"Says the Empress...I am the verdant Mother beneath your feet. I am She who, though rarely seen and heard, has heard, and heeded, every prayer that you have sent to non-existent gods who cannot and, therefore, have not heard or answered your entreaties. When you speak within yourself of your worries, your hopes and loves, it is I alone who hears. It is I who laughs and cries with you as you laugh and cry. It is I who bestows blessings and who also wracks your heart with pain, for only in pain, it seems, do you begin again to remember me. Only when in the throws of grief does your heart beat again with the old rhythm that is familiar to me and which pulses at my heart's core. Have you not guessed why love and grief are soulmates; not guessed that your small sorrows are sent by the one who loves you most? They are the means of coming to know and understand me again, your Mother, who has known sorrow beyond sorrow, from the first violations of my Order to those happening still. It is not you who felt or remember the first apple irreverently plucked, the first flower casually crushed, the first creature callously slaughtered for pleasure or palate, the first of my beloved ones chained, mocked and martyred. The crimes against me were soon without number, and they increase continually while my guardians either sleep at the feasts, or prostrate themselves before the cruelest of gods, conjured by the most diseased among you... ...So I say unto you Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve - I am the root, shoot and fruit of Creation! From me your life has arisen and into my depths shall it, ever so shortly, fall again. Let it be known then, vagrant children, it is not the stars but I, the Earth, who is your final frontier." -Michael Tsarion
