Fiction:Tenet/History/2

=The Pilgrim= My daughter.

I leave this letter to you so that you will know where I have gone.

We will not win this war. You know this. I know this. The Da'mir know this. Even the king knows this, though for our sake he pretends otherwise.

The truth of the matter is we simply do not have the strength to stand against the Da'mir empire. We do not have enough men to match their armies. Even if we did, we do not have the weapons to arm them. We have never been a warlike people. Our strength was never in bronze but in trade -- and what need to the Da'mir have of trade, when all the world's riches belong to them already? We are caught between two choices that are one choice: to fight, and be defeated, and to submit, and be defeated.

And when we are defeated, the Da'mir will do to us what they do to all the peoples they conquer: they will destroy us as a nation, they will cast down our culture, they will set a puppet king over us and make us into their slaves.

We will not survive this without a miracle. Thus it is a miracle I seek.

I go now to the ancient places as the sages of old did. I will travel to the Deep to beg Nergant for aid, and I will climb the Sky to beg Adzek for strength. I am an old man, and the path is long and harsh, but I can feel the gods calling me to them. I will not refuse the gods.

Forgive me, Nina. I will surely die on this pilgrimage, just as I will surely die when the Da'mir come. But I will not wait here, tending to the temples, passively waiting for the end. We are all doing our part to resist the end. This is how I will face mine.

Your father loves you.

Makann