My most eloquent and persuasive sophists of Eleusis,

I confess I was sceptical of your philosophy when this exchange began but I have now seen the light off the dew.

After all, how could anyone question the commitment, faith, or conviction of those who follow a creed they have decided promises inevitable victory, can be used to justify any course of action, and which demands none?

You say nature's victory is inevitable... and indeed, defined under your terms I suppose it must seem that way. Nature will have apparently won if at some point in the far future a cactus remains in the desert. How convenient, you don't even need to water it.

Moreover, apparently any act or desire is justified if you can find in all of nature's diversity a single creature that behaves in an analogous way. Eat meat or don't, steal or murder, fight or flee, there is a beast or buzzing insect out there you can point to. A million species providing a billion justifications.

Yet I now learn this gloriously permissive creed does not even stop there! It seems even asking you all to limit yourselves to natural behaviours and thus forego the pleasures of civilization was too much of a chore for nature's flock.

I can imagine it now, my blackened heart weeping. A little voice, whispering to you as you stuff yourself with Cyrenian cakes or lose yourself in the chaos of an Ashatani revel, that perhaps one should not ply with friendship, commerce, and patronage nature's civilizational anathemas.

You must have stood there, lips quivering at the novel concept of having to actually sacrifice for your beliefs, and would likely have wept had your leaders not rushed in with the comforting balm of whispered rationalizations.

Apparently, any building you like and wish to cavort in need only be described as 'in harmony with nature' or 'inevitably destined to fall to ruin and return to nature' and like a Hashani street alchemist's trick your sense of unease vanishes. Nothing is off limits! How miraculous! How liberating!

With victory inevitable and permissible behaviour expanded to include that which is 'natural', that which is arbitrarily declared 'in harmony with the natural', and all that is prophesized to 'fall to nature in time', you are free to do anything, and free to do nothing - forever.

You have convinced me. When I am ready to become the overripe fruit you apparently venerate and seek to emulate, I shall sprint happily into your sugar dusted arms. I'm just not quite ready to rot away yet.

In His Service and in awe at your ethical dexterity,
- Scribe Harkon d'Ivoire




Penned by my hand on the 22nd of Glacian, in the year 1010 AF.