22-11-YC123

Doctor Etinger tells me I have a mental health condition that is the cause of my unstable moods and propensity to emotional reactions.  Yet he assures me I am still quite sane and have a strong grip on reality, at least for the most part.  I can only assume, therefore, that I am neither suffering delirium nor some form of dissociative episode and the news that has come to me is quite true.

It is, in fact, Aldrith who has so clearly gone insane.

The sheer blind arrogance of that talentless word-hack.  He should have stuck to his angst-ridden, empty-headed doggerel rather than dare to assume himself worthy of joining the ranks of our pure-blooded nobility! And his walking incubator of a wife is barely much better.  An entire status based upon a few lucky shots.  She stains the memory of Empress Jamyl by supporting this idiocy, not to mention the sacrifice of poor, sweet Alizabeth.

Idiocy?  It is far worse than that - it is treason and betrayal of the worse kind.  To side openly with the Triglavian invaders!  If he were capable of feeling shame he would die from it, and it would do him well to do so, before a worse fate comes.  To insult the losses, the deaths, of countless Imperial subjects like that, and all for what?  A personal vendetta against Elkin?  I have no love for her, but her actions pale in comparison to this!  This madness makes even Nauplius look sane - at least he actually acknowledges who the enemy are.

How dare he, that waste of flesh, try to dictate what is and is not treason!  Does he presume himself higher than even Empress Catiz now?  I pray Lord Sarum sees sense and casts the Newelles out before they do irreparable damage to His Lordship's reputation.  What if people begin to think that those jumped-up petty bourgeois represent all of Lord Sarum's vassals?  What then?  They most certain do not!  My family has ever been loyal to the Sarum Family, has never seen conflict between that loyalty and the Throne.  This is what happens when peasants are elevated to the status of nobles, a status they simply do not have the breeding for.  There is only one meaning of breeding they seem to understand.  She seems to do nothing but.

Oh, but their poor children!  What does the future hold for them now?  Damned through the insanity of their parents.  If Arline is still their guardian, she could do no harm by spiriting them all away to a safer place, a family of proven and unwavering loyalty to the Empire.  I would honestly take them myself, and were Lord Sarum to order it so, I would not hesitate.  I have a mind to petition His Lordship, though I cannot imagine he even knows who we are.  We do not preen and bray in order to be noticed by our betters, quiet and content service is our way.

After all that bitter, cynical, paranoid talk of betrayal by others, he now does this.  Yet now I think of it, it was always how people had betrayed him, not the Empire, not the Empress.  Always him.  The warning signs were there then, the conceit, the arrogance.  Say what one may about Elkin, and about the other one - I forget her name - but at least they acted in accordance with a personal, identifiable principle, however mistaken, rather than a selfish vendetta placed higher than loyalty and duty, even to God.

Just another enemy to be crushed, another foe of God and Empire to be vanquished and then forgotten like so much dust in the cosmos.