If you are reading this…then I have no more secrets. There is no more need for secrets. This, then, is my manifesto.
Even as a child as I began my long apprenticeship in the healing arts, I felt that something was wrong, that the feeble little potions I was learning to brew could ease the symptoms but never cure the cause of our pain. The more I watched my neighbors tormented by the endless, pointless conflict that seemed so far from our shores, the more that belief hardened inside my heart. I opened my practice and tried to bring hope to my neighbors, but there was none in my soul for myself. It was all just dumbshow.
Finally, when my brother Denin, or what remained of him, was sent home for burial I knew I could continue no longer. Everyone told me of sacrifice and honor but no one could tell me WHY he died…WHY we had to go on like this. With no answers, I had to do something, anything to change the endless grind. I went through the motions in this quiet little town for years, treating the odd injury and petty illness, bringing babies into this world knowing they were doomed to die badly, but my heart burned with what my simple neighbors would call treason….or worse, and the flames just kept getting higher. Finally I had just reached the point that I could turn away from what I knew deep inside no longer, I could not pretend we had any future on the road we were on and set my mind to making contact with the Blood Eye, the only engine of revolt I knew of. It was shockingly easy. I knew they smuggled goods and other things regularly through certain docks, and from my role as healer I could make an educated guess who in town was involved with them by their injuries, and the days they asked me to vouch for their illnesses. I dropped hints in the right ears until I was given my first simple tasks. They seemed harmless and trivial, even merciful. I left medicines at a secret cove or left a cache of food unattended on the beach. Then I would light candles in my window after the patrols had passed by or store important papers and bits of valuable information in the secret cache in my office. Before long, I had wounded men tapping a secret knock on my seashore door in the dead of night, desperate men, broken men, who had been chewed up and spit out by “Gondor” just as I had been. The secret hospital I kept in the basement of my clinic was seldom empty after that. I did my best to help these men, who my society branded as criminals and scum, in their battle to make their way in a world that had rejected them. I asked no questions, they told me no lie.
Then one day just a few weeks past, a local girl named Annedyl walked into my clinic. I assumed it was to mewl at me about her leg yet again, so I began preparing yet another placebo for her, ever stronger draughts to kill the pain and numb the mind…but it was not to be. Instead she told me to my face, she knew I was part of the Blood Eye. I was so stunned I could barely speak, then assuming the jig was up I drew a knife and went for her, figuring I had nothing to lose. Over time and under the tutelage of my patients, I have become no slouch at defending myself, but she disarmed me easily, slapped me as if I were a child, then tossed the knife back on the table in front of me as if it held no threat at all.
She told me she wasn’t going to turn me in…quite the contrary in fact, assuming I did as I was told. She had messages for me to send to the Blood Eye, and tasks for me to help her with. I had always assumed that Annedyn was typical of her type, blindly patriotic and loyal to the system that would destroy her, ignorant and mean and easily led. God knows her mother would wander the market place, a horrible pig of a woman, as if the world owed her something, looking down her nose at honest folk due to her “hero” daughters, her son serving the tyrants in Dol Amroth, and then due to her husband the Councilman, a corrupt toady of corrupt masters. I had known Ane since she was a girl and was convinced she would grow up to be just another version of her mother, especially now that a badly broken leg had trapped her sulking at home. She would grow up, marry a local bully and look down her nose just as her mother did.
How wrong I was.
Annedyn gave me coded notes, written in a language I did not recognize, to be sent to the Blood Eye. Soon her replies came in the same tounge, etched in crimson ink on bone white Angmar vellum. Her great work was to begin. Ane had vision. She was bold and merciless and had a plan. Soon I was in awe of her, shamed by her courage. She was going to overthrow stupid Mayor Ordan and his milkfat accomplices, place a suitable puppet in power, and rule this town from the shadows. She had dreams…and so what if some fools had to be harmed to realize them. She was going to make Linhir the beating heart of resistance against the bloodyminded tyranny of Minas Tirith, and an irreplaceable cog of power for the Blood Eye and beyond. She was going to change the world.
Her first steps were simple. She intended to spread terror and instability and I was going to help her. She warned me that she had to remain hidden and may at times seem not to know we had even spoken. I was never to approach her unless she approached me first. She taught me signals to use, codes to speak. She taught me to say the ancient words that hurt my throat but made the fires burn black. My tasks were simple and I admit I did not see their meaning but Ane was always so certain of herself. She gave me strange foreign garments to wear when we set about the business at hand. At first I was afraid, intimidated by the ruthlessness of Ane’s resolve, but once the first addlepated local cow had died, I was filled with a rush of absolute purpose and clarity. This was the way, I knew it…the way to shake the despots to their core and bring their marble temples down.
I saw so clearly as blood ran over my hands, the West was doomed to fall, doomed to fail! There was no victory before the power that had risen in the East! It was time for the oppressed to master our own fates! Ane and I will save them all, delivering mercy, not murder! Even now thinking of that epiphany fills me with excitement. In the days to come, I will not be seen as mad, but rather as an Oracle who had first seen the way.
Now that her sister and her friends have arrived in town, Ane has said that the moment is soon at hand. Our scapegoats had arrived, the sparks that would light the fire under the town and burn it all to ash. I am to meet her tonight on the beach, to put the next phase of the deliverance of Linhir into motion.
Tonight she said, everything will change for me, and for Linhir. Tonight my true work begins.
This then, is my manifesto. If you are reading this, you have come through the flames into a new day. Welcome to freedom.
