Dema has always mistaken control for permanence. We tell ourselves that what we maintain cannot be lost, that order, once enforced, becomes something unbreakable. That is a lie we have repeated long enough to believe. You have all seen the fractures. The failures we quietly rename as “corrections.” The instability we refuse to acknowledge. We endure, yes, but endurance is not the same as strength. We learned that too late. Corpsebearer understood it before any of us. Not because he was compassionate, or wise in any conventional sense, but because he never pretended Dema was stable. He carried what the rest of us avoided, and because of that, things held together. Now they do not. His absence is not symbolic. It is structural. And it is already costing us more than you are willing to admit. So I will not wait for further deterioration disguised as patience. I am leaving Dema. This is not abandonment. It is correction in its most necessary form. There is a place beyond our walls, one we have attempted to erase through silence and distortion. You know its name, even if you pretend not to. Voldsoy. It does not belong to us. It does not recognize our authority, and it will not yield easily. But it holds something we do not have, something we cannot fabricate through ritual or discipline. Power. Not the kind we assign or enforce, but something older. Something that does not require belief to function. The Ned antlers are real. They are not relics or symbols. They are a conduit, one capable of reaching beyond the boundary we have treated as final. With them, the separation between what is gone and what remains can be… altered. That is their purpose. That is why I am going. I will retrieve the antlers and return them to Dema. I will use them as they were intended to be used, not as decoration, not as myth, but as a tool. And when I do, what we lost will not remain lost. Corpsebearer will return. Not as memory. Not as influence. As something real. Something present. Something that can restore what has already begun to collapse in his absence. You may question this. You may fear it. That is expected. But understand this clearly: Dema does not survive by waiting for stability to return. It survives because we are willing to create it, no matter the cost. I am willing. - Clancy