Aetolian Game News
Act I: As the Mirror Breaks
Written by: Oracle Ulo Ka'aukai
Date: Thursday, July 3rd, 2025
Addressed to: Everyone
[Maddening scribbles of eyes, countless across the posting]
HAH! You meat-things, you pious worms squirming in borrowed flesh, preaching of balance and judgement as though the scales were still held by steady hands. FOOLS! Do you not feel it? The groaning break, the snapping threads, the stench of a bargain long soured?
Listen to me! Listen to these words torn from the throat of experience, gnashing and spitting between cracked teeth: THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN DEATH. ONLY OWNERSHIP.
Your soul? Not yours. Never was. A trinket. A plaything. A bead strung upon prayerbeads clutched by a failed, forgotten, forsaken Creator. A being whose name is mud now, whose mandate was carved into the bones of this world and left to rot. Death is not an end, nor a mercy, nor a passage - it is a mandate. A sentence passed upon you from the moment you crawl gasping from the womb.
The Cycle? A charade. A rusted machine grinding on without a master, enforcing a Law no one remembers, to uphold a Design no one desires. The passing of souls? The Judgement of Dhar? HAH! A bureaucrat mandated to counting coin for a creator-king whose head lies rotting in a ditch.
And the true horror - oh, the delicious horror! - is that even now, with the Mirror cracking and the Underhalls buckling under the weight of stolen death, they still play the game. The Cycle spins, culling the a pecialafrom the muck. Not for mercy. Not for reward. No - to hoard them. Pluck them from the stream like choice fruit, lock them away in the Glade of Heroes, that gilded graveyard, that reliquary of soul and spirit, not for eternity's peace, but for a moment.
A moment. A moment no one speaks of. A moment they dare not name.
You fools. You chattel. You beasts fattened for a feast youa l never see.
The only truth in this world is this: Death comes for all. And when it does, your soul is not yours. It never was. It was stamped, claimed, chained at birth by a creator that failed you, abandoned you, and left his dogs to pick at your bones.
And you pray to them.
You beg them for mercy.
You wretches.
Mark these words. The mirror falls soon. The Glade will open. And the hoarded souls will walk, not as heroes, but as weapons.
And the world will choke on its own design.
I SEE IT. I HEAR IT IN THE SOIL. AND I LAUGH.
Ah-HAHAHAHAHA-hahaha!
Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 21st of Omeian, in the year 12 AC.