Northward to Ionel

December 27th, 5008

I pen this entry to my journal as we plod across the cold and fairly barren expanses of the Northern Sea. It's a frigid pace, devoid of warmth and light for the most of the year. We are traveling far out to sea as to avoid detection by the more shore-bound ships.

I am thankful that I do not sail on the waters below. I admit that despite my airship and my piloting acumen that I have little love for sailing. The thought of the pitching and heaving even in the smoothest of seas is enough to set my bowels to a slow roil. My father loved the sea. I love the air. Perhaps my children will enjoy the void.

My destination today is the city of Ionel. Little is known of this area, beyond basic geography. My cursory investigations revealed little though Alane Takadar does not council against the trip. As a native Vargan and my Councilor of Vargan Affairs, she is far more reliable in these matters than my own research, which is shallow at best.

As I travel this cold air, I watch from my command-chair, ice form on the nose of the Tsurin-Kaze. I wonder to myself how we have been here for so long and yet know so very little about the Vargan people. I of course, have an answer for this question and it is one that sits not well on my heart.

Each house, the church and the guilds, have long put personal gain above that of the Empire or even mutual gain. For fifteen some years, the great five have warred in the little land of the Lower Santiem. The greatest gains have come from cooperation, when Hazat worked with Al Malik, when Guilders with the Hawkwood. How can it be that Alvaro was such a great leader of men, and yet, took so little?

The answer is again in my heart, and I like it not. He was a great speaker, a great man who did things, but not a man who thought much about his actions. This, he left to his women and his women used him for all that he was worth. The Mantis has very much enjoyed the fruits of the labor of the Claw.

As of recent, the gains that could have been made have been stymied the Lord Protector, Auda Abu Iskander III. His personal politics are such that he plays divide and conquer with the houses, not committing until he must and then only so much as to meet his requirements. Rewards from him for service are far between and wrapped suchly in thorns that only if you take them in the way he wants, do they offer any joy.

Politics is the act of self-consumption, the Oroborus, always trying to gain ground on its enemy, never realizing that it destroys only itself. Vargo seems doomed at times, to short sighted leaders who have no love for the planet they rule, seeing it as only a patch of dirt upon which to pontificate or base power, not as a world that is noble in its own right, not as a home.

Home is a funny word. I used to miss home. Holy Terra. When I was a man on Pandemonium or Hira, I wanted nothing more than to go -home-. To see my siblings and feel my mothers arms. Near the end of my time on Pandemonium, as I rested (If one could ever call such a thing 'rest') in the med-tank of the Engineers, my skin sloughing away after an encounter with the wrong end of a flame gun, I came to the realization that home is a misnomer. I could no more go back home than I could spontaneously regrow my skin. This realization, that there was no home to go back to, was freeing.

Home is where I make it. I drew my line on Pandemonium, and from there my fortunes all turned upward. I draw my line in the sand now on Vargo. This is my home and I shall not return to Holy Terra. I will of course, accept my lands there as they will further my ability to settle and control this land, but Vargo is my home. Its people are my people. Its rivers will be my blood and its mountains, my bones.

Northward, to Ionel I go in that plan. Taking in war what should be joined in diplomacy is a poor waste of soldiers coin better spent to barter for Kurgan Blood.

Devante Castillo.

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Devante