To My Cousins in the Serenwilde:

 

You are already dead.

 

I say this not because my husband has decided to personally end you. Truly, your death is an old thing, a slow and lingering demise drawn out over hundreds of years. It is older than this current round of hostilities, or the last round of hostilities, or even the Glomdoring. It is as old as the Age itself.

 

As a people, you have chosen stagnation over growth, fear over discovery, safety over change. This has kept you alive, but barely relevant in an Age of power and conquest. You shun that which is impure, and in doing so shun the world, for the very fabric of creation is scarred by long battles with the Soulless. You value tradition, hold yourself up as the last standing commune of old, and in doing so tether yourselves to a legacy of abject failure.

 

Once upon a time, three communes held power over the whole of the Basin, guiding the world to a better state. In time, they let themselves become obsolete, allowing a ruthless Empire to push their influence to the fringes of the Basin.

 

Once upon a time, three communes learned that an Empire's course of action would damn the world. After diplomacy had failed and as doom loomed nigh, the communes chose not to fight the Empire tooth and nail at the gates of Magnagora, but to huddle meekly in their forests and await the end, which came as surely as Sun after Night.

 

Once upon a time, one commune remained at the end of an Age, the lone center of power that stood whole and functioning as the rest of the Basin stood in ruins or in the chaos of transformation. At the end of the Celestine Empire, it was Serenwilde alone that stood in a position to reclaim the Basin for nature, to strike at its enemies and drive them into hiding, to take stewardship of a world desperately in need of healing and guidance. Instead, Serenwilde curled in on itself. Magnagora gathered itself into something resembling order and grew mighty and terrible. The Celestians who had shattered the world gathered a stone's throw from the Serenwilde to begin anew, even managing to build a new nexus without interference.

 

Failure. Failure. Unfathomable failure. The failures of the Serenwilde loom large in the past, but the greatest failure of all is how you cling to this legacy like something worth keeping. The time of Ellindel and Glinshari is distant enough to be legend, those glory days of healing and purity Ages long since past, and all else of your history is a tale of inaction and curling around the spark of nostalgia. That which is alive moves. That which is alive grows. That which is alive reacts to its surroundings. Your people have done none of these things in hundreds of years, and so I must conclude that the Serenwilde is dead.

 

Dismiss my words as the hateful lies of an enemy, if you can. But look back critically on your past, your culture, your miserable standing in the world, and I think that you too shall find yourselves wanting. Then, ponder who else finds you wanting. Perhaps ask yourselves what the Maeve must think of you.

 

Serenwilde, as a power, as a culture, as a meaningful concept in the world, is dead. Let something new grow in its stead.

 

-Thul d'Illici, of the Glomdoring