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The Almanac: PON Edition / The Warrior Prophet
« on: August 19, 2018, 06:08:54 pm »
Are people still up for the re-read?
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... even though the skin-spies were exposed relatively early in the course of the Holy War, most believed the Cishaurim rather than the Consult to be responsible. This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.
- DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
...and that revelation murdered all that I once did know. Where once I asked of the God, "Who are you?" now I ask, "Who am I?"
- ANKHARLUS, LETTER TO THE WHITE TEMPLE
The Emperor, the consensus seems to be, was an excessively suspicious man. Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty.
- DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
The event itself was unprecedented: not since the fall of Cenei to the Scylvendi hordes had so many potentates gathered in one place. But few knew Mankind itself lay in the balance. And who could guess that a brief exchange of glances, not the Shriah's edict would tip that balance?
But is this not the very enigma of history? When one peers deep enough, one always finds that catastrophe and triumph, the proper objects of the historian's scrutiny, inevitably turn upon the small, the trivial, the nightmarishly accidental. Wen I reflect overmuch on this fact, I do not fear that we are "drunks at the sacred dance," as Protathis writes, but that there is no dance at all.
-DRUSAS ACHAMIAM, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Those of us who survived will always be bewildered when we recall is arrival. And not just because he was so different then. In a strange sense he never changed. We changed. If he seems so different to us know, it is because he was the figure that transformed the ground.
- DRUASA ACHAMIAM, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Many have condemned thise who joined the Holy War for mercenary reasons, and doubtless, should this humble history find its way into their idle libraries, they will blast me as well. Admittedly, my reasons for joining the Holy War were mercenary," if by that one means that I joined it in order to procure ends outside of the destruction of the heathen and the reconquest of Shimeh. But their were a great many mercenaries such as myself, and like myself, they inadvertently furthered the Holy War by killing their share of heathen. The failure of the Holy War had nothing to do with us.
Did I say failure? Perhaps "transformation" would be a better word.
- DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
Faith is the truth of passions. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.
- AJENCIS, THE FOURTH ANALYTIC OF MAN
Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world.
EKYANNUS VIII, 111 APHORISMS
Even the hard-hearted avoid the heat of desperate men. For the bonfires of the weak crack the most stone.
CONRIYAN PROVERB
So who were the heroes and cravens of the Holy War? There are already songs enough to answer that question. Needless to say, the Holy War provided further violent proof of Ajencis' old proverb, "Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.
DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
I have explained how Maithanet yoked the vast resources of the Thousand Temples to ensure the viabililty of the Holy War. I have described, in outline the first steps taken by the Emperor to bind the Holy War to his imperial ambitions. I have attempted to reconstruct the initial reaction of the Cishaurim in Shimeh from their correspondence with the Padirajah in Shimeh. And I have even mentioned the hated Consult, of whom I can at long last speak without fear of ridicule. I have spoken, in other words, almost exclusively of powerful faction and their impersonal ends. What of vengeance? What of hope? Against the frame of competing nations and warring faiths, how did these small passions come to rule the Holy War?
- DRUSAS ACHAMIAN, COMPENDIUM OF THE FIRST HOLY WAR
... though he consorts with man, woman, and child, though he lays with beasts and makes a mockery of his seed, never shall he be as licentious as the philosopher, who lays with all things imaginable.
- INRI SEJENUS, SCHOLARS 36, 21, THE TRACTATE