Role

Chapter 3

Within a day of my arrival in the Holy Grove I knew the awful truth. Wretched
civilization had creeped its awful tendrils into everything pure and right. I
had never known of a thing called a "city" before that day. I knew not stones
could be raped and abused into blocks that could then be stacked so high as
to block the sun to the creatures below. I didn't know that green things
could be so completely obliterated as to allow for mile after mile of
man-made abominations. I didn't think a creature could be so cruel as to
murder entire forest's of trees just to build unnecessarily large buildings.

These cities were not alone in their aberration. Cities were connected by
long strips of desecrated ground called "roads". And along these roads were
an unending litany of villages, farms, fortresses and the transgressive
creations of men.

The observance of all that had been lost since my people's hooves last trod
the lands evoked the ancestral rage of my centaur antecedence. Though naked,
alone and frail by comparison to the atrocities before me, I resolved to
wholly give whatever I was to the restoration of Thar-Eris.

Though angered, I also found myself overtaken by sorrow for a more insidious
danger. The loss of self-reliance. Man in his building had insulated himself
from the truth of the world. No longer did he need to hunt or gather to eat
himself into obesity. He needn't know which face of a mountain to make a
camp, or where to place his bed to remain safe from beast and element as he
slept. For though he would never know the danger of the wilds, he would also
never know the freedom self-reliance brings. He interned himself in the
illusion of safety.

I stand in opposition to all that which harms Thar-Eris and inhibits man's
reliance upon himself. Those I would call brother and ally are within the
Refuge, and those without are a blight upon the land I shall not suffer. My
enemies are not just those who seek the destruction of the natural world, but
any who further civilization's reach and steal from men their self-reliance
by living in villages, fortresses, camps or any unnatural dwelling. They
shall know the awful wrath of the Ancient's centaur.