Too big for your britches, forestral community? And they say we
Shallamese are mindlessly devoted to our ideals. Let me tell you all a
story about a raid by some Mhaldorians...

A raid which I attempted to end more speedily with a prism tattoo and a
holocaust globe. Obviously in a raid situation, there's no time to take
a good look around, to survey whether or not you're in a garden. It was
the heat of battle, meteors raining down. So I lay a holocaust. Mind
you, no plants were present in the room to permanently kill, it was a
subdivision.

So, of course, the bomb chars, cracks the ground. I can say, as someone
who is not a forestral enemy, that this mortified me. I say that I'm no
forest enemy because I care about nature just as much as the fanatics in
Oakstone profess to. The same fanatics, by the way, who still sell herbs
to Mhaldorians, though their fog is infinitely worse than every
holocaust I've ever created. But I digress.

So now I find myself an "enemy of the forests" for five years, and a
heathen in the eyes of many forestral friends, including my own wife,
who won't speak to me so long as I remain an enemy. This enemying was
unjust. I did all in my power to fix it. I sought out someone to
rejuvenate the room. I even provided my own elemental ice to fix this
(by the way, Hierophant Thenidiel, the most wise and benevolent, refuses
to deduct the price of my ice, a paltry 333 sovereigns, from my fine of
20,000).

I want to write this to explain to Oakstone that the letter of law means
nothing without reason guiding it, and that the world is not black and
white. Yes, it's a Shallamite telling you this. I'm also stating that at
no time will I pay this fine as it stands. It is unjust. I will fight
forest fires and protect groves, forests, and plants. I am not an enemy
of the forests.

Just the sentient organizations that claim to care about them.

-Erisycthon Op'shae-Crystalstorm

Penned by my hand on the 2nd of Ero, in the year 431 AF.