From the days before Old Seleucar, Cyrene has always been a state that sought peace and safety from the barbarous lowlands. To attain that peace, it reared rough men and women to enforce its security through means of martial art and decisive action; from Osric to the Iron Lion, men and women whose talents did not lie in creative outlets or social graces, but in securing the future through violence so that those other, more cultured talents might flourish. I was raised one of these.

After three centuries holding the passes, I see now that Cyrene had indeed achieved its greatest hope: an existence without war. It has become a mountain sanctuary open to all and accosted by few. A mercantile and artistic capital of the world, at long last the utopia we dreamed of. Let the historians write that your golden age dawned in this era.

But with the dawn of peace comes dusk for the soldier. Ill-fitted for civilian life, I had continued to expound my rigid ethics and martial perspectives in a society where they had become ever more obsolete, to my own detriment and, perhaps, to the detriment of my nation. For that, I recognize my error. In redress, I gladly accept my banishment to the lowlands where men like myself belong, and leave Cyrene to those who have built and inherited this Pax Cyrenacia. Let Cyrene's golden age never end, and let there be no bad blood between us.

Old soldiers never die, I have heard said, they just fade away.

Sir Aerek LastGoodbye-Kelworan Ancyrion
Knight of the Cerulean Spire, emeritus
Shieldlord, retired
Dominus Lumeni, superannuated


Penned by my hand on the 22nd of Miraman, in the year 727 AF.