[R&S 1.3] Van's Unclouded Judgement

Early December, 1525

Beloved Chis, hear my prayers. You are my strength, my fortitude, and my guiding light. By your wisdom, I am made a better man. By your grace, I make the world a better place. I am now and forever your loyal servant.

Forgive my silence these last weeks, I am an imperfect man and my greed gave way to anger that kept me from my prayer. I am your greatest servant and yet I can not comprehend why you have not revealed to me the intents, purposes, or deities behind the comets in the sky. Even though I turned my back on you, you have continued to guide me. What I have learned in these past weeks has again shown me the virtue of patience - of appreciating the slow path. Thank you for helping me avoid the failings of men like Imrik McGary.

I have been speaking with those who best knew my wife’s cousin. I have asked about his past, his rise, his role models, his advisers, his journey, his stumbles, and his sacrifices. The man that would be king, the man that was, by all accounts cared deeply for his queen and his family. He, like so many before him, acted with devotion and love. And like so many men of hubris, he failed to see your wisdom, your messages, your warnings.

You are a goddess of many forms. Most think of you as a being of beauty and grace. Some see you as the goddess of presentation, spectacle, ritual, manners, or illusions. Others call you the goddess of lies, of misinformation or deceit, of half truths, of fog, of distractions and misdirections. You are all those things; yet, you are also the goddess of seeing through illusions, the embodiment of hearing many meanings from the same phrase, the avatar of truth, the spirit of transparency, the illuminator of absence, the fountain of freedom that comes from understanding over knowing. You are the goddess of true wisdom. It is a great shame that my own race was born with so little desire to know you. I count myself among the blessed for finding my way to you.

Those that knew him, not the story but the actual man that was Imrik, spoke of a person who cared first for his family, second for his kingdom, and third for his own gain. Among common men, these would be admirable traits. Among great men, they are the most common of failings. Men like this see what they want and follow the easiest path to their desires - never stopping to ponder the virtues of a more difficult path.

The drive to achieve can be blinding. It has clouded my own vision these last weeks. I could not fathom - no, that’s not true - I yearned to know who it is that arrived in the world, and that you would not tell your greatest servant made me feel small, made me feel insignificant, made me feel rage toward you for slighting me. I try to be humble, but I know the power I wield, and I feel pride at my accomplishments, my status. Just as Imrik McGary’s desire to slay the dragon Scoria clouded his judgment, so too did my desire to know the will of the divine clouded my heart to the greater purpose I serve.

Clertus, the sage, spoke at length about the focus and detail the late Empress and her nephews put into their war. The determination they had to see the task completed. He barely spoke on their plans for the day after, let alone the year after. He never spoke about the paths they choose not to take.

It is this same sage, a man dedicated to his work, who revealed to me the path of Imrik’s demise. Please Chis, help me to show Clertus the way to understanding - he knows so much yet comprehends so little. What a servant he could be.

Like many men before him, Imrik had a storied past. He was never a perfect man, but who among us is? His slights, his weaknesses, his shortcoming, they were understandable. They were common. They impacted the moments they were from.

As nearest as I can tell, his downfall began with the battle for Xorathis the Green. His brother, Father Anton, was drawn into an vortex that ripped him from the mortal world to a place where he should have died. Most men would have, and Arcadia would be a better place if Imrik and his brother Tyrael had left him to his fate.

It is here where common virtues became great vices. His love of family clouded his judgment. Many sources tell me Tyrael and Imrik were adamant that they could not defeat the dragon without their brother. This was their first step. They loved their brother. They rejected the notion of his death. They lied to themselves and others. They insisted that his death should be overturned. That their cause mattered more than the natural order. They sought to resurrect him by any means and at any cost. Any cost. It is this blindness that would be his downfall.

Clertus told me of a night after the disappearance of Tyrael - on the eve of the coronation of the creature they call Imrik - where a fragment of Imrik’s soul reached out for help. The creature had taken to drinking, a trait of the human within, and with it the voices of the monsters were dulled enough for the truth to come out - a story involving the sacrifice of children, born and unborn, and of the sale of a soul made in a cave of one whose name I will not speak, of a pact made between two brothers and a creature of darkness. The two brothers choose to put family before all else, and not even the great golden dragon could dissuade them. How I wish I could have known her.

Great men are those who plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. Weak men fell shade trees to fuel tonight’s fires. In my years of service, I have seen many weak men of great power sell their futures for the present, and that is exactly what they did that night. As if the act of laying with such a being was the extent of the price to be paid. What blithering idiots they were. Imrik chose to surrender his spirit rather than weaken his flesh - a trap so obvious it is fodder for children’s tales. He saw what he wanted to see, not what was. It was this night that Imrik was lost to the world.

Should Father Anton been with them, he would have known her for what she was - yet they sought her out to save a godly man. What irony, what a cruel twist of fate! How she must have reveled in that moment.

Had Father Anton been with Imrik when he traveled to the demon’s home, he would have looked up and pondered the implications of a world without a moon. They had a wizard when they needed a cleric. If Imrik understood that in that realm, consuming the flesh is the same as consuming the soul, he would understand why devouring such a creature is the same as merging its soul with your own. Even a small bite of a creature made from a thousand souls could redefine your very existence. Or maybe he did see such things, but was so corrupted by the Hunger that now resided within him that he could choose no other path. He gained the knowledge he sought, but he invited a most terrible monster home inside of him. I want to believe the cleric of vengeance would have seen the trap of consumption, he would have seen the hunger that consumed Imrik, and turned the party back - yet I know vengeance often blinds us to reason and wisdom.

I suspect the desire for domination that lay within the demon went unnoticed by those around him. By this time, Imrik’s own desires were that of conquest, of destruction, of absorption. Those that spoke of this event did so with pride. They saw the defeat of a demon, not the defeat of a man. They saw the ripples in the pond, not the waves those ripples would become. Prideful men, who know not what they say, boasted that were they in Imrik’s place, they would have eaten the whole wyrm. Yes, they would have, and when they were done they would have understood that whether the man eats the wyrm, or the wyrm eats the man, it matters not, for the thousand and one souls would be joined all the same. They would embrace corruption and call the lands free of crime.

It is clear that by the time Father Anton was resurrected, Imrik was losing control of rational thought. A mage of his caliber and experience would surely know what it is to have an Imp as a familiar. Only amateurs and fools bring such beasts into the world. Their deceit and manipulative capacity is well established. The Imp serves the demons, not the shadows of the man.

The man that was Imrik was a good man, but not great enough for the burdens placed upon him. He was a flawed man. A man filled with love for family. A man who would do anything for his brother - even sell out his kingdom, his race, his whole world. He would turn a blind eye to the consequences of his actions because he was too weak the bear the pain of loss. He was ordinary when Arcadia needed extraordinary. No, it was worse than that, he was just capable enough to bring about ruin.

I am angry at this man for choices he made. He thought only he would pay the price. There is nobility in that, and were he a small man in the world, we would likely praise him. But he was no small man. He had an obligation to shield his kingdom from evil, not to invite it home. He saw what he wanted to see, not what was. He may have taken a path that led to the death of the red dragon, but now hell beasts with far greater ambitions sit atop her treasures and are beloved by the people.

Whatever little bits of the real Imrik remain struggle against what he has become, else Arcadia would already be awash in death. I pray to you Chis, greatest of gods, please guide those remnants to stall the monster that lives there now. That they have maintained so much control over his former body speaks well to the man that was Imrik McGary. I ask you Chis, my guiding star, help me end his torment and destroy the creature that walks in his flesh, that holds his name, that controls his voice, that maligns his memories. Help me rip it from this world before its evil purpose can be made manifest.

Beloved Chis, I thank you for the life you have given me. I thank you for saving me from certain doom. I thank you for letting me be your servant in the great war. I thank you for giving me the power to be an agent of goodliness. Thank you for bringing me home.