]

The woods around the Sanctuary grow more and more overgrown, its trees laden with frost and the rime upon the ground thick with the passage of a particularly brutal winter. Yet its people endure, and the restless things which stalk between the trees have known hardship. They press on, even as the enemy encroaches.

 

Eyes gleam in the dark; some are rotted within skulls, others are too many, or too few, in monstrous shapes. Others still are alive with fury and vitriol to those tromping feet that once more encroach upon this home, this bastion in dark corner of an already dark world.

 

The Sage of Liberation, the Lady Felice, gives her response to the marching forces:

 

 

"More children, claiming false righteousness.
 
You are not glorious knights. You are not warriors looking for pure purpose. I have seen beneath your armor, your skins, and into your hearts.
 
I have seen it over and over these past hundred years and more.
 

Beneath it all, you are only animals.

 
Whether it is the Athelite people turning against those which made their nation great, coveting relics by divine right that are in better, more deserving hands than theirs or even mine.
 
Or whether it is Myridia, arraigned in gold as your Angelic Princess shook hands in the dark with the things you pretend to hate. Or its Emperor offering so sweetly to make us weapons against Vinaska's temple to our west - to make of us his hunting dogs in his conquest of the world.
 
Promises that none of their banner would strike when we were turned upon by zealots. So easily broken.
 
Take off those cloaks. 
Take off that armor, that false skin. 
Stop pretending."

 

"Let us see who is the greater animal."

 

 

5/23, Saturday

5 PM CST