Dedication - Cleric
Rune Grey
starstrike@softhome.net

*Spoiler Note: This work contains moderately extensive spoilers for the ending of Vagrant Story. Please read at your own risk!*

Your mind is an open book to me. Your thoughts and dreams are as a skein of yarn for me to manipulate, to alter the pattern of your being to fit my needs. If you can not keep that which is most precious from my grasp, how do you think you will be able to protect that frail shell that you call your 'life'?

Show me your soul... because I will have it in the end. Such wonderful darkness, shadows in what is believed to be the purest heart in the land. Is this the power of your Īgod'? Your Īreligion'? You accuse me of twisting men's souls, when you have managed to do just the same on a scale that I can only dream of.

And in the end, it is still not enough for you. Will all of the temporal power that you have managed to accumulate over the years, you are willing to risk everything to gain what is mine.

The Dark is a living force, a nightmare given form by the willing sacrifice of thousands of souls. And like any living thing, it struggles to survive. It moves. It feeds. It hunts... Do you think that it will not move to protect itself? Do you think that it will simply bow down to you, and submit to your every whim? If you believe that, then you are truly the mad one...

The Dark will submit to no man... indeed, it is for human souls that it hungers. It is by the very power that is its nature that it hunts, drawing in the arrogant, the proud, and the righteous. No man who desires to control the Dark may ever master it. A lesson that

Guildenstein and Grissom will not soon forget, when their souls wander the blasted streets of Le Monde for eternity...

The only coin that the Dark will accept is sacrifice... willing sacrifice of that which is most valuable to you. It is to the Dark that

I have given both of my arms. It is to the Dark that I have surrendered my body. It is to the Dark that I have given my family... my father. My mother. My dear brother...

The Blood Sin upon my back is as much a mark of possession as it is a symbol of my power. One must accept the Rood Inverse willingly in order to master the Dark, as I have done. As my father, the Duke, did before me... but in the end, I must pass it to another. For as long as I serve as a host for the Dark, it sustains me. Instead of the half death that the souls of the Dark must endure, I possess true immortality. And for this 'gift', I will pay a higher price than any other man who serves the Dark...

What was once a quest for truth, a way for me to avoid the control that the church had so violently thrust upon my family centuries ago, has become a guardianship that has consumed my existence. After so many years of contact with the Dark, I will be consumed in death just as my Titans are. I will be no more than dust upon the wind, a soul that will join with the thousands who dwell in the depths of Le Monde...

Come then, Knights. Battle against the Dark will all of your might, and know that even should you destroy my people, slaughter every last member of the Mullenkamp Cult, you will never gain the power of the Dark. My heir has already been picked, although he knows it not... but he is ready.

Tell me, Agent Riot...

How will it feel to be a God?

Author's Note: Hmmm... this one didn't seem to flow as well as Ashley's. Probably cause I kept getting interupted as I wrote it. Well, you can't have everything I suppose... in any case, this reflection is of Sydney, the enigmatic leader of the Mullenkamp Cult, and the man everyone in the game seems to want to get their hands on. I'll probably write Guildenstein's or Rosencrantz's next...