The Pillar Scorned
Epistolary Testament of the Sultan of the White Sand Empire
To the Eminent Pillars of Sand and Flame, to the Hierophants of the Inner Sanctums, to the distant Dynasts cloaked in vine and bone, and to whatever trembling archivist unseals this scroll when all other certainties have calcified into ruin.
Let this be inscribed in the annals not as a supplication, but as indictment and augury.
It is the nascence of the fifth ember. The celestial braziers above our desert have kindled and guttered four times since my accession, and for seven score seasons I have reigned over these auriferous dunes, sculpted by covenant, abraded by duty. Obligation has been my diadem and my chain. You named me sovereign, but the crown I bear is a manacle that encircles even the loftiest neck.
I have ministered with unwavering fidelity, adjudicating disputes between caravans whose banners I no longer bother to remember, affixing my seal to treaties whose ink tastes of ash even as it dries. I have shepherded a people who believe themselves inviolate beneath the benediction of sun and sand. Yet the firmament grows tenebrous. The zephyrs bear portents. The terra itself quivers beneath the gravitas of something colossal and stirring, as though some buried colossus shifts in its shroud.
This letter is my prolegomenon to catastrophe.
Consider, if your pride yet allows contemplation, the so-called magnificent columns of our world. The White Empire’s own Pillars quarrel and preen, as if the desert itself were a stage erected solely for their feuds. To the septentrion, the Verdant tribunals coil around their arboreal thrones, wrapped in vines and jurisprudence, their courts swaying like canopies in a gentle breeze, deaf to the coming storm. To the meridian, the necromantic empress of Hextor enthrones herself upon ossified miracles, her dominion of swamp and bone and glacial witchcraft spreading like a slow, exquisite contagion.
Each believes the other the principal antagonist. Each calibrates strategy against the silhouette of the other. Yet the veritable adversary undulates beneath all their treads, beneath our own, a subcutaneous malignancy threading through the strata of existence.
I have beheld it in my somnolent visions. The sands surge like a tempestuous deluge, cresting not in water, but in incandescent grains that scour flesh from bone. Citadels, caravans, shrines: all swallowed in a single, exhaled convulsion of the desert. I have smelled mortar pulverized to dust, heard the ululation of collapsing minarets. There is a silence that comes just before the scream, a sacred hush as if the cosmos itself draws breath. Then the heavens avert their countenance. Conflagration cascades from the celestial vault in fuliginous veils, and the constellations drown in their own reflected fire.
You will say these are dreams. I say they are indictments.
Already the cinereous tempests wax denser along our horizons. What you call “seasonal storms” now arrive with a clamor akin to an orchestration of the accursed. The wind does not merely howl. It recites. It chants in registers that rattle the enamel of one’s teeth and tremble the ink within the inkwell.
The nomadic Nokhoi, those fox-riders of the far canyons whom we mock as savage and superstitious, whisper of phantasmal silhouettes traversing the miasma. Figures neither vital nor moribund, walking the threshold as if the division between life and death were an obsolete custom rather than a law. They beckon to the desert as if responding to a remembrance long interred: some ancestral summons buried beneath eons of sand, now stirring like an opened eye.
We dismiss their tales because their scripts are carved in bone rather than ink. We label them primitive because they do not gild their prophecies. Yet mark this well: the first warning seldom wears silk.
Within our sanctums, the hierophants discourse on serenity and contemplation. They compose treatises on balance while the scales fracture beneath them. Their voices, once sonorous and certain, now quiver around the edges, tremulous as a candle flame in a crypt. I have knelt behind the lattice and heard their supplications falter mid-litany. Words that should soar collapse into hoarse murmurs. Pauses linger too long. Silence congeals.
Even Samara, our effulgent Arch Djinn, she whom the people hail as the incandescent axis of our spiritual cosmos, has sequestered herself behind diaphanous curtains of radiance. They proclaim she meditates. They proclaim she communes with ineffable flames beyond mortal ken. I declare she trembles. The light that seeps from her veiled chambers is no longer steady. It flickers in arrhythmic spasms, like a heart uncertain whether to beat or break.
Yes, call it blasphemy if it pleases you. Draft another edict, have the scribes copy it thrice, and let your indignation be inked upon calfskin while the world outside our walls rearranges itself for war. But verity is not ordained by savants or ecclesiastics. Truth is not a decree. It is an event.
Beyond the Obsidian Chasm, the sepulchral portals of Hextor yawn agape. I am told the dead there do not wander with the usual shambling aimlessness of haunted tales. They abide in quietude, ordered, ranked, as though marshaled by an edict yet unuttered. The necromantic queen is not caprice; she is calculus. If her legions stand poised in stillness, it is not lassitude. It is anticipation.
To the verdant east, the Dynasty fortifies its peripheries. Their living ramparts of root and bone thicken. Their legions coil like constrictor vines around the arteries of their realm. Their pyres already smolder, prepared to devour whatever the jungle cannot absorb. Yet all their opulence and grandeur shall signify naught when the empyrean itself transmutes to cinder, when the very medium in which their gods’ birds fly is rendered unbreathable.
You squabble over tributaries while the river of reality itself begins to boil.
Why then do I write? Why stain vellum with a litany that will be dismissed as the melancholia of a fatigued monarch or the hubris of a would-be prophet?
Because a pillar, when scorned, still bears the roof.
I remain uncertain if posterity shall commemorate me as despot or oracle, as the tyrant who presided over collapse or the solitary voice who saw the avalanche before the first stone fell. Perhaps my name will be etched into no stone at all, erased beneath the very sands I have spent a lifetime commanding. It is irrelevant. One does not shout to the drowning in order to be remembered for shouting. One shouts because silence is complicity.
Hear this, then, as my irrevocable testimony: the epoch of concordance wanes. The ember diminishes. The maelstrom looms.
When the silence inexorably ruptures, it shall not arrive with precipitation, but with ash and conflagration. The skies will not weep. They will ignite. The dunes that once cradled caravans will rise as devouring waves. Our gilded domes will become molten tears running down facades of cracked stone. The hierophants will find their scriptures are not buoyant enough to float upon fire. The Nokhoi will ride against a horizon that no longer exists. The Verdant courts will watch their canopies blacken. Hextor’s dead will finally receive the command they await.
And we, in the White Sand Empire, shall discover whether our faith was ever in the sun at all, or merely in the illusion that it would never set.
To the Pillars who read this while there is yet time to act: look beneath your quarrels. Beneath your treaties. Beneath your fear of losing status in the eyes of peers who may not live to mock you. If you must call this madness, then call it a madman’s plea for preparation. Fortify not only your walls, but your will. Listen to the storms, not the courtiers. Attend to the tremors, not the compliments.
Should these words be opened only after the horizon has already burned, let them stand as my final indictment and, perhaps, my absolution. I saw the shadow within the flare of the fifth ember. I named it.
Whether you heeded me or not is now between you and the ashes. Written by my own hand beneath the waning light of the fifth ember, in the seventy-first season of my reign over the White Sand Empire, I, who once believed the desert eternal, Sultan and Pillar Unheeded
Epistolary Testament of the Sultan of the White Sand Empire
To the Eminent Pillars of Sand and Flame, to the Hierophants of the Inner Sanctums, to the distant Dynasts cloaked in vine and bone, and to whatever trembling archivist unseals this scroll when all other certainties have calcified into ruin.
Let this be inscribed in the annals not as a supplication, but as indictment and augury.
It is the nascence of the fifth ember. The celestial braziers above our desert have kindled and guttered four times since my accession, and for seven score seasons I have reigned over these auriferous dunes, sculpted by covenant, abraded by duty. Obligation has been my diadem and my chain. You named me sovereign, but the crown I bear is a manacle that encircles even the loftiest neck.
I have ministered with unwavering fidelity, adjudicating disputes between caravans whose banners I no longer bother to remember, affixing my seal to treaties whose ink tastes of ash even as it dries. I have shepherded a people who believe themselves inviolate beneath the benediction of sun and sand. Yet the firmament grows tenebrous. The zephyrs bear portents. The terra itself quivers beneath the gravitas of something colossal and stirring, as though some buried colossus shifts in its shroud.
This letter is my prolegomenon to catastrophe.
Consider, if your pride yet allows contemplation, the so-called magnificent columns of our world. The White Empire’s own Pillars quarrel and preen, as if the desert itself were a stage erected solely for their feuds. To the septentrion, the Verdant tribunals coil around their arboreal thrones, wrapped in vines and jurisprudence, their courts swaying like canopies in a gentle breeze, deaf to the coming storm. To the meridian, the necromantic empress of Hextor enthrones herself upon ossified miracles, her dominion of swamp and bone and glacial witchcraft spreading like a slow, exquisite contagion.
Each believes the other the principal antagonist. Each calibrates strategy against the silhouette of the other. Yet the veritable adversary undulates beneath all their treads, beneath our own, a subcutaneous malignancy threading through the strata of existence.
I have beheld it in my somnolent visions. The sands surge like a tempestuous deluge, cresting not in water, but in incandescent grains that scour flesh from bone. Citadels, caravans, shrines: all swallowed in a single, exhaled convulsion of the desert. I have smelled mortar pulverized to dust, heard the ululation of collapsing minarets. There is a silence that comes just before the scream, a sacred hush as if the cosmos itself draws breath. Then the heavens avert their countenance. Conflagration cascades from the celestial vault in fuliginous veils, and the constellations drown in their own reflected fire.
You will say these are dreams. I say they are indictments.
Already the cinereous tempests wax denser along our horizons. What you call “seasonal storms” now arrive with a clamor akin to an orchestration of the accursed. The wind does not merely howl. It recites. It chants in registers that rattle the enamel of one’s teeth and tremble the ink within the inkwell.
The nomadic Nokhoi, those fox-riders of the far canyons whom we mock as savage and superstitious, whisper of phantasmal silhouettes traversing the miasma. Figures neither vital nor moribund, walking the threshold as if the division between life and death were an obsolete custom rather than a law. They beckon to the desert as if responding to a remembrance long interred: some ancestral summons buried beneath eons of sand, now stirring like an opened eye.
We dismiss their tales because their scripts are carved in bone rather than ink. We label them primitive because they do not gild their prophecies. Yet mark this well: the first warning seldom wears silk.
Within our sanctums, the hierophants discourse on serenity and contemplation. They compose treatises on balance while the scales fracture beneath them. Their voices, once sonorous and certain, now quiver around the edges, tremulous as a candle flame in a crypt. I have knelt behind the lattice and heard their supplications falter mid-litany. Words that should soar collapse into hoarse murmurs. Pauses linger too long. Silence congeals.
Even Samara, our effulgent Arch Djinn, she whom the people hail as the incandescent axis of our spiritual cosmos, has sequestered herself behind diaphanous curtains of radiance. They proclaim she meditates. They proclaim she communes with ineffable flames beyond mortal ken. I declare she trembles. The light that seeps from her veiled chambers is no longer steady. It flickers in arrhythmic spasms, like a heart uncertain whether to beat or break.
Yes, call it blasphemy if it pleases you. Draft another edict, have the scribes copy it thrice, and let your indignation be inked upon calfskin while the world outside our walls rearranges itself for war. But verity is not ordained by savants or ecclesiastics. Truth is not a decree. It is an event.
Beyond the Obsidian Chasm, the sepulchral portals of Hextor yawn agape. I am told the dead there do not wander with the usual shambling aimlessness of haunted tales. They abide in quietude, ordered, ranked, as though marshaled by an edict yet unuttered. The necromantic queen is not caprice; she is calculus. If her legions stand poised in stillness, it is not lassitude. It is anticipation.
To the verdant east, the Dynasty fortifies its peripheries. Their living ramparts of root and bone thicken. Their legions coil like constrictor vines around the arteries of their realm. Their pyres already smolder, prepared to devour whatever the jungle cannot absorb. Yet all their opulence and grandeur shall signify naught when the empyrean itself transmutes to cinder, when the very medium in which their gods’ birds fly is rendered unbreathable.
You squabble over tributaries while the river of reality itself begins to boil.
Why then do I write? Why stain vellum with a litany that will be dismissed as the melancholia of a fatigued monarch or the hubris of a would-be prophet?
Because a pillar, when scorned, still bears the roof.
I remain uncertain if posterity shall commemorate me as despot or oracle, as the tyrant who presided over collapse or the solitary voice who saw the avalanche before the first stone fell. Perhaps my name will be etched into no stone at all, erased beneath the very sands I have spent a lifetime commanding. It is irrelevant. One does not shout to the drowning in order to be remembered for shouting. One shouts because silence is complicity.
Hear this, then, as my irrevocable testimony: the epoch of concordance wanes. The ember diminishes. The maelstrom looms.
When the silence inexorably ruptures, it shall not arrive with precipitation, but with ash and conflagration. The skies will not weep. They will ignite. The dunes that once cradled caravans will rise as devouring waves. Our gilded domes will become molten tears running down facades of cracked stone. The hierophants will find their scriptures are not buoyant enough to float upon fire. The Nokhoi will ride against a horizon that no longer exists. The Verdant courts will watch their canopies blacken. Hextor’s dead will finally receive the command they await.
And we, in the White Sand Empire, shall discover whether our faith was ever in the sun at all, or merely in the illusion that it would never set.
To the Pillars who read this while there is yet time to act: look beneath your quarrels. Beneath your treaties. Beneath your fear of losing status in the eyes of peers who may not live to mock you. If you must call this madness, then call it a madman’s plea for preparation. Fortify not only your walls, but your will. Listen to the storms, not the courtiers. Attend to the tremors, not the compliments.
Should these words be opened only after the horizon has already burned, let them stand as my final indictment and, perhaps, my absolution. I saw the shadow within the flare of the fifth ember. I named it.
Whether you heeded me or not is now between you and the ashes. Written by my own hand beneath the waning light of the fifth ember, in the seventy-first season of my reign over the White Sand Empire, I, who once believed the desert eternal, Sultan and Pillar Unheeded
Missive of the church
On the Visit of the Winter Emissary
Recorded in the Annals of the Sanctified Flame, as spoken by Zubaida Ahmadzai before the High Lanterns of the Church of the Lord of Light
“May this entry stand as coal upon the altar of remembrance, that no one may claim ignorance when the dusk comes walking.”
To the Most Luminous High Lanterns, to the keepers of the pyres and the stewards of our Lord’s incalescent grace, and to whatever trembling scribe shall unseal this page should we fail in our vigilance, let this stand not as a homily, but as a deposition of fire.
Today, beneath the twin orbs of our skyborne pyres, which hung like molten rubies in a vault of smoldering blue, we received a visitor whose mere aura chilled the marrow beneath my breastbone. She did not arrive upon creaking wagons laden with silks, nor heralded by bronze trumpets and perfumed envoys. She stepped instead from a shimmering veil of rime, a sudden cataract of frost that beaded upon our sandstone and turned our warm incense to brittle glass in the lungs.
No mortal court had sent her. She belonged to a dominion where breath congeals into scripture and bone is both ledger and law. In the sanctified hush of our inner hall, she named herself Ixqueya: Inquisitor of the Ossuary Dominion, Warden of Winterwake, adjudicator of the hoarfrost marches. Her voice cracked over the stone like a frozen river deciding where to break.
She spent no syllables on ornament. No idle courtesies, no gilded preludes. Each word she uttered fell into our silence like a blade of obsidian, driving concentric ripples through the faith of every man and woman present.
Before us she set no treaty, no plea for alliance, no veiled demand. She produced a ledger.
Its cover was bound in raven-black hide, so cold that frost bloomed wherever her fingers rested. Its pages shimmered with runes traced in a pallid luminescence, as if written with moonlight strained through bone. This was no account of gold or grain. It was a census of souls. Precise tallies of the departed, those who ought to have passed from flesh into the curated stillness of her Queen’s necromantic repose.
Under the quivering candlelight, its columns of names and tally marks gleamed like rows of tombstones half-buried in a snowdrift. Every entry, every numeral, an epitaph. Yet the sums did not reconcile.
There is a siphoning, she said, and the torches guttered as though the word itself had teeth. Somewhere between the last shuddering exhalation and the necromancer’s summoning call, an unseen hand diverts the fallen. Not all. Not even many. But enough. Enough that a realm ruled by mathematical exactitude has begun to mistrust its own arithmetic of oblivion. Enough that an empire of bones now fears its own census.
Her fear is colossal. It is not the tremor of a nervous courtier, but the tectonic unease of a realm that counts the dead as other kingdoms count harvests.
She did not name the specter that haunts her calculations. I, however, fear it may be the return of the Defiled.
Those who savage the sanctity of death. Parasites that gnaw at the ligaments between realms, corrupting flesh and memory until neither heaven nor hell recognizes the husk that remains. They do not simply raise corpses. They vandalize the very passage between breath and stillness. If her dread proves true, we are confronted not with a tidy enemy that plants banners and declares borders, but with a creeping contagion that insinuates itself into tombs, shrines, and cradles alike.
Yet she came not solely to burden our altar with anxiety. She brought, in her own glacial idiom, an oblation of wrath.
From the heart of her winter, she has dispatched a chosen instrument. A warrior of ice and judgment now marches in concert with our champions, bearing blades carved from winter’s black core, to hunt the source of this unseen larceny. Hextor’s winter has loosed its hounds upon the dunes, and one of them walks beneath our Lord’s light with provisional concord.
Her warning did not fall into an empty basin. It resonated.
Beyond our carved pillars, from the seared ribs of the southern marches, there came corroborating word from Watari, Khan of the fox-riders, General of the Nokhoi. His message reached us across broken stone and blistered sand, borne by riders whose mounts shook the ground like distant thunder.
He reports that in the swirling cinereous storms that scour the canyon ridges and borderlands, his beetle-mounted hunters have glimpsed processions of silhouettes. Not the stumbling, disordered gait of the mindless dead. Not the frantic scramble of beasts fleeing heat and hunger. These shapes move in ordered ranks, their outlines blurred yet unmistakably deliberate, striding in perfect lockstep with the gale, as though the storm itself were a banner under which they march.
We know the Nokhoi. They craft war-songs as deftly as they shape arrowheads. Their tongues are sharp, their imaginations seldom impoverished of monsters. It would be gratifying to soothe our unease by naming their vision a fever-dream, the delirium of southern fox-folk who have spent too many nights beneath a bruised and roiling sky.
Yet portents are beginning to coalesce around a single, disquieting axis. A deficit in Hextor’s death-ledgers. An emissary of hoarfrost who crosses deserts to confess uncertainty. A canyon-khan whose riders see spectral cohorts inside sandstorms.
Coincidence is a coward’s shield. It is the last garment worn by those who would rather be surprised than prepared.
Therefore I, Zubaida Ahmadzai, servant of the Sanctuary and sworn blade of the Lord of Light, place this matter before the Church in its stark and undiluted urgency. We stand upon the vestibule of an enigma we barely comprehend. The dead are being stolen in transit. The winter realm stirs to wrath and vigilance. The fox-clans murmur of storm-borne specters. Our own auguries curdle on the tongue with the taste of copper and smoke.
Though no siege-engine yet scars our horizon, we are observed. There is an intelligence taking our measure.
I beseech, adjure, and command in the name of our incandescent Lord: Marshal the Orders. Rouse the Palatine knights from contemplative repose and bid them remember that steel is prayer given edge.
Let the Lantern Companies purge their armories with consecrated flame, and account for every blade, every relic, every vial of sanctified oil.
Summon home the itinerant preachers long enough to glean from them every whisper that has slithered along the trade routes, then dispatch them anew as our eyes and ears among the shifting dunes.
Mandate that every temple in the White Sand Empire keep a double ledger. One for births and deaths as custom dictates. Another for deaths that feel wrong: corpses that refuse to chill, bodies whose wounds knit after breath has ceased, dreams that replay in precise and nauseating loops, omens that cluster like carrion ravens over the same stretch of sky.
We must weave ourselves into a single tapestry of vigilance that spans dunes, canyons, and coasts, rather than remain a scatter of solitary sparks fawning over our own radiance until the dark closes in.
If the Defiled have indeed dragged themselves once more from whatever pit once birthed them, let them find a Church unshaken, a people forewarned, a desert that burns with inner fire as fiercely as the sun that crowns it.
May the brilliance of our Lord of Light shine brighter than both our twin stars. May it lance through Hextor’s hoarfrost, cleave the Verdant’s emerald canopy, and rend the black tatters that the Defiled dare to name banners. May it illuminate every hidden siphon and every scorched, secret pathway by which our dead are stolen.
So recorded, so spoken, and so sworn.
Zubaida Ahmadzai
Blade of the Sanctuary,
Voice before the Lanterns,
Daughter of the Lord of Light’s fire
On the Visit of the Winter Emissary
Recorded in the Annals of the Sanctified Flame, as spoken by Zubaida Ahmadzai before the High Lanterns of the Church of the Lord of Light
“May this entry stand as coal upon the altar of remembrance, that no one may claim ignorance when the dusk comes walking.”
To the Most Luminous High Lanterns, to the keepers of the pyres and the stewards of our Lord’s incalescent grace, and to whatever trembling scribe shall unseal this page should we fail in our vigilance, let this stand not as a homily, but as a deposition of fire.
Today, beneath the twin orbs of our skyborne pyres, which hung like molten rubies in a vault of smoldering blue, we received a visitor whose mere aura chilled the marrow beneath my breastbone. She did not arrive upon creaking wagons laden with silks, nor heralded by bronze trumpets and perfumed envoys. She stepped instead from a shimmering veil of rime, a sudden cataract of frost that beaded upon our sandstone and turned our warm incense to brittle glass in the lungs.
No mortal court had sent her. She belonged to a dominion where breath congeals into scripture and bone is both ledger and law. In the sanctified hush of our inner hall, she named herself Ixqueya: Inquisitor of the Ossuary Dominion, Warden of Winterwake, adjudicator of the hoarfrost marches. Her voice cracked over the stone like a frozen river deciding where to break.
She spent no syllables on ornament. No idle courtesies, no gilded preludes. Each word she uttered fell into our silence like a blade of obsidian, driving concentric ripples through the faith of every man and woman present.
Before us she set no treaty, no plea for alliance, no veiled demand. She produced a ledger.
Its cover was bound in raven-black hide, so cold that frost bloomed wherever her fingers rested. Its pages shimmered with runes traced in a pallid luminescence, as if written with moonlight strained through bone. This was no account of gold or grain. It was a census of souls. Precise tallies of the departed, those who ought to have passed from flesh into the curated stillness of her Queen’s necromantic repose.
Under the quivering candlelight, its columns of names and tally marks gleamed like rows of tombstones half-buried in a snowdrift. Every entry, every numeral, an epitaph. Yet the sums did not reconcile.
There is a siphoning, she said, and the torches guttered as though the word itself had teeth. Somewhere between the last shuddering exhalation and the necromancer’s summoning call, an unseen hand diverts the fallen. Not all. Not even many. But enough. Enough that a realm ruled by mathematical exactitude has begun to mistrust its own arithmetic of oblivion. Enough that an empire of bones now fears its own census.
Her fear is colossal. It is not the tremor of a nervous courtier, but the tectonic unease of a realm that counts the dead as other kingdoms count harvests.
She did not name the specter that haunts her calculations. I, however, fear it may be the return of the Defiled.
Those who savage the sanctity of death. Parasites that gnaw at the ligaments between realms, corrupting flesh and memory until neither heaven nor hell recognizes the husk that remains. They do not simply raise corpses. They vandalize the very passage between breath and stillness. If her dread proves true, we are confronted not with a tidy enemy that plants banners and declares borders, but with a creeping contagion that insinuates itself into tombs, shrines, and cradles alike.
Yet she came not solely to burden our altar with anxiety. She brought, in her own glacial idiom, an oblation of wrath.
From the heart of her winter, she has dispatched a chosen instrument. A warrior of ice and judgment now marches in concert with our champions, bearing blades carved from winter’s black core, to hunt the source of this unseen larceny. Hextor’s winter has loosed its hounds upon the dunes, and one of them walks beneath our Lord’s light with provisional concord.
Her warning did not fall into an empty basin. It resonated.
Beyond our carved pillars, from the seared ribs of the southern marches, there came corroborating word from Watari, Khan of the fox-riders, General of the Nokhoi. His message reached us across broken stone and blistered sand, borne by riders whose mounts shook the ground like distant thunder.
He reports that in the swirling cinereous storms that scour the canyon ridges and borderlands, his beetle-mounted hunters have glimpsed processions of silhouettes. Not the stumbling, disordered gait of the mindless dead. Not the frantic scramble of beasts fleeing heat and hunger. These shapes move in ordered ranks, their outlines blurred yet unmistakably deliberate, striding in perfect lockstep with the gale, as though the storm itself were a banner under which they march.
We know the Nokhoi. They craft war-songs as deftly as they shape arrowheads. Their tongues are sharp, their imaginations seldom impoverished of monsters. It would be gratifying to soothe our unease by naming their vision a fever-dream, the delirium of southern fox-folk who have spent too many nights beneath a bruised and roiling sky.
Yet portents are beginning to coalesce around a single, disquieting axis. A deficit in Hextor’s death-ledgers. An emissary of hoarfrost who crosses deserts to confess uncertainty. A canyon-khan whose riders see spectral cohorts inside sandstorms.
Coincidence is a coward’s shield. It is the last garment worn by those who would rather be surprised than prepared.
Therefore I, Zubaida Ahmadzai, servant of the Sanctuary and sworn blade of the Lord of Light, place this matter before the Church in its stark and undiluted urgency. We stand upon the vestibule of an enigma we barely comprehend. The dead are being stolen in transit. The winter realm stirs to wrath and vigilance. The fox-clans murmur of storm-borne specters. Our own auguries curdle on the tongue with the taste of copper and smoke.
Though no siege-engine yet scars our horizon, we are observed. There is an intelligence taking our measure.
I beseech, adjure, and command in the name of our incandescent Lord: Marshal the Orders. Rouse the Palatine knights from contemplative repose and bid them remember that steel is prayer given edge.
Let the Lantern Companies purge their armories with consecrated flame, and account for every blade, every relic, every vial of sanctified oil.
Summon home the itinerant preachers long enough to glean from them every whisper that has slithered along the trade routes, then dispatch them anew as our eyes and ears among the shifting dunes.
Mandate that every temple in the White Sand Empire keep a double ledger. One for births and deaths as custom dictates. Another for deaths that feel wrong: corpses that refuse to chill, bodies whose wounds knit after breath has ceased, dreams that replay in precise and nauseating loops, omens that cluster like carrion ravens over the same stretch of sky.
We must weave ourselves into a single tapestry of vigilance that spans dunes, canyons, and coasts, rather than remain a scatter of solitary sparks fawning over our own radiance until the dark closes in.
If the Defiled have indeed dragged themselves once more from whatever pit once birthed them, let them find a Church unshaken, a people forewarned, a desert that burns with inner fire as fiercely as the sun that crowns it.
May the brilliance of our Lord of Light shine brighter than both our twin stars. May it lance through Hextor’s hoarfrost, cleave the Verdant’s emerald canopy, and rend the black tatters that the Defiled dare to name banners. May it illuminate every hidden siphon and every scorched, secret pathway by which our dead are stolen.
So recorded, so spoken, and so sworn.
Zubaida Ahmadzai
Blade of the Sanctuary,
Voice before the Lanterns,
Daughter of the Lord of Light’s fire
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