The Radsulite Manifesto

[richky]

I began life in a kami village and grew up following their teachings of living as one with Atys, and never taking more than could recover naturally. As I grew and developed as a harvester in the desert I never had reason to question the teachings of the kami. Then, one day, an envoy came to Pyr.

This envoy told us how the karavan were beginning a project of temple building. These temples, he said, were an offense to Atys – but instead of simply asking us to help prevent their construction this envoy declared that we must build some temples too. This request disturbed me, and I even considered the possibility that the envoy was not truly from the kami but was in fact a karavan representative. A few days later this possibility was eliminated.

The next announcement from the envoy was made at the kami altar in Pyr, and the kami there did nothing to denouce him, so I had to accept that the envoy was truly speaking for the kami. I would never have known it from his words. He was telling us that to build these temples we must go into the old lands and strip them bare of any resources we could find. He also told us to start killing any homins that were working on the karavan temples. At this point I knew that something was seriously wrong.

My fear was confirmed a short time later when I conversed with a friend who had heard an envoy from the karavan speak in Yrkanis. The envoy from the karavan had spoken at the same time as the announcement in Pyr, and he had used words close enough to identical that it was clear that the two speeches originated from the same source. This pattern continued throughout the temple building, and soon further evidence of collaboration between kami and karavan became apparant.

The steles of valor appeared at the temple sites, and engraved upon them were numbers. Homins had been assigned point values like pieces in a giant game, and scores were being awarded for taking homin lives. This was bad enough, but careful examination of the steles revealed that both kami and karavan were using the same point scale. Not only were they making a game of homin war, they were also lying to us about their opposition to each other.

Recently it has become clear that it is more than just a macabre game. There are no points being awarded for killing homins at the outposts. What we are seeing now is that the kami and karavan are working together to divide homins into smaller and smaller groups. First it was one side against the other, now they have split up the sides by setting guild against guild.

When I saw this I had to ask myself, what reason can they have for this atrocity? Once the question was asked the answer was obvious. When is a divide and conquer strategy used? It is used when faced with an opponent that cannot be defeated when it stands united. Kami and karavan have joined forces to incite war amongst homin because they fear us! They fear for their dominance on Atys and are now trying to set us against each other, to weaken us and drive us back into subservience.

Once I had seen this fact, I declared myself opposed to both kami and karavan; and I learned something else. I still resurrected when I was killed. Kami and karavan have always taught us that they control the resurrection forces and our continued lives are dependent upon them. This is not in fact the case. The resurrection force is either a natural force of Atys or something inherent in homins, or perhaps a combination of the two. The kami and karavan are able somehow to affect the forces involved to provide additional sites where we are able to resurrect, but they cannot stop the process! The evidence suggests that this is tied with their teleportation devices as the sites involved are the same, and these devices appear to have the ability to distinguish between individual homins. With that power they should be able to prevent the resurrection of any who oppose them - but they can't!

So, faced with this overwhelming evidence of collusion between kami and karavan to the detriment of homins, I, Radsul, declare that I will never to my knowledge do anything to assist either kami or karavan and will do all that I can to oppose the kami/karavan conspiracy. All that I do will be with the joint objectives of strengthening homins to resist the opressors, and seeking the secret of the teleportation devices to free homins from even that reliance on those who would keep us as slaves.