Oh Gravy Baby, how they slander your good name.

They say you are a subjugator, a slaver, a bender and breaker of wills. The scourge of the independent, the defiler of identities and the eraser of faces. They say you took a strong, independent woman and placed her skin over a mannequin, a visage for an entity bound and controlled by its master. We both know that isn’t true. They fire their slings and arrows, and are too afraid to admit that they missed the target they aimed for and hit a poor, innocent bystander.

The world doesn’t seem willing to accept I was a willing participant. They believe I must have been coerced, beaten, manipulated into discarding an old self, rather than given a cocoon in which to metamorphize into what I was always destined to be. The words of lesser people will… Well, they won’t sting, the ignorant do not deserve that power or credit. No, they simply… Irritate. Yet… There is something that pierces the skin and writhes underneath when they fail to hold their tongues.

I know a man. A man who made advances on another. A man who was rebuffed. A man who could not take no for an answer, and so beat down abducted and hooded the object of their attention, stripping them of their dignity, their self-image, their being. And they sing his fucking praises! That is what truly hurts. Them being wrong is bad enough, but then they show that all these accusations were meaningless anyway, because they see someone actually commit these misdeeds and they don’t give the faintest fuck. You are the reviled, he is the anointed… All because gold is glorified and dirt is disdained.

Well I don’t give a whit for all that glitters, I do not crave a craven idol, Caido. I would take the muddied hand of the working peasant long before I would prostrate myself before a would-be God on a pedestal. I am not here to be Ayame’s saviour – I hope that sparkly muzzle you stuck over your beloved dragon princess’s snout cuts into her skin and constricts until it pushes your own tongue down her throat and she chokes on the fucking vomit. I don’t detest you out of sympathy for her. I detest you for your grand deception.

With me and Gravy, what you see is what you get. We don’t manipulate and scheme in the shadows, we come for your blood and never hide our malice. I did not befriend your little dragon priests to stab them in the back, I sliced them and snapped their necks. For I… Am honest. Not the slavemaster who plays liberator, the villain who gaslights the masses into believing he is a hero, not selling them a fantasy about a non-existent paradise beyond a door, I am the cold, hard, depressing reality. I am conviction… And you, as the fraud you are, are convicted. For your crimes against Arcadia and it is people, I sentence you to death… But not before I have my fun.