The Sins of Bendir Dale

We all know about the little hollowed patch that houses a little village in the woods. One that likes to call itself an Earthkin settlement among the phantom of an alliance that hardly exists.

They speak of kinship as though it were sacred, yet bleed and yearn to spread both whisper and blatantly enamoured disregard for one another that spreads so far as disrespecting and blaming their own dead for their refusal to see how evil their own minds are. They sow doubt, claiming that they are a community that supports both kin and kith yet will turn neighbors into suspects, and friends into enemies. They argue over laws they have no grasp over and how granting mercy to the condemned descends them into weakness, while insisting that killing and bloodshed is a noble and kind act over anything else.

Well, I will tell you all this as my time has come to an end in Bendir Dale. Their own bigotry and narcissism is what allowed their Mayor and Hawk to die. It is what scared off Merelen Greenhill from her position as Head Alderkin during their time of need. It wasn?t just me, but the help of Amenia's ridiculous ineptitude as a "friend" of the Dale, Roswen's lust for power and desire to see Mayor Alwin out of her way, Merelen's complacency, the Elders' old age and old ideals, the arrogance of hin new and old, that saw all of this come to a spectacular and frankly, disgusting conclusion. All I had to do was give it a direction, and you eagerly followed your roles, like children chasing a story they were too proud to question each obvious sign sitting out before you.

Convenient isn't it, how the dead cannot argue when you cast blame on the people who died for your community. Convenient how it is that some of you will continue to insist that it was Mayor Alwin who is to blame for this all when YOU all are the ones that cling so desperately to a Bendir that cannot exist! You, Fenric, Amenia, Riam and others were the ones that tried first to reshape the deaths of your Alwin and Hawk Cailan, twisting them into the ones for blame over a simple branding?! Aelarion did that himself, but even then did you honestly believe that the Shy'alva are petty enough to come for Amenia just for saving them a little coin in the exchange? And when that was no longer convenient to the story you nearly cast out Amenia and Roswen who, to my surprise did indeed have intention to see the Mayor dead or buried under Bendir for one of you to call on elections. It's ludicrous. I barely had to lift a finger and Bendir creates its own villains, dancing around one another with fingers pointing at each other.

Let's not forget how blind loyalty and a love to accept any kin became your ultimate weakness. You wear these values of a community like a badge, but it's nothing more than arrogance dressed as vindictive and self-serving virtue. You believed in your friends not because they earned it, but because it spared you the discomfort of doubt, even when your Hawk died. Not even a question to the fact that I was the only other one present to have even written that report and steer your eyes after the Underdark like you always do. You took only my word for it and every answer given as something true. I could sit there, twiddling my thumbs as this show played out in front of me, further engraining how utterly cynical and ruined you Children all are. Even when the signs were there, Mayor Alwin's home was entered without so much as a forced entry. You didn't question the very few who could access his cottage, or pass along its key to see him dead. Didn't bother to question the very person that delivered the note to the board and claimed it was left there.

And those deaths, the Mayor and your Hawk? ESPECIALLY the Mayor. Although tragic, and abrupt you turned them into opportunities before the earth had even settled over their graves. Roswen?s hunger for power lurching with her ambition to take hold of Bendir Dale as her chance landed on her lap? The very opportunity she had been waiting for since he was elected and she was denied Head Alderkin. It wasn't an act of nobility, duty or sacrifice. She chose to hide away her intentions, to force an election after she watched Bendir fall. The largest hypocrite of them all, that wished to claim and run a community but was too petty to work with someone else. It was acted on by pure unfiltered greed and desire just as her Prince of Pleasures holds her chain.

You like to think yourselves children of Yondalla. Guardians of hearth and home. Keepers of quiet strength and unmoving existence, but there is nothing of her spirit in Bendir. Not in the suspicion you have nurtured, not in the ease with which you try to cast aside your own, letting anyone in through your door and certainly not in the way you step over the fallen to grasp at what they left behind.

I saw what you were long before you did. Bendir is just a community that can't tell a monster from a saint. That speaks of protection but devours itself from within. That calls betrayal unthinkable, right up until it comes biting them on the nose.

Is Bendir hopeless? No, not quite. Hopeless implies they never had a chance at salvation. But when one chose to save his own face over the Earthkin he swore to protect,he chose instead to laugh behind bars, watching his own "friend" forced to drink of a vampire's blood while the other had their own hand sawed off. The largest and truest sense of hypocrisy on this isle is in Bendir and these Hawk'in, who chase their own reputation while letting friends die and be tortured in front of their own eyes. What asinine thinking from a place that calls Earthkin, kin but laughs while their people are tortured in front of them? What inane thought crosses your minds that when push comes, you choose to abstain and keep quiet as you watch?!?

Remember, Bendir will let you die. Whether you are a Paladin of the Children or not, a neighbor, a so-called friend, or defender, Bendir will abandon you and the Earthkin Alliance just to save face and ignore anyone's plight. Bendir is nothing but a joke. And that, is the cruelest truth of all.

You never even needed me to show you how ruined and worthless this place is. Even if you try to discount this, remember that this was Bendir's fault and even your histories won't absolve you of your own evils.

The only evil I've done, is offer some of you the purest form of salvation. And that was mercy!

Stamped at the bottom of the page is a red raven perched over a torn emblem of pierced, feminine lips.

       Day 23, Month 5 (Mirtul), 189 AR
       Finch Rimedance