Intergalactic Summit

As we renew and refocus ourselves for the coming year and campaigns ahead, we take a moment to offer this public proclamation and to also share the Pillars of Faith.

To the Khanid Kingdom:

We do hereby reaffirm our Jihad [Holy War] against the Khanid Kingdom. We continue to interdict and destroy all neutral and peaceable targets that we can. We will continue to prey on your subjects, on your merchants, on your Navy, on your priests, on your institutions, on your very being.

You are not safe. Your sons and daughters are not safe. We come for your people.

Like a festering tumor, like a raging boil, we will burn you from within. We will drag your people kicking and screaming into the light of our Faith and show you the way forward.



Potential converts be made aware the five Pillars of our Faith. Reject your old lives and your old faith so that you might be born again into our warm embrace.


Avarice

The Insatiable desire for material wealth and gain


Lust

Pleasures of the flesh. One must not be held back or restricted against fully exploring these areas.


Pride

Unshakable faith in your own abilities and supremacy.


Will

Self Control. Self Discipline. The ability to have your desires made manifest.


Wrath

Inordinate feelings of hatred and anger towards one's enemies


Meditate on these and perhaps you will know wisdom and rebirth.

And where Cardinal Graelyn's words fail, the arms and armor of the Praetoria will not.

Your day is coming, Silas Vitalia. My former Grand Master reminded you that you are not supreme, and soon it will be my turn.

Referring to yourselves as "a festering tumor, like a raging boil" is sure to get you some recruits. Everyone wants to be a tumor or a boil right??

Little man;

I will advise you to take a gander at my public combat record, and that of my organization... and then compare it to your own.

Then tell me I only know how to throw parties.

I cause more destruction and pain every week than you have in your entire career.

Miss Vitalia,

I must confess that, while I find your depredations on the Kingdom and Empire to be...interesting, I think that I find your tenets to be somewhat less coherent, perhaps less than worthy of your own intelligence and enthusiasm. Now, please understand, I myself am very devoted to avarice, to will, and to wrath, but I must confess my lack of interest in developing the other two. By way of explanation, if it interest you, read my commentary on each.

1. Avarice
Out of the desire for gain comes all human progress, all wealth, all of which we have and enjoy. Our desire to have more motivates us to cultivate our will, and to wrath with those who would deny us what we want. By our desires we are motivated to conflict and competition, so that the most worthy are rewarded with the most in power, possessions, and position. Out of avarice, greed, and hunger comes invention, cunning, and diligence. For human desire have all things we have created been created. On this foundation do we all today stand.

2. Lust
Here is where I must disagree. One must control oneself, hold oneself back from these pleasures, if one is to achieve what one desires. Shall I have a battleship? I may not therefore squander my funds on boosters. Do I desire power? I must then deny myself, and work day and night to out do those around me in the competition for it. If satisfy lust is to satisfy the pleasures of the flesh, then it is the most useless toy. The greatest pleasures are not of the flesh, but of the mind and spirit: to achieve one's goals, to have one's vengeance, to achieve position, to possess. What then, is sex, or wine, or drugs, or any other artifact of common hedonism to the supreme bliss of seeing a rival vanquished, to accepting a position of power and responsibility, or to possessing a precious or powerful item?

3. Pride
Pride. I think you do not merely mean self-confidence by this. Perhaps you do, in which case, my critique is mistaken, and my apologies in order. Nonetheless, I have not found unshakable faith in my own abilities to be a wise course of action, on the battlefield or off of it. To be too confident is to fail to see others as threats, to fail to grasp the hidden vipers in the grass, to breeze over evidence of traps and to expect oneself to perform better than one actually does.

I do not therefore suggest a mewling humility. But skepticism of one's own position, if I might phrase it that way, seems to be a wiser, more useful approach. Or perhaps I should say a certain uncertainty maintained at all times, a watchful eye to the spirits of fortune and the plots of enemies. If one can avoid displaying arrogance, one has also established to one's own possession a new weapon - that of allowing the pride of one's enemies to betray them. To stab an enemy in the back is always a more delightful experience when it is the enemy's own hand that holds the dagger.

4. Will
Will. The will to, I presume, for what use is will alone. The will to have, to win, to possess. Very well, but I wonder what use it is to proclaim its importance. Those who have will, will need no such exhortation. Those who have not, shall indeed be the lawful prey of those who have. To put it more amusingly, how shall those who have not will, will themselves to have will? With whose will shall they will it?

Let the unwilled weak therefore perish, for one cannot be a will for another.

5. Wrath
Anger is our most potent weapon, and our most terrible foe. I do not suggest revenge taken in the heat, nor violence without contemplation. Wrath may make us unwise, unwilled, and, indeed, even motivate us to sacrifice our own goals and possessions. Better, better by far perhaps, is the slow grudge, the nurtured hate, and the bitterness of cradled offense, which gives one will to malice and violence, urges one to greater efforts, and becomes stamina in the time of testing. Out of all our emotions, hate endures. Find what one hates, become hate to it, and one will endure.

This may be useless. Nonetheless, I enjoyed writing it. I do hope it causes some offense, and, perhaps for one or two, a response in a more thoughtful vein. In any case, I am made happy by it, so I care naught more.

Oh please.

The Kingdom has stood firm against the likes of you since its independence.

We faced the retributive might of the Empire in our infancy, and came out all the stronger for it.

Our economy grows, our technology progresses, and our people thrive.


You?

Nothing but a bunch of pathetic vultures hiding out in western Khanid picking the bones of corpses.

You would do well to let up on these attempts at garnering so much attention, lest the Kingdom stir and do to you cultists what we did the last time we noticed you. And this time, it won't be Karsoth that we go after.

What is Happiness:

To crush your enemies, to see them driver before you. To destroy their weapons of warfare, and then to finally see them exterminated.

I'm no theologian, so I'm not completely sure. But as far as the little I know about heresies, Sani Sabik are some sort of Blood Raiders.

Other way around, actually. All Blood Raiders are Sani Sabik, but not all Sani Sabik are Blood Raiders.

I look forward to seeing the sanguine tears of the faithless, cowardly Kingdom fall down the cheeks of the fat, impotent Khanid and their kin.

Goodness, that was overly dramatic. Let me put it simply. The Khanid Kingdom is a bloated pig and the Blood Raiders are the butchers.