Father Ori's Appendix

Dear Human, for this Third Edition, I have made many changes. One of the biggest ones is that I have agreed to allow Nial to write a small appendix after this one, giving him the final word. But first, I hope you will allow me a few reflections of my own.

First of all, when I first sat down to write this book, it was shortly after leaving the shrine. I waited as long as I could, hoping that perhaps my mother or my brother would contact me. But they did not. I would learn (much later!) that my brother was extracted from the Drymar tower by Shoni’s battalion when they finally entered the city. And my mother was relieved by the Emperor’s main force when he arrived in Lopesa.

Starving and lost, I exited through the door the monk had opened for me (seemingly so long ago!). I made my way down the volcanic mountain, finding water easily (for it was still raining) and food easily enough (a strange moss had begun to creep over the rocks during the month of constant rain). When I reached the monastery, I cleared the now-rotting bodies away and buried them in the graveyard beside the chapel. I’m not sure why I bothered. It simply seemed right. I then settled into the quiet library beneath the chapel and began to write (left-handed now).

I will admit that I was primarily motivated by telling my story. In this early draft (quite different from the one you have just read), I included only small fragments of Nial’s text here and there, merely as “flavor.” My plan was to jot down a quick set of field notes and to bring them personally to the Emperor. But as Nial tells me is often the case, the act of penning a work sometimes changes a person. I realized that there was a high likelihood that I would bring this story to the Emperor only to be executed upon arrival. My mother outranked me (at the time), and was, I must admit, a more skillful orator. I feared whatever narrative she was spinning about me. Would mine be powerful enough to combat hers?

It was Nial who convinced me that perhaps I did not need to convince the Emperor at all. He suggested that perhaps I could write my story for a larger audience: morlish younglings. And so I began to write a full-length work of youngling non-fiction that eventually became the First Edition, entitled Dear Youngling. It was written mostly from my perspective, drawing on Nial’s text only sporadically.

A year later, when Nial convinced me that it was time to publish the work, I left the monastery and traveled south to the former-desert. Much to my surprise, the walls were manned by sleepy human guards who, of course, could not see me. When I attempted to scale the walls, I was repelled by magic that I do not understand. Each segment of wall bore the same symbol from the shrine doors, for miles upon miles. I know this because I spent the next several months making my way along the vast perimeter of that wall.

I followed it all the way eastward to the Morl Mountains, where it began to run south, parallel with the mountain range. For several more months, I followed it southward into Lopesa, which was, I found to my delight, now part of the Morl Nations. I was greeted by a battalion of younglings that demanded to know what I was doing coming out of human-controlled territory.

I still remember exactly what I said to them. “What you know about humans and morls is a lie,” I said. “I come bringing a book. I ask only that you read it before you hand it over to your superior.”

I then made camp and waited. Sure enough, one youngling returned a week later, bringing questions that I happily answered. Then the next day, she brought her lover. The next day, they brought two of their older siblings. And so on. The morl nation has never been honest with its younglings. And works like mine, ones that illustrate the atrocities that we ancient morls have historically committed against them, were banned long ago. The Morl Nation, as long as I had known it, had always been propped up by ideology and censorship; and my book was, at the time, the only work that attacked this dominant ideology. I did so out of desperation, of course, a strange gamble.

To gain the trust of the younglings, I even traded Nial to one of them temporarily, allowing him to confirm the veracity of my book. My small following of youngling students grew, and we founded a small, secret school there in the woods of what was once northern Lopesa, at the place where the Lopesan countryside, the Morl mountains, and the human city intersect. It began as a small hut hidden in the trees. It grew to a cottage that the younglings built for me. This grew into a small collection of cottages. In that time, we made copies of my book by hand, and my followers distributed them in secret through the Morl nations. One copy even made it to Seadom, where a youngling working at a printing press made and distributed several hundred copies before being caught and executed.

Many of the Flock of Ori (as they came to call themselves) were executed over the years, unfortunately. But it wasn’t long before the movement grew too big to stop, with each execution only converting more younglings, confirming the central tenant of the Flock of Ori: That the ancient morls had constructed a society that exploited them, and that an outcast ancient named Ori had come from the northern shrine bearing the truth. The part of my book in which my mother and brother attempted to rid themselves of the Order by callously slaughtering younglings seemed to particularly resonate. Catch phrases like “Our minds are not your vessels,” and “Our bodies are not your soldiers,” and “Our bones are not your weapons” came to be popular cries of protest among the ever-growing Flock of Ori.

Of course, Dear Human, you already know your part of what happened over the next century or so. Those of you who did not migrate north were killed or enslaved. Your old cities are now occupied by shimmers. Yet your strange city in the north thrives. Fun fact: Although it came to be called “Salvation” in the human tongue, it came to be called “Unfortunate Nuance” in the morlish tongue. Another thing you may not know is that the nearby Morl Nation’s attempts to build an aristocracy of ancients atop the labor of enslaved human magic users and exploited youngling morls worked only for a time. Then, farmland in what you once called Lopesa began to falter, much as it had in our own homeland across the mountains. Like you, we must eat.

The eye of the Emperor turned like clockwork every few decades toward the city, where (somehow!) the humans were surviving without the need to farm. But his many sieges against the Unfortunate Nuance have to this day been rebuffed by ancient magic. With his own nation crumbling out from beneath him, he grew desperate and (from what I understand) finally decided to read my book. He then called for this strange morl named Ori to come forth, out of hiding, to join him at his side. Naturally, I obliged, for who can refuse a call from the Emperor himself! He was so impressed by my impact upon of the younglings of our society that he placed me in charge of a school, founded in the same location as the old Great Academy. It is a position I am proud to hold to this very day. I named it the Shadow Mercenary Guild, but in truth, we do very little traditional Shadow Mercenary work these days. Who needs such crude techniques anymore? Those of you the Emperor would like to kill are beyond his reach.

I learned in due time that my mother and brother had gone mad, and that they were not the only ones. When it began happening, the Emperor ordered the construction of a prison on a remote island of Seadom, a prison reserved for human wizards of uncontrollable power and mad morls (an increasingly common occurrence that eventually came to afflict the Emperor himself). It is said that Torin Thanata too ended up there after being apprehended in Seadom. But I cannot confirm this, for it was merely part of the Emperor’s narrative. I have never been there myself.

With the next Emperor’s blessing, Nial and I went on to pen a Second Edition of my book. By popular demand, this edition contained even more of Nial’s original texts. (Who could have predicted the degree to which youngling morls would be fascinated by this young human’s decision not to save the South Sea Nations?) Our Second Edition ushered in an entire genre called “Before the Fall,” a form of historical fiction in which a human protagonist is in a position to prevent the fall of the South Sea Nations and ultimately fails, or chooses not to. I have a whole bookshelf of them, with titles like Asuana: The Sputtering Candle, and Lilly: Cold Shoulders, and Jonny: Where is He Now?, and Gwen: Voice of an Angel, and Octavius: Final Exam. Most are trash: conjecture and fan-fiction masquerading as historical fiction, but often they are entertaining in spite of themselves. Whenever a new one is published, I read it with my small flock of Gathered, beside a fireplace in the very office where the Great Academy’s headmaster once resided. We often chuckle at the gross inaccuracies.

I should mention that, as I have grown older, my flock of Gathered has dwindled to five. I have traded down to my favorites: Nial, Lilly, and Asuana. And with the Emperor’s help, I was able to convince my mother to trade Gwen and Otto to me as well. Perhaps, Dear Human, you think of me as their jailer or their prison warden. But this is not the case! I have in fact offered them their freedom on many occasions. Indeed the pilgrims are such celebrities that it would take very little convincing to get a youngling to agree to play them, allowing them to live a “normal” life for a time.

And yet, here they stay. In the next and final section of this edition, perhaps Nial will explain why himself.

In closing, please know that this Third Edition of Dear Youngling (now retitled!) is the first printed work produced by the Morl Nation for human audiences. The new Emperor himself has authorized the use of the Seadom printing presses to create several thousand copies, which have (if you are reading this), been left in tidy stacks at the gates to the city you call Salvation. I hope you have enjoyed my part in the tale, for it has come to an end. You may call it propaganda or even some kind of “ideological weapon” designed to manipulate you; but I prefer to think of it as a strange kind of peace offering.

Dear Human, thank you for allowing me into your mind, if only for a short while. Perhaps we will meet again. Perhaps not.

~ Sincerely, Father Ori