Letter to Dualists

A letter by Vond Satterly in response to a treatise proposing to elevate opposing forces and various emotional drives as equally viable to the Light.

At first glance, among the simplistic, the dual acceptance in equal measures of the Light and an opposing agency variously described as darkness, shadow, or some even dimmer and more suggestive appellation is deceptively alluring in its universality. For this reason it is commonly posited by both the casually philosophical and those who already have some personal or martial use for the shadow and stand to gain from justifying it.

I would like to briefly argue that strongly favoring the Light both actively and emotionally is in the best interest of the daily experience and continued existence of the mortal races. Though, as I am sure you have suspected by now, I am a paladin, a lifetime of Argent service across all continents brings me to appeal to the druidic principle of balance to illustrate the simplest and most obvious case for preferentially embracing the Light (for there are many others, which would require a much longer letter).

It is as simple as tallying the forces stacked against us that ply the shadow: the traitor prince and his blighted armies, the Burning Legion, the Old Gods. Tally, most insidiously, the cults and servitors of these deadly enemies, comprised of our own who have been led astray, and ask yourself how that might have come to pass. Why my brothers and sisters in the Light must be so fervent in their devotion becomes clear when you measure what they are up against in equal dedication to corruption.

The policy of dual acceptance is not an evenheaded middle road. It is an invitation for the immeasureable tide of the darkness to swell over us completely by letting up on our struggle for very tenuous footholds.

It is written: 'To continue to fear the dark is an affirmation of one's retention of the spark of life, and to continue to combat the shadow asserts a refusal to be consumed by the night, by the death and division that lay therein.' Consider: in these times of the Crusade, not a day goes by without the hard fortune that I must raise the hammer against the risen bones of a fallen brother, and what are these footsoldiers of the Scourge? What are the nattering ghouls? They are you or your comrades a misstep hence, severed from the Light and stripped of mortal vanities: something grotesque and of ruinous appetites.

Fondly, A Crusader