Rules For The Bled

"…The rebellion did not begin with swords. It began with memory. With the slow, suffocating accumulation of grief passed from father to daughter, from grandmother to grandchild. With the memory of children buried alive in the tombs of kings they never knew. With the stench of imperial blood rituals masking as divine rites. With the whisper in the ears of the humble that they too bore Breath, and that the law was not divinely ordained, but conjured by those too terrified to face their own smallness."

"There is a lie still told—that the fall of House Dehmohseni was orchestrated by a cabal of sorcerers, that it was mere ambition wrapped in righteous cloth. No. The empire fell because the world, at last, remembered what it was like to breathe freely."

"For twenty thousand years, the ouroboros did not merely symbolize eternity, it symbolized hunger. An eternal appetite that fed on belief, on obedience, on silence. The rebellion was not a war for power; it was a war to shatter that symbol. To teach the world that tyrants, even those who trace blood from angels, can still bleed."

"The origin of rebellion, then, is not found in banners raised or treaties broken. It is found in the shiver of the spine when a child hears their first imperial decree and thinks: 'this is not right.' It is born in that moment. Multiplied in a thousand others. Until, at last, the silence breaks."

Excerpt from Chapter III: Of Oppression, and the Heat of the People's Blood.