To Valerie: Fool’s Quest
[This letter forms part of the "Who Is The Enemy" series of letters, and was likely written directly after the first time the Founding Trine seek the Viscount Sunset's help and is rejected. The First would bow alone in front of Sunset Manor for three days and nights before the Viscount Sunset granted them a second audience.]
To Valerie,
I hope you are not wallowing in naivete about the upcoming war. There will be a war, and it will be long, hard and brutal war. That we secured the support of the Viscount Sunset was more luck on your part. What would have happened if the Viscount did not appear on the third day of rain? Would you have continued to lie there, writhing on the ground? That Satella and I would eventually join your fool's quest was most certainly a temporary madness, one that will never happen again. [1]
I still maintain that seizing control of the Afterlife army is still the most efficient way of winning in East Fabrique, even if that has been made somewhat harder knowing now that Viscount Sunset's manifest allows him to move between the bodies of the mummified. I will continue to make plans for if the Viscount Sunset turns on us, and if he cannot turn a blade against the Brother Viscount, I will personally plant a dagger in that obnoxiously red hair of his.
We have found some stable ground after wandering for so long, but we must not relax, since we still suffer from a lack of personnel, stable supplies, and support. The Viscount Sunset will never allow us to command the dead, so we are on our own on that front. Bylon is a dead island, in more ways than one, so we must obtain help from the remaining human support base in East Fabrique.
As I write, Satella is already preparing to scout out the Red Land for hidden internment camps. It would be good to build a small force to start freeing those who have grievances against The Eunarchy. The numbers and quality of such people are questionable, but pressing them into our cause is a needed next move.
The Viscount will likely wish to pit us against his enemies in the region, most notably the iron machines along the coastal ruins. Why the Viscount has not moved against them baffles me as well, seeing that the Afterlife army, while small, can easily overrun the poorly-constructed machine force. To serve as a proxy against land invasions? To preserve that force and one day induct it into the Afterlife? The Viscount Sunset is not a coward, but his heart is duplicitous difficult to fathom.
You need not ride with me and Satella tomorrow.
Do NOT do anything to upset the undead when we are gone.
Y. [2]
[1] Morganna would be convinced to carry out many more of The First's 'fool quests' later in the war, as The First learned to align Morganna's vendetta with The First's war goals of minimizing casualties and ending Constitutional Slavery.
[2] Morganna's early letters sign off with the letter 'Y' instead of "Lord Protector of Vespana", it has been assumed that it was shorthand for 'Your Protector', since it only appears on letters addressed to Valerie and Fleet-Admiral Sanae.
