Antioch,

The words after mine may be a-bluster with justification and misdirection, but I think you should hearken to me carefully.

Your leaders have led you astray.

Where once proud Antiochan recruits would rescue the slaves of Stavenn, your leaders have now allied you with the slavers of Urzog. Is freedom no longer important to Antioch? One can only surmise that the preservation of freedom is no longer a priority for your leaders, at least that much is clear...

Your leaders also claim that they intend to destroy us, because of what we are - users of magick and demonic energy, yet they have aligned your great city with a horde of clans that employ amongst other nefariousness, warmages? users of magick and sorcery that they claim to hate. The hypocrisy of your leaders grows in leaps and bounds. Antioch, will you continue to turn a blind eye? Is it not poor leadership that your leaders did not negotiate with Urzog for him to disband his warmages, yet you continue to spill your blood to defend those dirty users of orc-magick?

If they refute this assertion that they have allied themselves with Urzog for the purpose of destroying practitioners of magick, then why follow them in pursuit of a vendetta that serves only their vainglory?

Finally, if they claim that Urzog is merely a means to an end? This has a familiar ring to it, one that the once-mighty Stavenn trumpeted from every tower. Are you akin to that Stavenn of old? Have you forsaken your beliefs for the same pragmatism that drives users of necromancy to embrace their dark power?

A great web of self-serving deceit has been woven in front of your very eyes, Antioch, and it is either a statement of the diminishing nature of your great culture and history for you to take this lying down, or a statement of the internal oppressive forces that you have been slavishly serving for the last decade. Are you as hypocritical as your leaders? Only you can decide.

Subservience does not suit you, proud people of the sands. Yet to the outside world, it seems that that is what has occurred? Subservience to a God is nothing anyone would wholly refute, yet your leaders would have you bow at the feet of an orc-king.

What do you stand for Antioch, when you have chained yourself to an orc-king with a cadre of warmages and who demands things of your Farah and gets what he wants?

What do you stand for, Antioch, when you kneel before a creature that encourages the deprivation of freedom?

What do you stand for, Antioch, when you become the very thing that you desire to remove from this world?

I.N.

Penned by my hand on the 18th of Aequitas, in the year 78 AM.