Editing Game-Summaries:9/6/2019 Recollections (section)

==Recollections by Ci==
My order has existed for millennia. We have survived cataclysms, wars, inquisitions, purges, and pogroms. We believe in a higher truth, reflected as if through a mirror darkly, in the many faiths and beliefs of Terra. Some truths we know. Some truths we believe. Others are just hinted yet, and have yet to reveal themselves. These things we know: there is love, and it is the core of all life. There is hate, and it is the companion of death. Good, evil, law, and chaos are all in service of these two ideas: life and death. To love is to serve life, to hate is to serve death. Some serve one master or another without ever realizing it. They kill and destroy, deluded that their are serving some higher good, or worse yet themselves only.  Others choose the darker path, because they would rather rule in death, than serve in life. We met just such a two in the perverted halls of [[Atillar Keep]] 

For those of my order, in which love is service to life, the act of love is not to be feared or shamed. It is something as natural as breathing and walking, to be honored and shared with those who may benefit. For the creatures that played at being [[Maximus and Crassus Atillar]], even the act of love was rooted in hate. They used the promise of it, and the act of it to steal life in a ceremony they called a Blood Orgy, designed to fuel their Wild Hunt. The perversion of their ceremony was not in the joining of bodies but in the twisting of that joining to serve hate and death. In a way, I pity them, for though they use sex as a tool, and skilled in the practice if it (to which I can attest), they can never enjoy it. Never truly know what it means to give yourself completely to the joining with another. never truly know love. Our sage told me these creatures are known as Succubi and Incubi and they come from some of the lower planes. I pity them though because they are truly lost. They can never know love, and so are doomed to forever serve death.

In the end, we could do nothing to help them. We could only drive them off (though I wonder if they had stayed if we could have defeated them). We could only hallow the ground they had cursed, and seize their land on behalf of Shanjiu and the Magistery. We also found the Codex for which we had been hunting, much too dangerous to use, in my opinion, but MUCH too dangerous to remain in the wild. It turns out the codex was merely a reflection of a true codex, Coin's Journal, somehow imbued with the power of the [[Codex Mortalis]]. the paths Master Coin and his Journal must have traveled must be dark indeed to have absorbed such power merely by chance, if chance indeed it was. But [[Inugs]] returned to us, for that we may give thanks! And we also found hope, as one often does when one brings love to conflict. We had saved the object of their hunt... an Elder Unicorn named [[Eternia]], and she has pledged her help to Shanjiu should we require it. 

There is still much we do not know. What did the creatures Attliar hope to achieve by Eternia's death? How complicit have the allied houses been in the plan, in particular, Baron Zevane. But the servants of death have been thwarted, a mysterious and dangerous artifact has been denied our enemies, and a great ally has been recruited to our cause. AS always I will continue the Study. I will follow the Path. I will still serve life. As we say in my order, though the Paths are Many, the Mountain is One. The Mountain will Come.
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