We are not like you.

We are not like the sharded races, pieces of the Elders that still hold the breath of the Son within them; nor are we like the Dracnari, the children of Dynara's favored First; nor the insects, born from She of Many Eyes who slept beneath the sea; nor the Viscanti, who can perhaps be said to be shards of the Taint itself.

We are Illithoid, spawn of Illith - Mother - Leviathan - Herald - one of the ones called Soulless. We carry within each of us a scrap of Her essence, Her very being. We hold Her hunger, and, at times, we hold Her rage, the rage that allowed Her to persist for a hundred days in battle against the Mother of the Insects.

And yet...we are not like Her, either. Not all of us.

Is every Lucidian a simple carbon copy of Xyl? Every dwarf a mirror of Clangorum? All people of all races have their own thoughts, their own ambitions, their own desires. Why, then, are we the ones called abomination?

We have hunger, yes, but must we hunger for Creation itself? Is it not enough to satiate ourselves with knowledge, or battle, or any number of other pursuits? We have anger, but is that in itself a crime against nature? Can we not use it to persist, as our Mother did, through all that may try to break us?

We rose up centuries ago, Heralds in our own right of a new era. We flocked to Magnagora because, in a way, it is the city of misfits, outcasts, unmentionables, ones the rest of the Basin scoff at and call foul. Doubtless, some of us are; eating each other alive in the depths of the Prison, wasting away in the fleshy caverns of Ixthiaxa. Yet, were we not born of Dynara, same as the rest? Did Magnora Herself not weep for the death of the Son? Could one truly call Her evil, and Her Sister a saint?

We are even deemed worthy to pass through the Fates' Portal, to affect the future of the Basin. Surely, the Fates would not allow such an oversight, if it was truly an oversight.

The Soulless have caused much pain, it is true. We should not excuse the actions of our Mother. But we are more than Her. We are able to mark the tapestry of fate, to write our story - perhaps, even, to change it. We are able to create as much as we can destroy, love as much as we can hate.

We are like you.