To Arch-Inquisitor Raphael Melchizedek,

No doubt you are wondering about my most recent actions. I have always tried to serve on the side of the law whenever I could, only opting to go independent when I knew that hesitation or too much public attention could make matters worse. No doubt you are being told a fanatical story about how I assaulted two hired guards and set loose a 'dangerous spirit-possessed being' upon Sinai.

To those accusations I can only say this, have I done anything to ever indicate that my loyalties ever contradicted those of the Temple? I have served, and sacrificed a great deal for this country, only to find myself beaten and shamed with every homecoming from a battle, yet I have still tried to serve as best as I could. You know me well enough that if I wished to cause bodily harm I could have quite easily, but there was not a single casualty that night and I took a grave injury myself in order to avoid it.

The girl in question is reported as a spirit possessed entity. This is not the case at all, and you can verify my story through any guards that have touched her or seen her. It is a documented fact that whenever a spirit inhabits a living being for too long the spirit will take over and eventually kill the body. The more powerful spirits can animate the body, but sensitive noses will still smell the stench of decay from the animated corpse, and it will still give obvious signs that it is nothing more than a flesh-puppet having its strings pulled. If this were not the case, do you not think that there would be more reports of creatures such as the Srinala around Sinai? There are many 'spirits' who would slay millions if they could only have a living body of their own, and none have ever succeeded, not in the entire history of Sinai. Amenlichtli has come the closest, but she herself is only half-alive.

The truth of the matter is that Srinala was raised to consciousness and inadvertently linked to some grand high scheme of the High Princess of Babel. Her very birth was steeped in magic, as she was probably forced into a comatose state, her mind left dreaming and never able to wake, from the point of birth. She was raised partially from this state through an accident of sorts, and then fully pulled from it when the High Princess' ritual ended.

Srinala is not a spirit possessed being. She is no more such than a broken limb held together by life magic could be considered spirit possessed.

I find the actions of the Collegia reprehensible, and those of Mage Faust even more so. He was quite aware that Srinala was more than a ghost inhabiting a body, but refused to see her as anything more than a loaded pistol or a monster.

She is a child, Arch-Inquisitor, one who was forced to dream the dreams of others throughout her life, and then was finally awoken from her nightmares. She has harmed nobody, and the threat of such has never so much as crossed her lips.

And now, despite the fact that I stand by my actions, I am a criminal in your eyes. Tell me, Arch-Inquisitor… could a Knight Templar hope to get a fair trial in the Temple? Could the man who defended Rephidim against the Babelite Plaguebringers, the man sent out to be murdered on the battlefields during the war, the man who saved several noble families when Faraon made his escape and tried to make the Temple look like murderers get a fair trial right now?

I had temporarily relieved myself of my position as a Champion because I felt I was being unfairly angry at the Temple. That the fact that Faraon was gone would mean that order would prevail and the corruption would lessen and I could slowly find my peace. Instead I find that the men who served and gave their lives are being stripped and severed like an unwanted limb, and I am forced to dishonor myself by revealing my identity out of my uniform in order to save the life of a child that you arrested because of the ravings of a supposedly 'neutral' mage who should not even have any business poking into Rephidim or Babelite affairs.

The mages did nothing while Babel and Nagai attacked us for years, they did nothing while good soldiers bled and died… and now I am to believe that they took this child out of concern for the country? For patriotism? What of the cries of neutrality? What of the claims that any who took sides would be expelled?

I fervently pray that whatever blindness has afflicted the Temple has also not fallen upon your eyes, Arch-Inquisitor. But until then I have no other choice than to go into hiding, lest I find myself used as a weapon to shame my brothers. I would like nothing more than to clear my name and finally come to be at peace with my anger towards the Temple, but that goal slips farther and farther away the harder I try to grasp for it.

If you have any pull, or any influence at all, I would like to request that you use it to look deeper into this matter. The last time people minded their own business a dragon was left in control of the Temple. Although I no longer serve you, I am still a Rephidim citizen and I still care for my country. I would not wish it to fall into the hands of yet another creature.

Respectfully,
Shadow

(There are a few scribbled wards scrawled across the paper, sigils to keep scrying mages from being able to track where the message originated)