Gwyneplaine, The Just sits cross-legged on the deck of a military ship, his flaming sword Dragontongue sheathed within its glowing scabbard. He chars the broken chip of a torch on the metal's surface, smudging and grinding the gnarled branch until it smokes and softens into something serviceable enough to write with and opens a book. His fingers leave soot shadows on pages already filled as he turns to a blank one and begins to write as the goblin crew scrambles about under the direction of Gunther, his friend and by proximity the chief Hob in the area.

Hello, old friend, it has been an age since I have added to you with my hands. I find myself lost inside my own head, and grow tired of dragging my boots through the weary desert of my thoughts, so now I speak to you. My prayers were answered today, but where I thought I would find relief and hope, the realization brought me only dread. My request was petty, heartless and in jest, yet it was granted. No one else saw the miracle, only myself, a force like a crimson hand parted the fall of debris over my head, leaving me untouched while a city was leveled not five feet away.

 Doubt gnaws at my heart.
 My mother, if she is real and alive, would tell me to stay steadfast and be assured my goals are just and I believe this still.

 The light of the portal on the water is beautiful, I can see all the colors of the great wheel glistening on the surface, it is as if we're traveling down the leprechaun's arch.

 I feel more awake, more present and alive each passing day, though I get little sleep and behind my eyes I feel a dry, itching pain. Awake is not the word, restless perhaps, there is a current in my bones which animates me and I know its name.

 Bane, he visits me in my dreams both with eyes open and closed. At night I sit upon a golden throne, wreathed in impenetrable armor of ivory, Dragontongue and the scythe are at my side. Before me stretches an endless field of bodies and an equally endless army who bare my banner. My bannerets chant, they praise me and my god as equals and in the thunder of their cheers and the brilliance of the golden dawn I almost cannot see the scarlet which mixes with weapon oil in the muck of war beneath their feet. The scene shifts as blood becomes grass and bodies tilled dirt, warriors no longer bound in armor but the clothes of farmers and scholars. Children play through fields of cattails which moments ago, though my body in my mind has grown wrinkled with age, were spears in the backs of my fallen foes. I do not sit upon a throne, nor am I guarded by soldiers or demons. I sit in the field building toys and tools with my hands, laughing, growing old until I am too comfortable to rise from my bed any longer for nothing worries me and my people do not need me anymore.

 This is the future I so desperately desire, one where the farmer need not surrender his eldest children to the march of wars, illnesses, or the crushing poverty a single bad harvest can bring. A future where I am not remembered as Gwyn The King, The Butcher, The Prisoner or The Saint, but simply as the old and kind, the one who would've made his people laugh and be at ease, protected them with strong, warm homes and full bellies.

But this is not how I wanted to achieve that future. Day by day my head grows heavy, and I've begun to realize that it is not the weight of my goals but the chain around my neck which holds me down. I worked the head of a bolt out of my cell wall and pounded it flat, through the course of days I etched the black hand and sun into the surface with the broken tip. Bane, a shackle which only grants me power when it serves to push his agenda onward. I am fed power like nutrients to beef cattle.

 Then there is Voide, with no god to pray to, no friends or family left who has shared her story and her heart's poem with me, "Not just a better life, but life better. . ." She is more righteous than I, no doubt, I do not know entirely what it is that drives her onward still, but what was I before Bane? An urchin, someone else's design, a prisoner waiting to starve already emaciated inside, apathetic
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The air stings my eyes and lips, I can tell by the look on my companion's faces and the tightness of my skin that the burn has not healed entirely. It doesn't matter, vanity to those that can afford it, I suspect I will lose much more in the coming days than a few patches of skin, I am already unsightly as it is, I know.

I walk now without the protection of my god, of Bane, I've let that piece of prison scrimshaw go to the bottom of the river, may the current smooth away any sign of what it was before. I do not deceive myself as free, or above the temptation of power for even now I feel the scythe at my side and something burning in the back of my neck, something I have chosen to forget, a convenience should I need it still stowed away. The fist, the scythe, I can neither use them or be rid of them until I find a way to destroy both and what should I do if I find such a way, yet be stopped by an obstacle I cannot tackle on my own?

I only hope my conscience wins over.

I am a member of The Order now, one of two who are still true, I know no other that still lives by the code besides Voide. I will wear this ring around my neck as a testament to my change, not as a shackle, but a tiny spark of hope to keep me warm against my own cynicism.

If I die before the end of our journey before I can see that golden dawn, I hope that it is in the pursuit of equity, I hope that at the very least I shall die as myself, my true self, the one that these friends I have made shall remember fondly, and in remembrance keep their flames alive when the wind threatens to leave naught but embers.

I am both pyre and bonfire, which will I be remembered as?