From an academic sense, one must first define who - or what - constitutes the valid heir of an organizational legacy, or if such a thing is even possible. Can such an intangible construct be inherited by a single person? A group of people? A successor organization? Or is it simply an ephemeral definition, as fragile as the dreams and desires that went into creating it?

From there we must consider - while the Phantoms have a legacy, what is that legacy made of? The organization known as the Phantoms had no sentience that could be attributed to it alone. So what does it possess to pass down, but the composite of the men and women who formed its ranks, the nameless and faceless actors on the stage of history? Their artefacts, their memories, their records - something uniquely human.

If you will pardon the digression, I have heard it said before with regards to sentient beings that true replication is impossible. A man can write a book constituting every memory he has ever had, yet the next man to read that book from cover to cover and memorize it is no more the author than the book itself. A man could composite every belief and experience that the whole of Aetherius has had with his lost wife and create a perfect copy, yet in the process create something wholly different - something that is simply not the same.

There is a spark in every person that cannot be duplicated, that cannot be replaced, that cannot be forged anew. Something unique and irreplaceable that makes us who we are. Something that such arbitrary constructs as organizations cannot possess.

So, perhaps you are right - perhaps we are Phantoms no longer. But then, for all the grand visions engineered, for all the dreams dreamt by the hopeful, for all the attempts to walk paths already tread, such an attempt to duplicate was impossible from the start. The Phantoms were ultimately human. They lived, they died, their heirs scattered to the winds like so many leaves. Three guilds and more claim a piece of the puzzle as their own, and not one of them is truly wrong.

Perhaps we have deviated from a grand design, but a design so strict does not bear following. The glories of the past are little more than guidelines when the glories of the future await us. And if doing so makes us something else, then so be it - the story of the Phantoms has been told.

We will tell our own.

Penned by my hand on the 1st of Solis, in the year 603 AD.