In the name of Truth and Beauty, as instantiated in the completed Joy of the Shining Garden, having reached the perfection of attainment in the 4006th year since the Ascension of Kadham: ENDI ARUSION, the Kvithlin Qainion of the perfectly reflected fragment of divinity called Raikoth sends the shadow of a thought of the Shining Garden forth into expression in the worlds below:
I. Results of investigation on inter-ducal exportation of proprietary empathogens
Seven weeks ago, the Angel of Inference granted a petition by the Chisu Atsara Aekophan company in the outskirts of Echo to export pharmaceutical products to Shirekeep. CAA had previously been a supplier primarily to the Raikolin military and associated loyal Elwynnese units.
These products included the empathogenic drug qainaktara, a phenethylamine compound that causes a deep and abiding feeling of love for all living things. By the terms of the Thousand Years' Hate, Raikolin are forbidden to trade any goods across the Elwynnese border with the exception of humanitarian supplies for any West Elw impoverished or risking starvation because of the destructive and ill-advised policies of the Eliria government. Qainaktara was determined not to fall under this exception.
However, these laws are effective only at the Ducal level, and the other four Duchies of Shireroth as well as the Imperial County have much looser restrictions on cross-border trade. Therefore it was understood that allowing export to Shirekeep would no doubt result in resale and export to lands further abroad, inevitably including Eliria and associated rebel territories.
Nevertheless, the Angel decided to allow the export of these drugs, including qainaktara, after assuring Itself that they were of minimal risk. Although their formulation is not public, it would not grant the Elirian government significant advantage to learn the secrets of their manufacture, and the level of theophany afforded by normal doses is small enough that even spiritually unprepared Western Elw should be capable of handling and integrating the resulting divine contact without suffering psychotic breaks.
An internal investigation under Nore Tolrhutin, High Priest of Truth for the Echo-Ketsire Diocese, determined that Chisu Atsara Aekophan acted properly in selling 3.3 kilograms of qainaktara to its partner Amara Pharmaceuticals Shirekeep, and that Amara Pharmaceuticals Shirekeep and its business partners are not obliged to follow Raikothin laws prohibiting export of goods across the Elwynnese border.
II. Condemnation of the Elirian war on drugs
According to statistics gathered by the Vankarha Sui Mek, 481,000 Elw, Amokolians, and Hurmudans are in Elirian prisons, often in inhumane conditions, because they believed they had the right to their own bodies. These people's crimes include not only the use of Raikothin empathogenic and entheogenic drugs as part of peaceful religious and spiritual seeking, but the use of cannabis smuggled in from Batavia and inexpensive pain medication imported from Ashkenatza by invalids unwilling to pay the marked up prices charged by cutthroat Elwynnese suppliers.
News reports taken from the Apollo Fireball V, the Eliria Tribune, and other sources reveal that the policies used to make these arrests are often brutal, including breaking into people's houses without warrants, shooting family dogs that were considered a "threat" by police personnel, and splitting up entire families if a breadwinner is believed to have used psychoactive substances. Entire areas of the Elwynnese border have become no-man's-lands, dotted with barbed-wire fences and Cudgellers, in a vain attempt to restrict the flow of these substances.
Less directly, the war has set back mental health treatment in Elwynn. Psychiatrists complain that they are unable to prescribe effective medications because they have been scheduled by the Elirian government and either banned completely or fenced behind so many restrictions, fees, and bureaucratic hoops that they are unavailable to all but the wealthiest patients. Researchers talk of the government denying them permission to work with chemicals known to be effective against depression and psychosis because of the tiny possibility that they might have abuse potential. As a result, countless Elw live with an unnecessary burden of mental illness that could be effectively treated in more liberal regimes.
A well-educated and well-adjusted population has nothing to fear from freedom, and that includes the freedom to use psychoactive substances. It is only when people are consistently trained to be irrational and make poor choices that they abuse drugs; it is only when their lives are hopeless that they become fixated on a cheap euphoria; it is only when their entire society is a prison that they become escapist. Raikoth has offered countless times throughout history to help improve Elw society to the point where the elites need no longer fear the choices of their own populace. Each time, Elwynn has refused, and chosen to instead try to hide the decrepitude of their entire way of life by violently persecuting the drugs that would help expose it.
Elwynn does not fear the health effects of drugs, or the addictiveness of drugs. Some of its leading citizens drink alcohol, a drug far more dangerous and addictive than anything produced in Raikothin factories. They fear the fault lines in their society being made clear; they fear enlightenment itself. Qainaktara is not a brainwashing drug. It is an empathogen that causes one to feel a deep kinship with the entire universe. Only in a country based on chauvinism and militarism would this be seen as a threat; only when one has strayed very far indeed does spreading love become an act of war.
III. Establishment of six new special Vankarhal Sui Mek posts in border cities.
This incident has put into sharp relief two long-term trends. First, that there is a growing desire in rebel-held Elwynnese territories for safe and effective medications that allow both the treatment of psychiatric disease and the realization of full psychospiritual potential. Second, that the repressive Elwynnese government remains completely deaf to this desire, forcing people to rely on unsafe alternatives or risk prison or execution trying to smuggle safer medications in from Raikoth, Batavia, Shireroth, or elsewhere. This is a human rights issue.
Therefore, the Vankarha Sui Mek is directed to set up six new posts in easily accessible sites along the Elwynnese border; one in South Tielion Loki, one just south of Islus, one in Kingsgate, one in Echo just across the river from Eliria, one in Elesmari, and one in Hyfrost. These sites are to offer free psychoactive medications under the supervision of trained priests to any West Elw who can access them, along with training in their use. They will also offer samples of such medications to those Western Elw who request them, and although of course we cannot condone taking those samples back with them across the border in contravention of any West Elw laws the Vankarha Sui Mek will not be responsible if certain West Elw citizens choose to do so.
The VSM will continue its commitment to not providing any dangerous medications or any substances that provide revelation at a spiritual level greater than its clients are able to integrate and accept.
IV. Borders and free movement of people
The Shining Garden observes with confusion the recent debate among rebel leadership in Eliria about the right for East Elw citizens to be granted West Elw citizenship upon crossing the borders.
It is our understanding that the border is generally free and open from both sides, although we understand it has been closed by the order of Dragonskeep for the duration of the current crisis. It is also our understanding that both sides already have a policy of accepting defections from the other. We are unclear on what change the new legislation entails.
We do, however, notice the rebels' attempt to break the Articles of Peace signed by their wiser ancestors in the days of Ometeotl by claiming the Western Elwynnese territories to which they previously forsook all claim. Remember the words of Tanri Asurion: "Accursed is the oathbreaker, for he is like a frost that saps away all trust and bonds of friendship."
V. On the threatened end to eight hundred years of peace.
In the beginning of the fifth millennium ASC, Ometeotl the Great and the founding fathers of the Elirian rebellion signed a treaty ending fifty years of bloody civil war. At the time, hopes were slim. Eliria was tottering on the edge of total destruction after a terrorist attack by Babkhan-associated terrorist groups destroyed much of their national infrastructure. East Elwynn was shell-shocked and so devastated that the Raikothin military was forced to come in and restore order. The best either side hoped from the treaty was a brief breather to bury the dead, treat the wounds of the living, and offer their children a brief taste of what peace was like before the inevitable continuation of the struggle.
Yet despite the pessimism, the Ometeotl Treaty remained in effect eight hundred years. They have not been years of friendship. Raikoth imposed punitive sanctions on East Elwynn, Duke Alaion instituted a massive military buildup, and West Elwynn, for their part, tried to frame the East for the death of Prince Daniel, nearly precipitating a new war. Yet though they were not years of friendship, they were years of peace. We kept our hatred, but no young people had to die for it; no parents had to suffer the loss of their children. It has remained the guiding principle of Raikoth's foreign policy for eight hundred years that none of them ever will.
And so we have placed sanctions upon you, we have spoken against you in the Kaiser's court, we have given money to those of your religions that please us, we have sent the Vankarha Sui Mek to teach you the kelanth mri that binds us all together, but never once in eight hundred years have turned upon you in violence.
Now those eight hundred years of peace have been broken, and not by our hand. Three citizens of Echo, workers in a Chisu Atsara Aekophan factory, have been killed by Elirian artillery fire. The land screams in terror as their blood sinks into the soil, remembering how many bodies it was once forced to bear long before their proper hour.
We are happy here in the Shining Garden. We do not fear death, but neither do we yearn for it. If we are to die, we would rather die joyous and free among the high icy mountains than by a rusty cudgel in the dust-filled plains of the south. We believe that there are many in Eliria who feel as we do. Maybe some have taken the qainaktara and felt the endless love of the world. Maybe others are not yet ready to leave their families and homes.
Though the Minister of Kinetics is so in love with his own power that he has unilaterally broken eight hundred years of peace without even a by-your-leave to the Elirian Senate, we hope that we have some brothers to the south who have no more desire to see the flowers of our people mowed down like grass than we.
Do not mistake our restraint for weakness. We have tens of thousands of warrior-monks, hundreds of Niphiltiyyin and Star Nebula aircraft, the two unsinkable Ice-Ships, and new machinery of war so terrible the South has never before seen its like. But for now, we have not deployed it. The Duke in Dragonskeep has sounded the call to attack, but for now the Paladins restrain themselves.
I offer to travel alone and unarmed to meet the Elirian leaders at any place of their choosing, to negotiate a solution to this crisis before the dark forces of destruction they have unleashed this day consume us all.
By my hand as the avatar of the egregore of the Shining Garden,
ENDI ARUSION