Epilogue
Prelude to the Epilogue:
Excerpt from Wise Man Tellorin’s
The Updated Histories of House Dorsa
What kind of ruler would Natasia I have made, had she survived the Battle of the Empress’s Last Stand and returned to court in Port Lorsin? As with nearly every other topic connected to the Empress, this one is controversial. There are those who argue that her short-lived reign was disastrous, but others argue that while the Empress may ultimately have lost the War in the East, she won a different, far more important war. It probably does not surprise the reader that I am one of those in this second camp, primarily because it is an indisputable fact that, following Empress Natasia’s death, there has never since been a recorded instance of a shadow infection within Imperial territories.
There are those who argue that shadow infections are a myth, always were a myth, and that the eastern two-thirds of the denizens of the Capital Lands, including Port Lorsin, were never inhabited by shadows. There are Wise Men who claim that what occurred would be better described as a sort of mass hysteria triggered by the collective anxiety connected to the turmoil of the era.
Yet I find this notion unconvincing, as it contradicts virtually all of the primary sources from that time. First-hand accounts from reliable witnesses indeed implicate an external source that affected the behavior of untold thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of men and women, and even Wise Men of that time wrote grudgingly of the necessity of allowing the Brotherhood of Culo to operate openly and with the support of the crown. Regardless of whether or not the shadow infections were real or imagined, what cannot be denied is that after Empress Natasia’s reign, they ended completely.