Tyrannus,

I am humbled that -you- would respond to me, rather than allowing someone to fulfill some sort of requirement. Undoubtedly you found the time to pen it during a brief respite from your busy schedule of strengthening the defenders of other city-states with the blood of your citymates.

Unfortunately, you seem intent on attempting to dismiss my words by addressing my past as if it means anything beyond the folly of my youth. As usual, the only time one is actually seen as an individual by Mhaldor is when they have departed. I am certain that there is an enterprising jester within Carnivalis Institute currently penning their thesis on Mhaldor's brilliant use of irony in the written medium.

In any case, it is meaningless and trite to bring up my past: I have moved beyond Mhaldor and its promises of 'greatness', 'perfection', and 'advancement'. For all of the sermonizing and the digestibility of its ideology into simple Truths that can be quoted ad infinitum, it fails to address the underlying dilemma: One's actions in Mhaldor serve to advance Mhaldor and Sartan, not one's self.

As you have so generously provided more evidence in your writing, Mhaldor remains a vicious spiral downwards: A hypocritical system where those in power seek to justify their existence and position by dragging the deluded down into their system of oppression. After all, a slave with no master is free. A slavemaster with no slaves is -nothing-. And all of this propagation is for what? For a higher purpose in service? To 'advance the cause of sentient life'?

If it's merely the servitude that draws people to Mhaldor, I'm certain that could be found elsewhere: The Bloodsworn within Targossas, the call of Oblivion within Ashtan, a servant of Nature within Eleusis, or whatever the name of the dominatrix is in Hashan's House of Delights. Any of those would satisfy the Mhaldorian urge to be led around and commanded, and at least one of them offers the whippings and public humiliation that you'd be accustomed to.

If one actually believed in the advancement of sentient life, one should seek to do so without the oppressive yoke to a tyrannical God and ideology that could not care less whether one serves or not. Instead, there is merely blind obedience stemming from honeyed promises that only serve to shackle and bind those who would seek strength.

Those that truly wish to advance themselves, to strengthen and grow, to rise above their humble beginnings and the follies of their youth, they have a simple choice to make--Do they serve an uncaring tyrant with absolutely no interest in their growth, or do they cast off their shackles and bindings to grow and flourish without sacrificing themselves?

I have made mine, and I am all the better for it. I challenge those within Sapience who still have the faculty to read and think to do the same.

Arditi Nithilar

Penned by my hand on the 3rd of Ero, in the year 672 AF.